[Peace] Sept 18, 7pm, IMC: CONSTITUTIONAL SCHOLAR TO SPEAK ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM, SALAITA

[Sharon Irish via Peace]

CONSTITUTIONAL SCHOLAR TO SPEAK ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM, SALAITA

Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke joins off-campus panel discussion 

What’s next, now that the University of Illinois Board of Trustees has voted down Steven Salaita’s job? This Thursday, September 18, Katherine Franke, a top national scholar of law, religion, and human rights, will lead a community conversation focused on academic freedom, political dissent, and particular issues involved in political action on Israel-Palestine as well as the firing of Salaita from a tenured faculty position after he sent out tweets decrying Israel’s attacks on Gaza.

Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University, is paying her own way to speak at the Independent Media Center in Urbana. She canceled a planned visit to the UIUC campus and announced her decision to take part in a growing faculty boycott in a September 2 letter to Chancellor Phyllis Wise. She has chosen to come to Urbana as way to act on her resistance to an aggressive and well-funded campaign against critics of Israel (see Letter from Katherine Franke). She argues that strategists in this campaign consistently reframe questions of pro-Palestinian advocacy in terms of attacks on civility in the university context—just as Wise and others have done in the Salaita case.

Joining Franke at the Independent Media Center in Urbana will be Michael Rothberg, professor and head of the UIUC English Department and director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies Initiative on campus; Robert Warrior, director of the American Indian Studies Program, which offered Salaita the tenured position in comparative indigenous studies nearly a year ago; Chantal Nadeau, professor and former chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies; and UIUC students Brenda Sanya and Eman Genayam.

WHAT: “Academic Freedom & Political Dissent: A Conversation with Katherine Frank and the Community”

WHEN: Thursday, September 18, 7-9 p.m.

WHERE: Independent Media Center, 202 S. Broadway, Urbana

(corner of Elm and Broadway)

SPONSORS: Independent Media Center and Illinois Faculty for Academic Freedom and Justice

For more information on Katherine Franke, see http://www.law.columbia.edu/fac/Katherine_Franke; for Franke’s recent interview on the Salaita case, see  http://m.democracynow.org/stories/14633

CONTACT: Ellen Moodie, ellenmoodie50 at gmail.com
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