Professor Steven Salaita, whose job offer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was rescinded after the revelation that the educator had made numerous — and venomous — anti-Israel and anti-Jewish tweets, has been given a $5,000 grant from the American Association of University Professors.
“The governing board of the AAUP Foundation’s Academic Freedom Fund has approved a grant of $5,000 to Professor Steven Salaita, who is without salary while he contests his dismissal from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on academic freedom grounds,” the group announced Tuesday. “Under Academic Freedom Fund guidelines, temporary financial aid may be provided to faculty members whose means of support are reduced or cut off because of their involvement in academic freedom controversies.”
Salaita quit his post at Virginia Tech after being recruited by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which abruptly rescinded the offer after Salaita’s “loathsome and foul-mouthed presence in social media” (a potential colleague’s words) became well known. But he’s drawn support from the American Association of University Professors, among others.
Salaita recently capped off a four-stop Chicago-area campus speaking tour on academic censorship and U.S. policy in the Middle East, and “his attorney said he is preparing a lawsuit against the U. of I. for violating Salaita’s constitutional rights of free speech and due process, as well as breach of contract,” the Chicago Tribune reports.
The newspaper adds a separate donation effort culled $17,000 for Salaita, and other groups continue to fund raise for him.
At one of his campus appearances last week, he suggested pressure from “Zionist donors” was partly to blame for his situation. He also denounced the notion of “civility.”
“Valuable ideas disrupt, reorder, undermine, confront, subvert, unsettle, upset, menace, admonish, forebode. Critical thinking is fundamentally incompatible with conformity, which is collegiality’s primary desire,” he said, according to a transcription of his speech.
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