Steven Salaita - First Peoples, Palestine and the Crushing of Free Speech (2015)

Speaker 1: Welcome to the village of . It's the big name that's been given to what Vancouver is today. There are many villages along here on the waterfront and inland. some of which are which is very close to here, and both make references to the maple trees, which for me is probably my favorite of all the trees in this area besides the cedar tree, and the reason being which Stephen will probably appreciate this, is that the maple trees have moss on them. And in the moss are little ferns sticking out. So if you get a chance to wander around through Stanley Park while you're here, go up and hug one of those trees and see if you can't get some of the rhizomes off the fern. It's for your throat. It's for your stomach. It makes you feel good. It's the way that our people would sing for the entire winter. This is the winter village site of the three different peoples that have continued to dwell here, the ,, the ,, and the . So these are the three nations you know in this area. We've continued to share these lands and waterways. We do our best to live in harmony. It doesn't always work, but, you know, I think when we follow our spiritual, traditional, and cultural ways and follow our artistic, creative minds, You know, everything comes to a better place of being. So this song I'm going to share with you tonight came from our summer village. And I like singing it at this time of year because it's called tum tum, the tum tum slolum. Slolum is sacred song. And tum tum means winter. So we're in the heart of winter now. And this song is about the snowbird. And I believe that when our people, because we were semi-nomadic, that when we left the winter villages after, which is where we are now in the winter village land, when we left the winter villages and went back into the mountains to the summer villages, I think that one of the first things we saw was that that snowbird going back into the glaciers where the snow exists all year round. So this is Tum Tum Slolum. It comes from the wife of Chief Billy. And the other reason I love this song is that I watched our people bring our forests back through a lot of work, and I learned this song through spending over a decade going to stand up and bring our rights back to that land. So it's the only part of our lands and waterways that hasn't been entirely brought back to us. We ended the logging, and we ended a lot of the violence that happened in those mountains to eco-warriors, the people that stood up for the land and water. So this is Tum Tum Slolim.

Speaker 2: Oh, hey.

Speaker 3: Oh, hey.

Speaker 2: It's really tremendous to have the opportunity also to welcome Stephen here. Stephen is the author of such works as Anti-Arab Racism in the USA, The Holy Land in Transit, Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan, Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures and Politics, and The Uncultured Wars, Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought. As you can gather from the titles of these works, there's an astonishing breadth to Stephen's work, which brings together such fields as indigenous studies, Arab American studies, and comparative literature. Stephens taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Virginia Tech, and as many of you no doubt know, he was to take up a position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign when he was effectively fired this past year for comments that he had made on Twitter. Of course, Stephen's case has generated an enormous amount of commentary and debate. I think the size of the crowd here is testament to it, both among academics generally and specifically within the University of Illinois community. But I have to confess that this debate has left me quite shaken. at a distinctly personal level for a university administrator to strike at the professionalism of such a productive and well-respected colleague feels like an affront to all of us who have taken up the Middle East as a field of scholarly inquiry. And so I really want to thank you, Stephen, for coming to share your expertise and your experience here with us today.

