PBS
October 1st, 2014
In October of 2013, Steven Salaita, a tenured professor at Virginia Technical Institute and respected scholar, was offered a tenured position at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). After accepting the position, he fired off a series of passionate tweets highly critical of Israel in the current Israel-Gaza conflict, including one that read “You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the (expletive) West Bank settlers would go missing.” In August 2014, the UIUC trustees rescinded the job offer, citing a failure of civility as justification.
Their decision to renege on the job offer has ignited a hailstorm of controversy concerning academic freedom of speech. In the ensuing and ever-growing controversy surrounding the case, five observations about the state of higher education have become increasingly clear, all the result of the changing economics of higher education, beginning with the increased power of wealthy funders in the face of decreased public funding.