The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 24th, 2015
Forty-one campus leaders at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have signed an open letter calling on the institution to hire Steven G. Salaita, whose appointment to a professorship was nixed last year over the scholar’s anti-Israel tweets.
The message comes after a tumultuous few weeks for the campus. Earlier this month, a federal court ruled that the university had broken its contractual obligations with Mr. Salaita by declining to hire him. Then the campus’s chancellor, Phyllis M. Wise, suddenly announced she would step down. Later in the week, it came to light that Ms. Wise and other officials had used personal email accounts to communicate secretly about the Salaita case and other topics, in violation of state open-records law.