Why This Jewish-American Cant Visit Urbana-Champaign Professors Lauren Goodlad, Michael Rothberg, and Matti Bunzl University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Dear Lauren, Michael, and Matti, Grateful as I am for your invitation to screen my film, Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists, on the Urbana-Champaign campus in October, I am afraid I will have to decline. I am enormously appreciative of you all, for your scholarship and your solidarity with the projects of others. Thanks to you, Lauren and Michael, I spent a very exciting and rewarding two weeks in Urbana-Champaign as Mellon Professor, and I have benefited from your hospitality on more occasions than I can count. Nevertheless, the decision that Chancellor Phyllis Wise and the University of Illinois administration reached to fire Professor Steven Salaita for his political views makes it impossible for me to have anything more to do with that campus, at least until that decision is reversed and Professor Salaita is reinstated. I hope that will happen before October. I will not rehearse for you the reasons why this firing is an outrage to anyone who cares about academic freedom or simple human decency. Im sure you will already see them very clearly for yourselves. Professor Salaita spoke up privately, in his capacity as a citizen, against what history will surely agree (everyone outside the United States already does) was a massacre of the innocents in Gaza. In punishing him for speaking up by taking away his job, Chancellor Wise has inscribed her name in a shameful list that includes Joseph McCarthy, among others. Im confident that history will deal with Chancellor Wise much as it has dealt with McCarthy. But she will not have to wait to be judged by history. Thanks to her, the Urbana-Champaign campus is going to become a no-mans-land, famous for embarrassing itself in public. im sure I am not the only academic who will no longer want to be associated with it in any way. With regret and, again, much gratitude to you as individuals, Bruce -- Bruce Robbins Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities Philosophy Hall Columbia University NY, NY 10027
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 19:59:56 +0000
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