Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

I am not troubled by the idea that an acceptance of all students as they come to you is an important professional standard. I would go even further than you do in your statement and suggest that persistent inability to accept and respectfully work with students and colleagues with many diverse views is not just a legitimate weight on hiring but should govern whether someone retains tenure. But you must not measure adherence to this standard by reading what scholars or intellectuals say or write in the public sphere, whether in formal publication or in social media.

Hmm, but if you can't use that to gauge what somebody's going to be like as a teacher, what can you use? Which question is sort of answered by this:

The proof is in the pudding: in how a professor teaches, in how they participate in the professional evaluation of other scholars, in how they execute their administrative duties. There are innumerable examples of faculty in the last fifty years whose intensely expressed public views had no impact on the professionalism of their work with students and colleagues.

Sort of answered.

But basing it on how they behave in class with students requires you to hire them first

FIRE are really creepy even tho they occasionally seem to come down on the right side of some things. on the whole they feel like some astroturfed koch/reason operation

http://jewishphilosophyplace.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/steven-salaita-uncivil-speech-obnoxious-speech-abusive-speech/

If anyone wrote this way about or addressed Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians, vilifying broad sectors of an entire community for its political commitments, he would have found his head on a platter, and rightly so.

Worth quoting this recent LGM blog post in nearly its entirety, as it bears directly on this little bit of sophistry:

You will be unsurprised that Glenn Reynolds has no problem with academics being fired for the political content of their Twitter feeds:

A FACULTY CANDIDATE WHO TALKED ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE THIS WAY WOULD BE UNEMPLOYABLE ANYWHERE. SAY IT ABOUT JEWS, THOUGH, AND IT’S CONTROVERSIAL. “Yet ad hominem attacks are also a BDS strategy that serves to silence opponents. Many faculty who believe the university made the right decision about Salaita are now unwilling to say so publicly.” BDS people have made clear by their actions that they are nasty antisemites who deserve no respect.

First of all, let us once again dispense with the silly idea that Salaitia was a mere “candidate,” despite having agreed to an offer and been scheduled to teach classes. By this logic, he could have been teaching for a month and not been hired. The trustee approval is pro forma; he was treated by the university as an employee, which he was. The idea that he wasn’t fired is such vacuous formalism it would embarrass proponents of the Hilbig litigation. He was fired.

So let’s consider another hypothetical. What if someone said “something like that” about, say, Palestinians? I happen to have a test case handy:

Dean Obeidallah @Deanofcomedy
.@instapundit I applaud ur honesty in cheering the death of Palestinian children.

Instapundit.com @instapundit
Follow
@Deanofcomedy If Palestinians acted civilized, no one would die. You are a mouthpiece for bloodthirsty savages.

Note here that Reynolds isn’t talking about Hamas, or Palestinian terrorists; he’s talking about Palestinans as a group. The evidence alleging anti-Semitism in Salaita’s tweets is far more ambiguous. (Indeed, I don’t think they constitute evidence that Salaita is anti-Semitic at all, although some of the tweets are hateful and indefensible even if they are not anti-Semitic.) It is being asserted that Salaita retweeting a tweet saying that a reporter’s story — not the reporter, the story — should have ended at the “point of a shiv” is a firable offense. Reynolds has called for the literal, not metaphorical, murder of Iranian nuclear scientists.

My position at the time of the latter incident is that Reynolds could not be fired for his statements based on the principles of academic freedom, and that applies to his new disgusting tweets as well. Reynolds himself, however, is happy to benefit from these protections but does not want them extended to people he disagrees with, which is a disgrace.

That does not really bear on the link I posted at all.

Of course it does. You can regularly find academics saying that and worse about Palestinians and Muslims all over Twitter and other outlets, every day, which puts the lie to the handwringing about "If anyone wrote this way about or addressed Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians, vilifying broad sectors of an entire community for its political commitments, he would have found his head on a platter, and rightly so" and all the surmising about separating someone's social media activity from who they are as a person.

(The use of "head on a platter" is particularly funny for LGM-related reasons as well.)

Glenn Reynolds is a very controversial figure who has received tons and tons of disapprobation. He has also, as far as I can tell, never said anything as damning as blaming Jews for anti-semitism (where he does not just make a generality about a group of people, but actively and directly promotes bigotry). If you can locate some reputable academics who have publicly approved of, eg, Islamophobia, I think you'd have a stronger case.

"very controversial figure"? he teaches law at tennessee, has a column in USA today. he's about as reputable as it gets for a conservative public intellectual

I guess my experience of him is colored by only ever reading about him on ILX and Crooked Timber, lol. (Didn't Glenn Greenwald used to tee off on him regularly when he was writing for Salon?)

ha, google//site:salon.com greenwald reynolds
About 212 results (0.18 seconds)

He has also, as far as I can tell, never said anything as damning as blaming Jews for anti-semitism

He just referred to every Palestinian as "bloodthirsty savages." And he doesn't just "teach law," he is a tenured senior faculty member.

blaming Jews for anti-semitism

This, of course, is not what Salaida did, unless we're going to go over the "'Zionist' does/does not mean the same as 'Jew' PICK ONE" thing again.