Steven Salaita: Let me start by thanking the First Peoples of this land and for welcoming me here as a guest. I'm profoundly honored. I'm profoundly interested in learning from you as much as you're willing to teach me. And I would love the opportunity and consider this a formal invite to welcome you someday to my ancestral lands of Jordan and Palestine. I want to thank also all the organizers and co-sponsors. It was quite an impressive list that everybody had put together. Sheila Delaney and Paul Sidra particularly for their introductions and to you all for coming. I'll try not to... yammer for too long. I can't make any promises. I tend to go on tangents, which is what led me to Twitter in the first place. I'm interested in setting aside time for questions, so if there's something that you feel like you want to argue with me about or press me further on, I'll be happy to do it. One final qualification. I'm not native, aboriginal. You'll have to excuse my American vocabulary. I'm trying to tailor it appropriately for being north of the border. And as such, I'm not particularly interested in nor do I feel it fully appropriate for me to represent a set of their cultures, politics, geographies, et cetera. I want to focus more on Palestine in relation to indigeneity and the relationships of those doing Palestine solidarity work on colonized land here in North America. Just so you know more about who I am, who you're dealing with, beyond the guy who got fired, I was born in the US on the West Virginia border in southern Appalachia. My mother is from Nicaragua, and her parents are from Palestine. And they're from the villages, my grandfather of Ein Kerem, which is in West Jerusalem. It was ethnically cleansed in 48. And then Beit Jala, which is adjacent to Bethlehem, probably about five, six miles south of Jerusalem, although it can take all day to make the trip, if it's even possible at all. My father is from a traditional Bedouin clan of Jordanians, or as they like to call themselves, somewhat chauvinistically Jordanian Jordanians, meaning Jordanians not of Palestinian origin, from a town called Madaba, which is to the southwest of Amman. It's kind of in between Amman and the Dead Sea. And it's an old biblical town. In it, or right next to it, is Mount Nebu, Moses supposedly saw the Promised Land of Palestine for the first time. So that's kind of my subject positionality. I want to look at aspects of my firing that haven't often been discussed in corporate media, but that have been subject to some discussion within academic and activist communities. I'm especially interested in situating my firing not in the context of adjudicating myself of any wrongdoing, but looking at how it informs a set of questions that are crucial to us both inside and outside of academe. That's the corporatization of the university, the meanings and practices of academic freedom, the status of American Indian or indigenous studies on campus, the repression of Palestinian voices, along with the repression of serious discussion of Palestine, or on the inverse, criticism of Israel, and the way that these forms of repression influence our ability to take up the study of indigenous peoples in a way that's not only intellectually productive, but in ways that are materially useful as well. One thing I've heard throughout my life that I don't dispute, I have no reason to dispute it, and those of you who are of Arab or Jewish origin have probably heard the same thing at some point in your life, that Jews and Arabs have much in common. We share an ancestral origin. We share a set of cultural practices. We share a conflict. And that's something, even if it brings us together as antagonists, it still brings us together. We're not holding hands over it necessarily, but it has also brought Jews and Arabs very closely together in opposition to many Israeli policies and the practices of settler colonization in Palestine. But when we're talking about Jews and Arabs in North America, here's one thing that we share in common that is absolutely crucial to our activism on behalf of Palestinian human rights. The fact that in North America, both Jews and Arabs are settlers. The fact that we're settlers gives us something productive in common and gives us a basis to develop a more complex form of engagement with the Israel-Palestine conflict. When we share ideas or argue about Israel-Palestine, sometimes the arguments sort of descend into a back and forth about who the land really belongs to historically and contemporaneously. So, oh, the Palestinians are the indigenous peoples. the land is indigenous to Jews. And that kind of situation around indigeneity sort of informs a lot of people's politics around the conflict. My viewpoint, and I think it's a sound viewpoint, I'm biased, is that the Palestinians are clearly indigenous to the land. Their culture grew up on that land. Their sense of identity grew up on that land. Their sense of identity remains attached to that land, even though many of them don't live on the land or in physical proximity to the land. And I always go back to David Ben-Gurion's prediction. I don't even like calling him David Ben-Gurion. David Green, that's his real name. David Green's prediction that the Arabs would forget the homeland in a generation or two and everything would be easy sailing. He was wrong that the Arabs would forget about the land. The Palestinians would just forget about it. In fact, it seems to me as somebody of Palestinian origin born here in North America that our attachment to that land, our sense of identity being tied into that land is stronger than it ever has been. I have a young son. He's two years old. I'll make sure that he understands the importance of our attachment to that land. It's something that is going to continue, and it's something that attachment that's impervious to militarization. It's impervious to weapons. It's impervious to bombs. It's something that no amount of physical violence can stamp out, and that's the particular power that Palestinians bring to bear on the conflict, the simple fact that they refuse to forget and they refuse to give up their claims to indigeneity. We don't have that argument in North America, though, right? And it's important that we don't. We can say that we're rooted in North America, but I think it's important for us to acknowledge that we're rooted in North America as settler. I mean, think about the term immigrant. An immigrant is an accurate way to describe a lot of the Jewish and Arab and South Asian and East Asian populations that have ended up here in North America. But I think we use immigrant so incessantly, even a few generations down the line, to conceal a more powerful word, a more descriptive word, and that is the word of settler, which positions us in a disparate circumstance of power vis-a-vis the indigenous populations of these lands that we've settled and continue to inhabit. So when we come together to work on behalf of Palestine, it's equally crucial that we recognize that we're doing this work from a colonized space in which we're directly implicated, that we have a set of interests in, And that on this space, we have a set of relationships to this land's original inhabitants. And in that sense, we need to attach our understanding of settler colonization in Palestine to histories of ongoing settler colonization in North America, from which we have benefited in ways that are both tacit and explicit. A quick story to illustrate from my point of view, one of the ways that we've benefited from it. As I mentioned, I grew up in a very small town in Appalachia. And we were one of the few, at that time, one of the few immigrant families, or settler families, if you want to call it that. There were a few others, but there just weren't very many brown people there. There was a significant black population. and a sort of significant Italian population. Both of them had arrived to become laborers in the coal mines. This is coal country that I grew up in, coal mining country. And the whites and blacks in my town, it's called Bluefield, were strictly separated. And we actually had railroad tracks separating the white side of town from the black side of town, right? So the term, you know, The metaphor across the tracks wasn't actually a metaphor back in Bluefield. It described the spatial reality. And having a Nicaraguan mother who, Spanish is her first language. She was the Spanish teacher at the high school. So everybody in Bluefield thought she was Mexican. I don't know if that problem exists in Canada, but any Spanish speaker in the US is by and large Mexican. That's just kind of the way it is. I had a Mexican mom and a God knows what father. He could be anything from Moroccan to Indonesian. Somebody from that vast geography known in the Orientalist imagination as Islamoland. He was from there. And so it was kind of a double whammy. And I used to complain to my parents about You know, the nonsense I always heard, xenophobia, and in some cases outright racism. And my dad's attitude was typical of a Middle Eastern immigrant, right? Shut up, keep your head down, pull up your bootstraps, and do well in school anyhow. All right, that's his answer to everything. You know, just do well in school. You know, hard work overcomes all, and you shouldn't be thinking about anything else besides becoming an engineer or a doctor. And I became neither. So anyway, you know. My mom always had a different answer, though. She'd tell me, you have it better than people who were born in this country and who have been in this country for generations.

