CHE: My Life as A Cautionary Tale (Salaita)

[polly_mer]

Adults take responsibility for their own behavior. "But he started it..." is middle-school crap.

Speaking of that, honest question: suppose  you post something on the twitter account and you realize minutes or hours later that, had you been writing something for publication, you would have edited the thing out or changed it. So which one is taking responsibility for your behavior:

(1) Delete the tweet; it does  not express the distilled, accurate, most true statement that is you, and it might needlessly offend or misinform readers about your truest self. People need not be getting junk to read, or

(2) Leave the tweet. You wrote it and you can't revise history or deny the truth of who you are and what you've said. Man up and own it.

Delete because most writing can benefit from another revision.  Writing doesn't have to have anything to do with one's truest self, but often ends up with whatever was done enough when the deadline comes up.

I tend to write long because revision and editing are the time-consuming step in writing.  I frequently don't know what I think until I've written a bunch down, read it over, and then edited until I run out of time.

People who know they have very unpopular views and are posting anywhere under their legal names in venues that are likely to come to the attention of their employers should not be letting anything go out without an overnight sit.  That's like crossing the street without looking both ways and paying attention to what's in the street.

[nescafe]

I disagree entirely that Salaita's criticisms of Israel and Netanyahu's government constituted anti-semitism, first of all. Incivil, provocative, or even spiteful speech against a settler-colonial state is still critique of a state. I also take umbrage with the emotional leap that happens when someone's tweets blow up like this, the phrase that "his speech is offensive to me so he must also be a poor role model, bad teacher, incapable of separating his politics from his pedagogy." One doesn't follow the other.

That said, there is something here that bothers me, as a scholar who also writes about issues that a lot of people have feelings about (it's the open borders debate in my case). The AAUP case turned on the idea that Salaita's tweets were extramural speech, and were thus protected on that basis. That has fed the perception that politics and political viewpoints are sui generis pieces of our lives, and Salaita's views on Israel and Palestine were some kind of unfortunate quirk that he made the unfortunate choice to air in public. But he's a scholar in Palestine Studies, who works on this stuff full-time, who writes about the occupation, and who until this incident was theorizing the relationship between indigeneity and forced removal across transnational contexts.

The pulling apart of professional vs. extramural speech is necessary for legal action (isn't it?), but at the same time, it feels completely disingenuous to me. It requires the academic to jump through the weird hoop of claiming expertise in their own professional discipline while conforming to the absurd dictate that their own views on that discipline are separate, quarantined, and of no consequence.

Anyway, that's off to the side of this article, which nails the issue of faculty's failure to practice solidarity in tough times pretty well. I had the misfortune of being on another campus that made national news shortly after the 2016 election. I watched a non-tenure-track colleague of mine go through these turns and was horrified by how swiftly the tenured faculty my department turned on him.

[ciao_yall]

That said, there is something here that bothers me, as a scholar who also writes about issues that a lot of people have feelings about (it's the open borders debate in my case). The AAUP case turned on the idea that Salaita's tweets were extramural speech, and were thus protected on that basis. That has fed the perception that politics and political viewpoints are sui generis pieces of our lives, and Salaita's views on Israel and Palestine were some kind of unfortunate quirk that he made the unfortunate choice to air in public. But he's a scholar in Palestine Studies, who works on this stuff full-time, who writes about the occupation, and who until this incident was theorizing the relationship between indigeneity and forced removal across transnational contexts.

Fine, but he wasn't writing about the issue from that perspective, or critiquing the State. He was accusing a whole group of people of gleefully committing infanticide. Which crosses a line.

[ciao_yall]

Adults take responsibility for their own behavior. "But he started it..." is middle-school crap.

Speaking of that, honest question: suppose  you post something on the twitter account and you realize minutes or hours later that, had you been writing something for publication, you would have edited the thing out or changed it. So which one is taking responsibility for your behavior:

(1) Delete the tweet; it does  not express the distilled, accurate, most true statement that is you, and it might needlessly offend or misinform readers about your truest self. People need not be getting junk to read, or

(2) Leave the tweet. You wrote it and you can't revise history or deny the truth of who you are and what you've said. Man up and own it.

If you say/do something in anger or other negative emotion that you realize is causing a lot of unintended hurt feelings or other consequences, do you...

1) Apologize and make amends?

2) Double down and do it again?

[larryc]

He had other, worse, tweets that he is not quoting.

[hesitant]

Here is what I do not get. Granted, I am a European transplant and there is a lot that i do not understand, but I am puzzled by the logical fallacies in many of those tweets (ad populum, ad hominem...honestly, you name it, it is there). Again, I do understand that this is how political activism/speech/satire works, and I am aware that tweets are not academic arguments, but I found most of the tweets beyond offensive: to  me, they seem inflammatory, just stirring up controversy for controversy's sake. Bracketing for a moment the anti-semitism (and yes, although not Jewish and far from being a supporter of Israel, I do think many of them are anti-semitic... a topic for another post, though) of the tweets, to me they defy fundamental principles of pluralistic discussion by attacking opponents rather than critiquing arguments or providing viewpoints that can further discussion, rather than silencing divergent opinion.

