Professor fired for criticizing Israel files suit against University of Illinois
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  Professor fired for criticizing Israel files suit against University of Illinois
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Author Topic: Professor fired for criticizing Israel files suit against University of Illinois  (Read 2768 times)
Snowstalker Mk. II
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« on: January 29, 2015, 12:40:17 PM »

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/29/salatia/
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Oak Hills
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« Reply #1 on: January 29, 2015, 01:04:31 PM »

Hopefully he wins.
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Adam Griffin
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« Reply #2 on: January 29, 2015, 01:10:00 PM »

Quote
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If true, then it's stuff like this that feeds the age-old conspiracy.
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IceSpear
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« Reply #3 on: January 29, 2015, 01:24:57 PM »

A couple of the tweets which were curiously omitted from the article:



Yeah, not gonna shed any tears over this. Preaching hatred can get you dismissed. Big shocker. He goes far beyond the disingenous description of "criticizing Israel".
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Mr. Illini
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« Reply #4 on: January 29, 2015, 01:33:07 PM »

Speech does have consequences, but the university also needs to tread lightly and remember that it is a government organization. Will be interesting to see how this plays out here at my school.
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Adam Griffin
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« Reply #5 on: January 29, 2015, 01:44:53 PM »

Speech does have consequences, but the university also needs to tread lightly and remember that it is a government organization. Will be interesting to see how this plays out here at my school.

Yes, he most certainly has a case, I feel. I seem to recall at least one Supreme Court case from decades ago (Pickering v Board of Education?) in which a teacher was fired for unpopular speech made in their capacity as a private citizen, and that the SC ruled that teachers couldn't be fired for such. Obviously the professor in question came with a pre-existing social media following and a resumé with several previously-published books, so the school can't really claim that they have any possession or right to regulate the social media account nor that it was reflective of anything other than free speech made as a private citizen.
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« Reply #6 on: January 29, 2015, 03:39:20 PM »

The guy advocated mass murder and put the blame for anti-semitism on the victims. He can go to hell, and the hypocrisy of the far left has never been clearer when it comes to "speech has consequences".
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Atlas Has Shrugged
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« Reply #7 on: January 29, 2015, 04:06:15 PM »

Sounds like hate speech to me, and the school has the right to fire him.
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Boston Bread
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« Reply #8 on: January 29, 2015, 04:09:22 PM »

It looks like his firing was justified.
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MalaspinaGold
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« Reply #9 on: January 29, 2015, 04:37:04 PM »

They left off the more colorful ones... like "Israel: turning anti-semitism from something terrible to something honorable since 1948."

Also, he wasn't actually fired. Given that fact, I'm not sure he actually has a case. Too bad such a big fuss needs to made over so irrelevant a figure.
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Boris
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« Reply #10 on: January 29, 2015, 04:52:32 PM »

As someone who sat through numerous lectures of Israel-bashing at UIUC, I can assure Snowstalker that criticism of Israel is most certainly allowed provided it doesn't descend into anti-semitism as in this case.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
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« Reply #11 on: January 29, 2015, 06:56:49 PM »

Also, he wasn't actually fired. Given that fact, I'm not sure he actually has a case. Too bad such a big fuss needs to made over so irrelevant a figure.
There's a dispute over whether he was actually fired.  The university is claiming he hadn't been, since the paperwork wasn't final and it would make their case stronger if he hadn't been,  That said, given that they were already advertising course he would be teaching, and that he'd quit his old job under the impression his new one was secure, I think any reasonable jury would conclude he'd been fired.
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All Along The Watchtower
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« Reply #12 on: January 29, 2015, 07:00:50 PM »

"criticizing Israel."

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Indy Texas
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« Reply #13 on: January 29, 2015, 07:25:42 PM »

The guy advocated mass murder and put the blame for anti-semitism on the victims. He can go to hell, and the hypocrisy of the far left has never been clearer when it comes to "speech has consequences".

So I take it you are equally offended when Alan Dershowitz et al basically advocate Third Reich tactics in eliminating Palestinians at all costs?
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ag
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« Reply #14 on: January 29, 2015, 07:37:01 PM »

The guy advocated mass murder and put the blame for anti-semitism on the victims. He can go to hell, and the hypocrisy of the far left has never been clearer when it comes to "speech has consequences".

Did he? Neither, surely, follows from those tweets cited above.
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ag
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« Reply #15 on: January 29, 2015, 07:52:57 PM »

Also, he wasn't actually fired. Given that fact, I'm not sure he actually has a case. Too bad such a big fuss needs to made over so irrelevant a figure.
There's a dispute over whether he was actually fired.  The university is claiming he hadn't been, since the paperwork wasn't final and it would make their case stronger if he hadn't been.