Speaker 2: I said, what do you mean?

Steven Salaita: Well, we get to live in a neighborhood that plenty of people who were born in the United States don't get to live in. And she was, of course, talking about African-Americans. And I used to think that my mother's narrative was just a reconfiguration of my dad's Horatio Alger bootstrap story. But it turns out that she was trying to inculcate me into some sort of understanding of structural racism, that we entered into the United States. And as soon as we did, we came embroiled in a particular racial hierarchy. whether we wanted to be or not. And within that racial hierarchy, we could be white enough to benefit from the existence of white supremacy. All the immigrants in Bluefield from the time of my childhood and onward, from South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, et cetera, live in white neighborhoods. Not a single one went to a black neighborhood. The neighborhoods are still segregated, strictly segregated along the black-white axis even today. My mom compelled me to think about the ways in which, despite the persistent xenophobia, the ways in which we benefited from a type of anti-black racism. Then many years later, I went to college and I started learning about Native Americans, indigenous peoples, And I understood that our sense as immigrants, and my parents were very progressive along the line of racial politics, right? Very progressive. They had zero sense of the space as a colonized land. They had zero conception of Bluefield or any other place in America as being subject to ongoing colonization. I grew up like most American kids with an idea that bad things had happened to the Indians. That's how we grow up in the US. Bad things happen, but it was all for the greater good. Look what came of their displacement. This great democracy that we enjoy could not have come into existence without a few bad acts here and there and whatever. It was all worth it. But absolutely no sense that indigenous peoples are still alive, that they're still constituted as nations, that they are still fighting to gain full control over their land bases and their legal systems, and fighting for self-determination and sovereignty, or to put it in less like academic terms, liberation. And that made me recognize the landscape on which I grew up and in which I came into existence as an intellectual being as one profoundly compromised by the persistence of colonial narratives. Because the idea that bad things had happened to the Indians but they're not problems anymore is, if nothing else, a distinctive colonial narrative. It's a colonial narrative of erasure. It's a colonial narrative that deemphasizes responsibility. It's a colonial narrative that tells us we don't have to engage these issues because they don't exist anymore. And anyway, you're not responsible for it because you didn't live 100 or 200 years ago. And so we all have to continue undergoing this process of on learning those discourses and narratives and replacing them with the new knowledge that we can pick up from indigenous peoples, from the people in Palestine and so forth. Just a second. My hire at the University of Illinois, having been in American Indian studies is critical to my termination. And I think it's something that we ought to keep in mind when thinking about or discussing this situation, which gets couched very frequently, almost exclusively at times in the discourses of academic freedom. And those discourses of academic freedom are extremely important, and they're extremely germane to the case. But the case informs other broader, I would argue, more important matters. I don't think that it would have been so easy, if I can use that word. I say easy based on the amount of thought that the administrators appeared to put into it, which is none. It wouldn't have been so easy for them to have made this decision had I been in another department. The fact that it was in AIS, American Indian Studies, is a crucial factor because AIS at the University of Illinois has long had a tense, at times antagonistic, relationship with the administration. So there were a whole series of problems that preceded and foregrounded my termination. One of them has to do with the persistence of Chief Illiniwek. Do I need to explain Chief Illiniwek? Okay, I'll do it very quickly. He's a mascot. I don't even need to explain too much further. He's a mascot from a fake tribe, and he's fake in all the other ways that Indian mascots tend to be. He dances around at halftime of their basketball and football games. And his motto is ,, which is actually derived from an indigenous language. It's true. It's called Tontoese. And he says ,, and he has a scowl. He always has a huge scowl, and he sits there like this. And he scowls, and he always looks solemn even when he's dancing. It's quite the performance in a bad way. Illinois was forced to retire the chief in 2007, but of course they haven't retired the chief at all. And I know that you've