Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

After following the Steven Salaita affair with intense interest ever since news of his firing broke, I finally heard him speak in person at the New School this afternoon. I was pleased to shake his hand and to be warmly greeted by Nidhi Srinivas, a New School professor and Facebook friend who helped organize the meeting. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to meet Nikhil Singh, an NYU professor and another Facebook friend who was on the panel alongside yet another FB friend Steven Salaita. Interesting how a capitalist vulture like Mark Zuckerberg can create the technology that connects radicals. For all the scare talk from Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier, I’ll take my chances with the Internet just as I do with the telephone.

Claire Potter, a history professor at the New School (my alma mater) who blogs as “The Tenured Radical” at Chronicle of Higher Education chaired the meeting. I confess never having read her blog since it is linked in my mind with Cary Nelson’s “Manifesto of a Tenured Radical”, a book that once graced my bookshelf. As most of you know, Nelson has pretty much functioned as Police Inspector Javert to Salaita’s Jean Valjean so my reaction has been to put a minus where he puts a plus. Maybe Claire should rename her blog “Not Cary Nelson”—that would increase her readership by tenfold at least. In the meantime I will keep up with her blog from now on since she was an excellent chairperson, informing the audience of perhaps 75 people about the background on the case.

Steven Salaita was the first to speak. He took the opportunity to address points that have not received that much attention to the media coverage that was obsessed over his tweets.

Most revolved around the racism that is both implicit and explicit at the University of Illinois. To start with, the assault on the right of an indigenous studies department to hire a professor is tied to the ongoing racism there that is reflected in a number of ways. No matter how many times the department and activists who sympathize with its goals have raised the issue of Chief Illini, a racist mascot that used to be featured prominently at football games and that was as much of an affront to native peoples as the Washington Redskins moniker, his presence is still pervasive at the school.

It is not just native peoples who get the shitty end of the stick at this university with its multicultural pretensions. It is also Black and Latino professors and students. Salaita pointed out that the school has been losing people of color from the faculty for a number of years now, a reaction to the prevailing racism. With a student body of 43,000, there are only 332 Black students in the freshman class. There are also social gatherings on campus that Latino students would find most “uncivil” as the student paper reported in 2006:

A recent exchange between the University chapters of the Delta Delta Delta sorority and the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity has sparked a controversy because it played on ethnic stereotypes of Latinos. The exchange, which happened Oct. 5, had a “fiesta” theme, said Cassie Arner, alumnae adviser of the sorority.

A Tri Delta official said one of the women at the party made herself look pregnant, and that some of the women who attended unofficially dubbed the exchange “Tacos and Tequila.”

Ashanti Barber, member of Iskra, a social justice organization, and junior in LAS, said that the men at the party wore sombreros and ponchos and claimed to be illegal aliens or farmers.

Speaking of civility, Salaita reminded the audience that the term has the same root as civilization, a word that was consciously used to draw a distinction with “savagery” when the New World was being conquered. As Nikhil Singh would remind the audience during his remarks, Gandhi had the right take on this when he was asked for his opinion on Western civilization. His reply: “I think it would be a very good idea”.

Next to speak was Ibrahim Shikaki, a Palestinian economics major at the New School who has been active in the struggle around BDS. He gave a shocking (maybe not so shocking at this point) report on how the U. Cal Berkeley student senate voted 16 to 4 for divestment in 2008 when he was a student there. To their dismay, the president of the student senate vetoed the measure after consulting with powerful Zionist organizations.

There was a lot riding on this vote apparently. Students who voted for the measure were contacted by Zionists who warned them that their names would be displayed prominently in a Google search linking them to anti-Semitism, making it impossible for them to get into a good graduate school.

He also reported on trying to enter Jerusalem. He was stopped a crossing and told that he was invited to meet with an Israeli cop to have coffee. The meeting turned into an interrogation over the many Youtube clips that featured Shakaki conducting himself “uncivilly”, in other words protesting Israeli aggression.

Nikhil Singh spoke next. Much of his talk consisted of glowing remarks on a book that Salaita had written, titled “The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism And the Quest for Canaan (Middle East Studies Beyond Dominant Paradigms)”. It turned out that they were extracted from a letter that Singh wrote on behalf of Salaita on his application for the U. of Illinois position. Singh stated that he only writes such letters of recommendations when he is convinced that the applicant is a strong candidate. Furthermore, nobody that he has ever recommended has been rejected. The callous and duplicitous rejection of Salaita was not only an affront to him but to Singh as well, in fact an affront to academic standards universally.