That is the University's only claim that seems to be, at least somewhat, valid. Then, again, though it might be legally true and take care of this particular case, that something like this can ever happen at a university would make pretty much any academic upset.

Universities function, to a large extent, on trust. A formal offer, once it is given, is, generally, viewed as binding on the offerer. Once it is accepted, it is viewed as binding for the faculty member as well - even though it cannot be binding legally (there are no slavery contracts in this day and age). Academic markets work slowly - being notified in August that you are not employed means you pretty much will be unemployed (or, at best, a temporary visitor somewhere) for the next 13 months. If a university may rescind an offer on this short notice, it cannot, really, give any offers which anybody would trust. This will create hiring problems, unless they can convince everybody and their grandmother that this is an exceptional case, that can never happen again. And it would be a tough convincing.

This is aggravated by the fact that the guy had been tenured, was offered a tenured position, resigned his tenure at the other school to take it - and then this happened. I could, possibly, understand the university if in the meantime he had been convicted of a serious crime - though, frankly, even in that case I would prefer if the university followed procedures it uses in such cases for existing tenured faculty. Simply reneging on a tenured offer at that stage - for whatever reason that is not materially related to his job (he has not been caught plagiarizing, or faking his credentials, for instance) - is a very serious breach of trust.
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« Reply #16 on: January 29, 2015, 08:04:49 PM »

The guy advocated mass murder and put the blame for anti-semitism on the victims. He can go to hell, and the hypocrisy of the far left has never been clearer when it comes to "speech has consequences".

So I take it you are equally offended when Alan Dershowitz et al basically advocate Third Reich tactics in eliminating Palestinians at all costs?

Yes, Dershowitz has long gone far off the reservation on this issue. It's not uncommon when it comes to outsiders.
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Ray Goldfield
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« Reply #17 on: January 29, 2015, 08:06:27 PM »

The guy advocated mass murder and put the blame for anti-semitism on the victims. He can go to hell, and the hypocrisy of the far left has never been clearer when it comes to "speech has consequences".

Did he? Neither, surely, follows from those tweets cited above.

He wants for thousands of people to "go missing" in a callback to an event that almost everyone knew would end with the gruesome discovery that it did.

And he more than once said that Israel is the cause of anti-semitism (and even described it as "noble" because Israel), which puts him about four thousand years off the mark as to the origin.
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« Reply #18 on: January 29, 2015, 08:10:04 PM »

The thing is the charge of anti-semitism is massively overused when it comes to Israel. I mean Sheldon Silver called Zephar Teachout an anti-semite for saying she'd support the Obama administration on Israel. Come on.
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Ray Goldfield
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« Reply #19 on: January 29, 2015, 08:14:12 PM »

The thing is the charge of anti-semitism is massively overused when it comes to Israel. I mean Sheldon Silver called Zephar Teachout an anti-semite for saying she'd support the Obama administration on Israel. Come on.

That's no reason to dismiss very clear examples of people being wildly anti-semitic.
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Indy Texas
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« Reply #20 on: January 29, 2015, 08:30:09 PM »

The thing is the charge of anti-semitism is massively overused when it comes to Israel. I mean Sheldon Silver called Zephar Teachout an anti-semite for saying she'd support the Obama administration on Israel. Come on.

That's no reason to dismiss very clear examples of people being wildly anti-semitic.

No, but you can understand that "crying wolf" all the time can lead to that.
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ag
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« Reply #21 on: January 29, 2015, 09:29:54 PM »
« Edited: January 29, 2015, 09:32:16 PM by ag »


And he more than once said that Israel is the cause of anti-semitism (and even described it as "noble" because Israel), which puts him about four thousand years off the mark as to the origin.

Well, as somebody who has experienced anti-semitism first hand - as a victim - and from very early age (growing up Jewish in USSR does that to you), I think I am qualified to respond to this.

Anti-semitism is, of course, not caused by Israel. For centuries - millenia - Jews were the only notable minority in much of Europe (and not only Europe - though, one should note, nowhere were Jews treated as badly as in Christian Europe). When others went to church on Sunday, Jews did not. Jews spoke their own languages, dressed strange, prayed to god in their own way, etc.,etc.  And, as such, they - my ancestors - were the focal point of popular xenophobia. Strangeness somehow attracts hatred. Strangeness is a convenient scapegoat. Uniting against strangeness is a firm ground to build a national identity on. Hence, the massacres and the ghettos of the middle ages. Hence the pogroms and the death camps of the newer - romantic nationalist - age.