[mahagonny]

Adults take responsibility for their own behavior. "But he started it..." is middle-school crap.

Speaking of that, honest question: suppose  you post something on the twitter account and you realize minutes or hours later that, had you been writing something for publication, you would have edited the thing out or changed it. So which one is taking responsibility for your behavior:

(1) Delete the tweet; it does  not express the distilled, accurate, most true statement that is you, and it might needlessly offend or misinform readers about your truest self. People need not be getting junk to read, or

(2) Leave the tweet. You wrote it and you can't revise history or deny the truth of who you are and what you've said. Man up and own it.

Delete because most writing can benefit from another revision.  Writing doesn't have to have anything to do with one's truest self, but often ends up with whatever was done enough when the deadline comes up.

I tend to write long because revision and editing are the time-consuming step in writing.  I frequently don't know what I think until I've written a bunch down, read it over, and then edited until I run out of time.

People who know they have very unpopular views and are posting anywhere under their legal names in venues that are likely to come to the attention of their employers should not be letting anything go out without an overnight sit.  That's like crossing the street without looking both ways and paying attention to what's in the street.

More complex though? No one feels obligated to cross the street when there's peril.  But yours is a good practical answer.

But I don't have tenure. My sense of obligation to say something unpopular, even when I think it's true, is much less. My attitude might be 'someone else who can afford to needs to say it.'

Adults take responsibility for their own behavior. "But he started it..." is middle-school crap.

Speaking of that, honest question: suppose  you post something on the twitter account and you realize minutes or hours later that, had you been writing something for publication, you would have edited the thing out or changed it. So which one is taking responsibility for your behavior:

(1) Delete the tweet; it does  not express the distilled, accurate, most true statement that is you, and it might needlessly offend or misinform readers about your truest self. People need not be getting junk to read, or

(2) Leave the tweet. You wrote it and you can't revise history or deny the truth of who you are and what you've said. Man up and own it.

If you say/do something in anger or other negative emotion that you realize is causing a lot of unintended hurt feelings or other consequences, do you...

1) Apologize and make amends?

2) Double down and do it again?

I would probably do what most people do. Apologize 'if I've offended anyone' without weighing in on why they should be offended. Or if it were a tweet (I don't do Twitter) I would delete it and hope it's forgotten, like most people would. Because, as Dale Carnegie  wrote, everyone will say that a mature person should accept criticism cheerfully, but almost no one does.

When you say something to many people, that you know is unpopular with some people, you could be hoping the scales will tip in your favor. When they don't your problem is not that you are beginning to wonder that you may harbor dark impulses and pleasure in offending people that you will have been accused of by then. Your problem is you counted your votes poorly.

[nescafe]

Fine, but he wasn't writing about the issue from that perspective, or critiquing the State. He was accusing a whole group of people of gleefully committing infanticide. Which crosses a line.

This probably seems like too fine a line, but wasn't that tweet about Netanyahu? Correct me if I'm wrong (because if there is another tweet you're referring to, marshall it), but that tweet was pretty solidly in the camp of demonizing Israel's leader... a leader who has overseen furtherance of an illegal and violent confrontation with civilians in his own state. I googled briefly to see if there were other tweets you might be referring to and only came up with one about Israel killing children in the Gaza war of 2014.

Anyway, I think the point that Salaita shouldn't have made such a tweet can still be made without conflating it to say something it didn't. I wouldn't have tweeted with the tone that Salaita chose. I think he came off as kind of an asshole. But the way he lost his job then was really alarming to me, and it still represents a problem for scholars who have really no option to not make unpopular speech. It's not an opt-in/opt-out thing for people who work in these fields; tone is important, but critique is unavoidable and basically guaranteed to make someone angry or offended enough to come after your job. Well-defined norms for academic freedom plus a rigorous plan for how to preserve it at the campus level would be enough to meet/defuse public outrage when this happens. But that's not usually what happens. Instead, institutions respond to outrage incidents in unpredictable ways, with gross inequities in response (usually governed by the rank of the professor involved). The wider campus suffers a consequent chilling of speech: few will willingly teach Israel-Palestine pre-tenure in US universities, to name a common phenomenon. This is the campus climate we continue to promote and sustain unless we make some real changes in how we choose to respond to outrage incidents.

[marshwiggle]

Anyway, I think the point that Salaita shouldn't have made such a tweet can still be made without conflating it to say something it didn't. I wouldn't have tweeted with the tone that Salaita chose. I think he came off as kind of an asshole. But the way he lost his job then was really alarming to me, and it still represents a problem for scholars who have really no option to not make unpopular speech.

So do you see any way the university could have come down on him (other than by firing) for being a jackass in any way which would have led to him showing any sort of remorse? People who like to be provocative for the sake of being provocative often don't listen to any sort of criticism.