I don't have the details of the exact tweet but I recall reading something like "Israel makes antisemitism respectable."

Also does Dawkins still count as a "reputable academic?"

wait, so your proof that other ppl wouldn't similarly be fired/contract unapproved is from a guy with tenure?

he runs pjmedia, writes books that get reviewed outside the rightwing pastemill ghetto. he ain't drudge but he's a big deal

this isn't to excuse salaita's antisemitism (if that's what he is, i haven't looked into it myself tbh). it should not even be questionable to state that open hatred of palestinians and muslims generally can be done w/o much sanction on the right, and therefore treated as alien and controversial (at best) by the mainstream

xps

I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here! The tweet in question read: Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.

xxp Let's ask Ward Churchill just how much protection tenure revokes when the right wing gets its panties in a knot, shall we?

*tenure provides

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/08/a-very-letter-to-chancellor-wise-from-the-eminent-historian-natalie-zemon-davis.html

golly she sure is good

i don't have time to fully investigate the articles he links to here but this seems relevant to what we were discussing above re double standards:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/09/03/steven-salaita-more-than-just-an-obnoxious-tweeter/

But a lot of people are using him as an example of how academics with pro-Palestinian or “anti-Zionist” views are punished in American universities. This is laughable. For every Steve Salaita, there are a larger number of people interested in Middle East Studies who get rejected for academic jobs, or decline to go into academia to begin with, because they have pro-Israel views. As I noted several years back, top universities have found it necessary to create special “Israel Studies” programs and chairs because Departments of Middle Eastern Studies are so closed to anyone who wants to do objective, much less sympathetic, scholarship on Israel. That final link goes to a story about what passes for debate at the Middle East Studies Association: “Should we boycott all Israeli goods, products, services, and people, or should we exempt academics?” The vast majority of those who are agitating for Salaita on the grounds that political views shouldn’t affect academic appointments don’t care at all that MES programs are so one-sidedly hostile to Israel, and hire accordingly.

no, we're agitating b/c of faculty governance; i.e. it shouldn't matter what rich people who happen to have been named to the board of trustees think about an appointment

i'm not sure why someone who apparently exclusively writes about palestine/israel would be getting a tenure job in a native american studies program tbh, and this article suggests his scholarship is not so fantastic either. someone said early on that this makes the perfect 'freedom of speech' in academia case bc of how much salaita fails on every other merit.

because decolonialization

"fails on every other merit" : maybe you should be consulted on every faculty hire! would save us a lot of work. congrats on tenure btw

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ASteven%20Salaita

he fails on the merit 'actually seems to be a scholar in the field'

lol, what is "the field". like I don't have a clue what people in area studies do but I don't presume to judge its boundaries. I mean right wingers hate area studies generally so I get what's going on here

U of I actually has a Middle Eastern Studies dpt - I was scanning through the faculty and I've actually read some of Pitard's work on the Ugaritic Baal Cycle. I wonder why he didn't try to work in the actual department that fits his area of expertise.

don't force boundaries on him man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLoYFvbR0XY

bc that unit didn't have a line?

are arab americans americans? looks like that's who half of his books are about

idk how U of I works but i'd be surprised by any institution i've been involved w/ giving someone a spot in an unrelated department bc the correct department is filled up - it's pretty bizarre.

arab americans are not native americans

lol mordy I like you but you have no clue here

idk i have experience w/ a variety of NYC universities and departments so i'm not coming from complete ignorance. obv you feel it's not strange tho. i guess you've seen stuff like this before?

like, i have known ppl doing stuff in like German + French language departments that weren't German or French, but they always had theoretical basis in those languages. i've never seen someone literally doing another department in the wrong place.

like to lay it out: a unit gets a line, it advertises, it gets applicants, it chooses among those. they decide who "fits". they can't just send an applicant to another unit. in this case they judged fitness.

oh lol i missed that whole angle on this

maybe it's a ward churchill honorarium kind of thing

as in my eye missed the 'native' american part of all these articles

he has a book exploring parallels bw Native American and Palestinian issues. that's the basis for their judgment of fit

feels like they might have been able to find someone else who cared a little more about native american issues, somewhere in america

guess they didn't! maybe you should talk to them about it

did they post on craiglist that seems to be a good place to post jobs

you would know

feel like if I were someone really invested in illinois supporting its university system I wouldn't be so sad that tax dollars aren't going to the guy writing for electronicintifada.net, like gee, why are conservatives so bitter about area studies hmmm

again, you would know

http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-order-of-civility.html

on the uc berkeley chancellor's civility/free speech statement, for the 50th anniversary of the free speech movement

"The demand for civility effectively outlaws a range of intellectual, literary, and political forms: satire is not civil, caricature is not civil, hyperbole and aesthetic mockery are not civil nor is polemic. Ultimately the call for civility is a demand that you not express anger; and if it was enforced it would suggest that there is nothing to be angry about in the world. The call for civility in discourse confuses the enforcement of administrative time, place, and manner restrictions with the genuine need to defend people from personal threat. The result is that the administrative desire trumps all else."

two very different threads there IMO and not entirely consistent with, for instance, how this discussion often plays out on ilx