A win for academic freedom: Steven Salaita

[azurnoir]

Full title : A win for academic freedom: Steven Salaita awarded back-to-back victories against university that fired him

The first part of June has awarded back-to-back victories to a professor who last year was dismissed from his post at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Nearly a year ago Steven Salaita was fired for posting some tweets that were considered by some to be beyond the pale of proper academic discourse; the context for many of these tweets was the ongoing, devastating attack on Gaza by Israel. What makes this case especially interesting, and what the recent court decision and a critical vote by the largest confederation of U.S. professors in the country shows, is the undue and improper interference of wealthy donors on the internal affairs of public educational institutions.

On June 12 the court found in his favor: “The judge said that previous scandals at the university – including the so-called ‘clout list’ that gave preferential admission to politically-connected applicants – were examples of why the public had a right to know the information Salaita was seeking.” In other words, the university’s betrayal of the public trust had already happened once, where it had discarded its normal admissions process in order to pay back its powerful connections and maintain their loyalty. Affirmative action for the wealthy and influential, in other words, the law of the market in place of the commitment to the public good.

This links up to an interesting back and forth between university counsel Charles Schmadeke and Salaita’s attorney Anand Swaminathan of Loevy & Loevy:

At one point, Schmadeke argued that there was no genuine “public interest” in the Salaita case but rather “public curiosity” similar to that around reality TV’s Kardashian family.

http://www.salon.com/2015/06/18/a_win_for_academic_freedom_steven_salaita_awarded_back_to_back_victories_against_university_that_fired_him/

[azurnoir]

1. Salaita's case is very important to the future of academic freedom