[hesitant]

Marshwiggl: my point precisely (which I failed to make in my post upthread). While I can see how his firing/non hiring could be problematic on one level, I can also imagine that the University's reaction is  dictated by  'buyer remorse' . Honestly, I could not imagine working alongside this person and engaging in the work that is necessary for the benefit of the res universitatis , so to speak. If he cannot gauge the impact of his actions using Twitter as a public intellectual, I am horrified by all the other possible types of ill judgement that can ensue. To me at least, his tweets are the obverse of what academic freedom is/should be about.

[nescafe]

Anyway, I think the point that Salaita shouldn't have made such a tweet can still be made without conflating it to say something it didn't. I wouldn't have tweeted with the tone that Salaita chose. I think he came off as kind of an asshole. But the way he lost his job then was really alarming to me, and it still represents a problem for scholars who have really no option to not make unpopular speech.

So do you see any way the university could have come down on him (other than by firing) for being a jackass in any way which would have led to him showing any sort of remorse? People who like to be provocative for the sake of being provocative often don't listen to any sort of criticism.

I'm not sure it's the university's job to come down on a professor for being a jackass (christ, how many jackasses are there in the profession?). I also don't think Salaita was being provocative merely for the sake of being provocative, either. The anger over Israel's war in Gaza was/is a real and legitimate one. And it's kind of easy for someone like me (who is not Palestinian, nor a scholar of Palestine studies) to say I disagree with his tone. But even as I say that, I am conflicted about it because tone-policing is commonly used to shut people up when their perspectives are already marginalized. I've heard about enough unhirings of scholars who work on Palestine in the US academy to know that Salaita's case is not exceptional. Maybe what is exceptional about it is that Salaita has been the loudest about it... proving, perhaps, that incivility is an effective instrument after all.

[marshwiggle]

I'm not sure it's the university's job to come down on a professor for being a jackass (christ, how many jackasses are there in the profession?). I also don't think Salaita was being provocative merely for the sake of being provocative, either. The anger over Israel's war in Gaza was/is a real and legitimate one. And it's kind of easy for someone like me (who is not Palestinian, nor a scholar of Palestine studies) to say I disagree with his tone. But even as I say that, I am conflicted about it because tone-policing is commonly used to shut people up when their perspectives are already marginalized.

What I find frustrating is the idea that somehow people expect some sort of "free pass" for what they say on Twitter, as though it's not basically the same as saying something anywhere else in public. If your account is clearly identified with you, since it has global reach, why does it justify an offensive tone that would be avoided face to face?

As hesitant indicated, someone who wants to be taken seriously as an intelligent thoughtful person should not sound like a snarky jerk on Twitter (or any other public forum, for that matter).

[nescafe]

I'm not sure it's the university's job to come down on a professor for being a jackass (christ, how many jackasses are there in the profession?). I also don't think Salaita was being provocative merely for the sake of being provocative, either. The anger over Israel's war in Gaza was/is a real and legitimate one. And it's kind of easy for someone like me (who is not Palestinian, nor a scholar of Palestine studies) to say I disagree with his tone. But even as I say that, I am conflicted about it because tone-policing is commonly used to shut people up when their perspectives are already marginalized.

What I find frustrating is the idea that somehow people expect some sort of "free pass" for what they say on Twitter, as though it's not basically the same as saying something anywhere else in public. If your account is clearly identified with you, since it has global reach, why does it justify an offensive tone that would be avoided face to face?

As hesitant indicated, someone who wants to be taken seriously as an intelligent thoughtful person should not sound like a snarky jerk on Twitter (or any other public forum, for that matter).

I hear that frustration, but I guess I believe the proper consequences for being a jackass online are better served socially, not handed down by the same institutions that we trust to protect our right to speech. Don't like Salaita's tone? Don't invite him to a dinner party. But tone alone is not sufficient grounds for dismissal... and certainly not in the shady way that donors were involved here.

[mahagonny]

Maybe what is exceptional about it is that Salaita has been the loudest about it... proving, perhaps, that incivility is an effective instrument after all.

Alternatively: 'You may too polite to say it, but Netanyahu is  a leader who has overseen furtherance of an illegal and violent confrontation with civilians in his own state.'
Not exactly grabbing the headlines, right.

[marshwiggle]

What I find frustrating is the idea that somehow people expect some sort of "free pass" for what they say on Twitter, as though it's not basically the same as saying something anywhere else in public. If your account is clearly identified with you, since it has global reach, why does it justify an offensive tone that would be avoided face to face?

As hesitant indicated, someone who wants to be taken seriously as an intelligent thoughtful person should not sound like a snarky jerk on Twitter (or any other public forum, for that matter).

I hear that frustration, but I guess I believe the proper consequences for being a jackass online are better served socially, not handed down by the same institutions that we trust to protect our right to speech. Don't like Salaita's tone? Don't invite him to a dinner party. But tone alone is not sufficient grounds for dismissal... and certainly not in the shady way that donors were involved here.

So is he the only person who has expressed those political views? Or have others expressed similar views, but without being so obnoxious about it? I'd guess there are lots who have expressed similar views, but in a more responsible way, who have never had their careers threatened. He's being sanctioned for being a jerk, period. Academic freedom shouldn't be a protection from normal human social expectations.