That kind of antisemitism still exists today - but it has gotten to be fairly marginal. Jews are no longer strange. It is the "Judeo-Christian" age. My fellow tribesmen (as my grandfather would put it) are now mainstream. In the age where the main difference between us and the rest is that we do not go to the sinagogue on Saturdays while the rest do not go to church on Sundays it is harder to feel hatred than it was when people, actually, went somewhere to pray during the Sabbath. And the Holocaust did, finally, make that anti-semitism a thing to be ashamed of, at least in the civilized word - an inconceivably large price to pay, admittedly, but it has been paid. True, there are countries - such as Russia - where the lessons of the Holocaust have never been properly learned (distorted, really, by the  regime that never viewed mass murder as something shameful) , where the traditional anti-semitims is still alive  - but even there it is losing its virulence (for lack of identifiable Jews, mostly, but that is another matter).

In any case, the traditional European anti-semitism - the type that gave me the bloody nose in my young years - is on its way out. When people in the civilized world have encounters with anti-semitism today it is, more often than not, a very different phenomenon. When a Palestinian teenager says that he "hates Jews" he does not express xenopohbic hatred for a stranger. His feelings, in fact, are much closer to those of a Jewish kid a hundred plus years back who, having had enough, joined - or, at least, sympathized with - a revolutionary organization. In fact, he IS the Jewish kid of modern Israel. For my fellow-tribesmen have managed to take on the role their ancestors rebelled against in the old Empire: that of the majority oppressor.

Now, do not get me wrong. I am not an admirer of the old revolutionary hatred, nor do I think that today's Palestinian "hater of Jews" is anything but an idiot. What I am saying is that this "anti-semitism" is a very different phenomenon from that of old. And, well, yes, this new anti-semitism has its own causes: for instance the fact that my fellow-tribesmen decided that what they always hated was not that the ispravniks cut the beards, but that they were not the ispravniks.

The nearest parallel to that old anti-semitism today is the anti-migrant - or, for that matter, the anti-Muslim feeling too many people in the "civilized world" do not feel a need to be ashamed of. That is the old hatred of the stranger, the one who goes for his own prayer at his on time.
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MalaspinaGold
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« Reply #22 on: January 29, 2015, 10:35:21 PM »

The guy advocated mass murder and put the blame for anti-semitism on the victims. He can go to hell, and the hypocrisy of the far left has never been clearer when it comes to "speech has consequences".

So I take it you are equally offended when Alan Dershowitz et al basically advocate Third Reich tactics in eliminating Palestinians at all costs?
Dershowitz of course belongs in an institution- a mental institution. This does not change the fact that the university should have been allowed to fire Salaita.

A nice parallel is how one would have responded to the Brandeis-Ayaan Hirsi Ali fiasco. I can't speak for Ray Goldfield I of course supported the revocation of the honorary doctorate offer.

The guy advocated mass murder and put the blame for anti-semitism on the victims. He can go to hell, and the hypocrisy of the far left has never been clearer when it comes to "speech has consequences".

Did he? Neither, surely, follows from those tweets cited above.
I refer to the tweet I referenced above where he put "anti-semitism" and "honorable" in the same sentence.

And the point I was trying to make about him not actually being fired is purely legalistic. If he doesn't have a legal basis for this current suit, then it's a frivolous lawsuit, and it makes him more of an attention-monger than he already is.

I'm not familiar with all the legal complexities when it comes to the case, but assuming they didn't enter a final contract together, I don't see how he "fired" in the legal sense. Of course he was essentially fired, but not in the legal definition, and thus not in a way that the courts could recognize as a firing.
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ag
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« Reply #23 on: January 29, 2015, 10:41:28 PM »



I'm not familiar with all the legal complexities when it comes to the case, but assuming they didn't enter a final contract together, I don't see how he "fired" in the legal sense. Of course he was essentially fired, but not in the legal definition, and thus not in a way that the courts could recognize as a firing.

It is almost certain that by that point he had signed some sort of a contract at that point - nobody resigns their tenure just like that without a written contract. Yes, sure, there must have been a footnote somewhere saying that this is conditional on approval by the board. Individual faculty members are NEVER vetoed at that stage - this is something completely unheard of. A provost might veto, true - but he was 6 months past that stage, probably. He had accepted a tenured offer. Few things are supposed to be more binding in the university world. This is a tough contract to break. If they get away with it, they will have a big problem hiring in the future.
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ag
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« Reply #24 on: January 29, 2015, 10:46:35 PM »


I refer to the tweet I referenced above where he put "anti-semitism" and "honorable" in the same sentence.


Arguably, he was being deliberately provocative in that statement. There is no suggestion that this was anything but a fairly common rhetorical device. I could understand a computer taking this for an approval of anti-semitism, but an actual human being would have to think first before taking that point of view.

In any case, if tenure was created for some purpose, this was the purpose - to protect unpopular and provocative speach. A university that feels firing is justified in this case should simply abolish tenure.
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