The last speaker was Ann Snitow, who is the director of Gender studies at the New School and a long time feminist activist. The axis of her talk was on the need to see past platitudes of “civility” and to understand that such calls emanate from the white and powerful figures in academia who regard people of color, women and gays a rude and unwanted presence in campuses where the status quo is rigged against them.

She talked about the Matsunaga incident at the New School when Sekou Sundiata, an African-American poet and professor at the New School, defaced a placard at an art show that he regarded as racist.

Snitow, a feminist who had fought against tendencies in the movement to “protect” women against porn even when made by women for their own pleasure, was expected to argue for the right of the artist to express himself without an intervention from Sundiata who was seen by some as tantamount to Rudolph Giuliani assailing art he regarded as anti-Catholic.

Snitow told people at the New School that the institution has protected the right of free speech for decades but not so much the right of Blacks to feel like they are part of the community. As such, she stood by Sundiata.

(From Facebook)

I will speak publicly about my termination tomorrow

**MEDIA ADVISORY**
Press Conference: Professor Salaita to Speak for First Time About Losing Tenured Position Over Gaza Tweets

Urbana-Champaign, IL –Professor Steven Salaita, faculty and students of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), and legal experts will hold a press conference at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 9 at the University YMCA (located at Wright & Chalmers). Salaita had accepted a tenured position in the American Indian Studies program at UIUC, but the university’s Chancellor terminated his appointment in early August over tweets regarding Israel’s latest attacks in Gaza. Salaita and other speakers will discuss his termination in the larger context of organized attacks on free speech on campuses and concerns about academic freedom and the First Amendment raised by the incident.

Many groups have come out strongly against the university’s actions, including the Modern Language Association, the American Association of University Professors, and the American Studies Association. Several departments at UIUC have cast votes of no confidence in the Chancellor, and many are boycotting the university – several scholars have already cancelled lectures at UIUC, and a national conference to be hosted there was cancelled. The press conference will be held following a student walkout.

This is the first time Prof. Salaita will be speaking about the situation in public. He is represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Anand Swaminathan of Loevy & Loevy in Chicago.

For those unable to attend the press conference in person, a copy of Prof. Salaita’s comments will be sent around afterwards and the speakers will be available for interview by phone beginning at 2 p.m. CDT.

For more information and documents on the case, visit CCR’s website here.

Who:
Professor Steven Salaita
Professor Robert Warrior, director of American Indian Studies at UIUC
Maria LaHood, senior attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights
Michael Rothberg, head of the English Department at UIUC, on behalf of the Modern Language Association (MLA)
Eman Ghanayem and Rico Kleinstein, students at UIUC

When:
Tuesday, September 9, 2014, 12:30 p.m. CDT

Where:
University YMCA
1001 S Wright St., Urbana, IL 61820

K. Franke letter to Chancellor Wise
September 2, 2014 at 9:36pm
Columbia University in the City of New York ¦ New York, N.Y. 10027

SCHOOL OF LAW

Katherine M. Franke

Voice: (212) 854-0061
Fax: (212) 854-7946

Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law
kfranke@law.columbia.edu
Director, Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

September 2, 2014

Dr. Phyllis M. Wise, Chancellor
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Swanlund Administration Building
601 John Street Champaign, IL 61820

Dear Dr. Wise:

Last June several University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty invited me to your campus as part of The Cultures of Law in Global Contexts Initiative and the Gender and Women’s Studies Department’s Queer Studies Reading Group. I agreed to come in late September and give several public lectures and hold intensive sessions with graduate students in the humanities, law, and women’s/gender/queer studies. For this I was generously offered a modest honorarium plus the costs of travel and accommodation. I enthusiastically looked forward to working closely with the UIUC’s outstanding interdisciplinary group of faculty and students who are thinking in new and challenging ways about notions of globalization, nationalism, personhood and justice across a range of disciplinary locations. These interdisciplinary initiatives promise to destabilize comfortable notions of belonging, reparation, identity, and dispossession. I was excited to learn more about their work and participate, if only for a few days, in a community of scholars who were committed to thinking hard, if not uncomfortably, about the ways in which law is, or is not, up to the task of addressing the most critical forms of injustice, and how law itself can become an instrument of injustice in critical global contexts.

