[Peace-discuss] Fw: Fwd: Breaking News! Wise to Forward Salaita Appointment to Trustees!

Tue Sep 9 19:23:02 EDT 2014

Apologies for delay. This has made the rounds, so maybe it's mostly old news. 

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "fransears at netscape.net" <fransears at netscape.net>
To: jencart13 at yahoo.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Cunningham <cunningham.dave1 at gmail.com>
To: fransears <fransears at netscape.net>
Cc: george repchinski <George57 at earthlink.net>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Corey Robin <comment-reply at wordpress.com>
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2014 02:37:05 +0000

Posted     : September 1, 2014 at 10:36 pm
Author     : Corey Robin
Tags       : Israel/Palestine, Phyllis Wise, Steven Salaita,
University of Illinois
Categories : Uncategorized

We are getting reports out of the University of Illinois that
Chancellor Wise is going to forward the Salaita appointment to the
Board of Trustees for a vote on September 11. A group of Gender and
Women's Studies students reports the following (
http://illinois.edu/lb/article/5198/87007 ) :
From GWS Undergraduate Stephanie Skora's report back on meeting with
Chancellor Wise on Monday, September 1, 2014:

The meeting with Chancellor Wise was a success, and we have gained
some valuable information and commitments from the Chancellor!

We have discovered that the Chancellor HAS FORWARDED Professor
Salaita's appointment to the Board of Trustees, and they will be
voting on his appointment during the Board of Trustees Meeting on
September 11th, on the UIUC campus! Our immediate future
organizational efforts will focus around speaking at, and appearing
at, this Board of Trustees meeting. We will be attempting to appear
during the public comment section of the Board of Trustees meeting, as
well as secure a longer presentation to educate them on the issues
about which Professor Salaita tweeted. Additionally, we are going to
attempt to ensure that the Board of Trustees consults with a cultural
expert on Palestine, who can explain and educate them about the issues
and the context surrounding Professor Salaita's tweets. It has been
made clear to us that the politics of the Board of Trustees is being
allowed to dictate the course of the University, and that the
misinformation and personal views of the members of the Board are
being allowed to tell the students who is allowed to teach us,
regardless of who we say that we want as our educators. We will not
let this go unchallenged.

Additionally, Chancellor Wise has agreed to several parts of our
demands, and has agreed upon a timeline under which she will take
steps to address them. The ball is currently in her court, but we take
her agreements as a gesture of good faith and of an attempt to rebuild
trust between the University administration and the student body. She
has not agreed unilaterally to our demands, and but we have made an
important first step in our commitment to reinstating Professor
Salaita. In terms of his actual reinstatement, the power to make that
decision is not hers. This is why we have shifted the target of our
efforts to the Board of Trustees, because they alone have the power to
reinstate and approve Professor Salaita's appointment at the
University. In regards to the rest of our demands, which we have
updated to reflect the town hall meeting, we have made progress on all
of those, but continue to emphasize that it is unacceptable to meet
any of our demands without first reinstating Professor Salaita.

We have made progress, but we all have a LOT of work left to do. We
must organize, write to the Board of Trustees, and make our voices and
our presences known. We will not be silent on September 11th, and we
will not stop in our efforts to reinstate Professor Salaita,
regardless of what the Board of Trustees decides.

Please keep organizing, please keep making your voices heard, and
please‪#‎supportSalaita‬ (
https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/supportsalaita?source=feed_text&story_id=789552214455350
) !

Also, feel free to message or comment with any questions, comments, or 
concerns.

Assuming the report is accurate, I can think of two interpretations of
what it means.

If the UIUC is thinking politically, it would be an absolute disaster
for them to open this can of worms, to act as if Salaita's appointment
is now a real possibility, to raise expectations for two weeks or so,
to encourage all the organizing this will encourage (I can imagine the
phone calls and emails that will now start pouring into the Board of
Trustees), only to have the Board vote Salaita down. From a political
perspective, this would be a disaster for the university. The
strongest weapon the UIUC has always had is the sense that this is a
done deal, that they will not budge, that we can raise all the ruckus
we want, but they simply don't care. Opening the decision up again
calls that into question. Where does this line of reasoning lead us?
To the possibility that the UIUC Trustees will vote to appoint Salaita
on September 11, throw Chancellor Wise under the bus (remember, the
Executive Committee that upheld her decision is only comprised of
three Trustees, not the full Board), and say it was all a
misunderstanding wrought by an incompetent chancellor. Who'll then be
pushed out within a year. The advantage of this approach is that it
will effectively bring this story to a close. There will be angry
donors, but everything I've ever read and experienced about that crew
suggests that their bark is often worse than their bite. The ongoing
atmosphere of crisis and ungovernability on campus is not something
any university leader can bear for too long, and this threatens to go
on for a very long time.

The other possibility is that the UIUC is thinking legally. One of the
many weak links in their legal case was that Wise never forwarded
Salaita's appointment to the Board of Trustees for a vote. She
basically did a pocket veto. Salaita's offer letter stated that his
appointment was subject to approval by the Board of Trustees, but Wise
effectively never allowed the Board to approve or disapprove. So the
UIUC's lawyers could have decided that the better thing to do would be
simply to carry out the full deed.

Many questions remain. Stay tuned. Regardless of which interpretation
is correct, we have to operate on the assumption that the first is a
very real possibility and that we have a lot of work to do in the next
ten days.

Add a comment to this post:
http://coreyrobin.com/2014/09/01/breaking-news-wise-to-forward-salaita-appointment-to-trustees/#respond

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