Regretfully, I write to inform you that on account of the decision to rescind an accepted offer of employment to Professor Steven Salaita, I must now cancel my visit to the UIUC campus in late September.

I have long held the view that the use of boycotts as a tactic to protest an unjust practice by a state, business or academic institution may be appropriate in the right context, such as the current crisis at the UIUC, but that those who pledge to honor a boycott cannot rest their political commitments exclusively on a promise not to do something. Rather they should also pledge to affirmatively engage the injustice that generated the call for the boycott. For this reason, rather than merely boycotting your institution, I plan to travel to Urbana-Champaign in mid September at my own expense to participate in a forum (located off campus) with members of the UIUC community in which we will explore the manner in which the termination of Professor Salaita’s employment at UIUC threatened a robust principal of academic freedom.1

Of equal, if not greater, importance, at this forum I plan to explore with UIUC faculty the complex questions of belonging, dispossession, and possibilities for legitimate uses of state and non-state violence that may underlie Professor Salaita’s tweets on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

We would be well served to relate them to a rich academic literature that has aimed to give meaning to this particular struggle. UIUC’s world-class faculty in history, comparative literature, post-colonial studies, Jewish and Arab studies, ethnography, and human rights, aremore than equipped to unpack Professor Salaita’s brief comments on social media (most would admit that 140 characters do not allow for nuance, rigor or careful analysis), taking them as a starting point instead of an end of a discussion about complex questions of belonging, dispossession and identity. Rather than appealing to norms of civility and safety that risk inoculating the UIUC community from challenging and uncomfortable inquiry, an approach that appreciates the norms and values of an academic institution would substitute rigorous interdisciplinary and scholarly analysis of the possible meanings of a provocative comment such as “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.”2 Should we take from such a statement a cynical, if not offensive, apology for antisemitism or does it suggest a deeper critique of the unintended and tragic consequences of certain extreme forms of political Zionism? Perhaps both? This conversation may include thoughtful consideration of the perils and merits of academics’ use of social media. Instead of being afraid of ideas that may be disturbing or provocative, or prejudging their meaning and declaring them off-limits, scholars aim to unpack them and interrogate their possible implications. I suspect that this conversation could generate disagreement, but I am certain it would galvanize a rich scholarly inquiry that has been lost by banishing Professor Salaita and his ideas from the UIUC campus.

As for my decision to decline the departmental invitation to speak at the UIUC, allow me to explain why I have chosen to take this course. The statement you and your Board of Trustees issued on August 22nd, affirming the decision to terminate Professor Salaita’s employment, as well as emails related to this matter that were released to the public last week, make clear that this catastrophe is not really about Professor Salaita and the UIUC’s interest in preserving a civility norm on campus. Rather, it is better and more accurately understood as the most recent iteration of a well-funded, well-organized and aggressive strategy to censor academic scholarship, research or discussion that is critical of Israel or Israeli state policy. So too it aims to censor scholarship, research or discussion that expresses sympathy for the rights of Palestinians. With the assistance of consultants and other branding experts, the strategy has been to frame comments critical of Israel as an affront to civility in the university context. To those of us who have defended academic freedom on this issue in recent years, your statement on the Salaita case echoed, in profoundly disappointing ways, the framing that has been advanced by political operatives who seek to capture the parameters of discussion of Israel/Palestine in an academic context.3 We at Columbia University are no strangers to this pressure, as we have experienced, and weathered, enormous outside pressure placed on our administration to deny tenure to scholars whose academic work criticizes Israel or political Zionism. I have had my own lectures taped and then critiqued by members of the David Project, have been instructed by my dean’s office that I cannot give a talk in which the word “Palestine” appears in the title because “there is no such place as ‘Palestine,’” and my former dean refused to accept a grant I received to fund scholarly work designed to create space in academic contexts for critical discussions of Israel/Palestine.

The strategy behind the campaign opposing Professor Salaita’s appointment at the UIUC seeks to reframe any discomfort that might arise around the competing claims to belonging, dispossession and identity in Israel/Palestine as a fundamental problem of intolerance, disrespect or abuse. This tactic insinuates as a baseline a particular stance or orthodoxy with respect to the highly contested claims to truth or right on this issue that can then be intolerated, disrespected, or abused. The emails disclosed from your office from university donors, alumni/ae, and others clearly document that the UIUC has been targeted by a particular kind of pro-Israel pressure group hoping to purge the professorate and the campus of parties who they deem to have taken positions (whether in their academic or personal capacities) hostile to an uncritically felicitous conception of Israel. That the UIUC administration would surrender to that pressure, and then defend the decision to do so, in the name of a civility norm on campus, is both disingenuous and disheartening.

Finally, you and your Board offer the defense that the UIUC was justified in terminating Professor Salaita’s employment on the ground that “our campuses must be a safe harbor” where students will not be confronted by ideas that upset them or make them uncomfortable, and that the UIUC “will not tolerate … personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.” Presumably this new standard of “academic integrity” would apply not only to Professor Salaita but to other faculty and visiting lecturers such as myself. If so, then the positions I have advanced in my scholarship andin my work outside the academy would disqualify me from giving a lecture to your students asan invited visitor, not to mention an appointment at the University of Illinois College of Law. My recent article Dating the State: The Moral Hazards of Winning Gay Rights includes a sustained critique of the state of Israel’s effort to rebrand itself as a gay-haven in order to distract attention from its abuse of the human rights of Palestinians,4 and my public withdrawal5 from a gay rights conference in Philadelphia partially funded by the state of Israel would most certainly create discomfort for some members of the UIUC community who are inclined to applaud Israel for its “pro-gay” laws and policies. To be frank, most of my work was written with the aim of upsetting settled notions of identity, justice and rights – something for which I have received both praise and criticism from others in writing and in person at public lectures. I regard this give and take, often impassioned if not ferocious, as a central part of the academic project where we test new, uncomfortable ideas for the novel forms of knowledge they may illuminate.

In addition to myself, Professor Salaita, and many other scholars holding appointments at peer academic institutions whose scholarship and other advocacy contain remarks that would run afoul of the UIUC’s new civility policy, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would surely be unwelcome at the University of Illinois as an invited lecturer on the basis of his recent uncivil comments on social media, swearing vengeance against the “human animals” who captured and killed three Yeshiva students in the West Bank last June.6

My most sincere regrets that on account of the unfolding catastrophe surrounding the termination of Professor Salaita’s employment I will be unable to accept your faculty’s invitation to visit the Champaign-Urbana campus to give a lecture on The Cultures of Law in Global Contexts. However, I do hope that we can meet in mid September, either in a public or private context, when I come to central Illinois to participate in an off-campus session with a community of scholars who do not fear, nor are intolerant of, provocative, challenging, and even uncomfortable ideas.

Sincerely,

Katherine M. Franke

1 A good summary of my legal analysis of this catastrophe can be found in the letter that I authored on behalf of professors of constitutional law, available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gxfbptf2t0d17vw/Faculty%20Letter%20to%20U%20of%20I.pdf.

2 A number of scholars have already taken this tweet as a provocation to explore its possible meanings. See e.g. Corey Robin, What Exactly Did Steven Salaita Mean By That Tweet? (“Israel and many of its defenders claim that Israel is coterminous with Jewishness — indeed, sometimes, that Israel exhausts the definition of Jewishness; Israel has come to be associated, in the eyes of many, with colonization, racism, occupation, population transfer/ethnic cleansing; and movements against colonization, racism, occupation, and the like are considered to be honorable because those things are thought to be, like anti- Semitism itself, among the great sins of the 20th century. Because of these three developments, Israel has perversely made anti-Semitism into something honorable: i.e., a discourse that is not about animus toward Jews but rather about opposition to colonization, population transfer, occupation, and the like.”) http://coreyrobin.com/2014/08/08/what-exactly-did-steven-salaita-mean-by-that-tweet/.

3 See for example, The David Project, A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges (2012), available at: http://www.davidproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012524ABurningCampus- RethinkingIsraelAdvocacyAmericasUniversitiesColleges.pdf; and Gary Tobin, Aryeh Weinberg, and Jenna Ferer, The Uncivil University: Politics and Propaganda in American Education (2005).

4 “Dating the State: The Moral Hazards of Winning Gay Rights,” 44 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 1 (2012), https://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/gender- sexuality/Dating%20the%20State.pdf.

5 Katherine Franke Explains Why She is Boycotting the Equality Forum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jd5YwZJB3U.

6 Alexander Marquardt, “Israeli PM Calls Killers of Three Israeli Teens ‘Human Animals,’” ABC News, available at: http://abcnews.go.com/International/israeli-pm-calls-killers-israeli-teens-humananimals/ story?id=24367041.