probably been to places or live in places where the settler attachment to Indian symbology is extremely strong, but I promise you it is not as strong as the attachment of the people in Illinois to Chief Illiniwek. absolutely batshit crazy when they got rid of that mascot. There's a Facebook page called Bring Back the Chief or Save the Chief. Check it out. It's got like 55,000 likes last time I looked at it. And it is an amazing testament to a type of, and note I said a type of, white psychology wherein their sense of identity And their sense of self-esteem is completely tied into what amounts to, because this is what mascots are in the US, a corporate icon. It's a brand. It's a corporate brand. So it's a problem of capitalism as much as it is a problem of representation. It's brand loyalty. And every time I visit the page, because I've done some writing about the chief, and so I have to visit the page and get material. It always comes to my mind. It's like, well, these poor people don't need an Indian mascot. They need a grief counselor. They really do. They talk as if somebody in their family had died. And I'm joking, but I'm not joking. This is the kind of discourse that you hear. And so the chief is informally everywhere on the campus, everywhere, on cars, on t-shirts, He turns up at football games and basketball games in the stands. He's not allowed to go to the court or to the football field. He's always there. And so the chief is still an omnipresent symbol. And the folks in AIS have been working hard to curtail that without much success. And their work to eradicate this ridiculous chief imagery, and it's more than just chief imagery. Corresponding racist narratives grow up around the chief and then get put into circulation. they're deeply resented, the AIS people, by a significant portion of the campus community, including administration, and by a significant portion of the Champaign-Urbana community as well. Also, I don't know why the University of Illinois, which it's the flagship institution of a state that doesn't have a considerable native population. I don't know exactly why they invested money in an American Indian Studies program about 15 years ago, but the people in AIS grew it to be through a tremendous amount of work and vision, grew it to be one of the most distinguished departments of American Indian Studies in North America. It's a remarkable remarkable collection of faculty who do fabulous research and who are wonderful people. But I think the fact that they do fabulous research and are wonderful people, it contravenes the administration's original desire that the department exist to placate those who were upset by Chief Illiniwek and as a feather in the diversity cap. They wanted a department that would look good in their glossy brochures, but certainly not a department that was going to cause trouble, that was actually going to be interested, in other words, in doing American Indian studies. because American Indian studies and indigenous studies necessarily causes a university trouble. It cannot perform its work unless it is causing trouble to colonialist institutions. So my being in that department has been critical. And if you can indulge me just for a moment, I don't know why I was hired. And people laugh at me when I say that, but I really don't. I wasn't there when the search committee was making its decision. I don't know who the other finalists were. All I know, like many academics, is that I applied. I went through a year of hazing. I got offered the job. I accepted it. They didn't tell me, you know, we hired you for ABC reasons. This is what our discussion behind closed doors looked like. This is who you finished behind. This is who you finished ahead of. We offered X, Y, and Z before you. They all said no, so you were fourth on the list. Not, you know, these are things that happen normally in search. I have no idea what went on, which is one reason why I'm so amused when... when just a collection of half-baked imbeciles keep talking about, oh, they hired Salida for this reason and that reason. You don't know why Salida was hired at all. Salida doesn't know why Salida was hired. So why don't you just drop that narrative? But there was interest in transitioning to an indigenous studies that would have more of a global scope. And they were interested. And at the time I was hired, I think they had eight full-time faculty. Those eight full-time faculty were unanimously interested in accommodating Palestine in this move to a more global focus. And so my work in Palestine they saw as complementary of their vision as a program. And so when the administration made its decision, it didn't just affect me personally, although it did that. It had severe negative consequences for the department. And the department has suffered terribly. Their workload has increased dramatically this semester. And I always want people to remember the folks in the department. And send some of your love and energy and support to them. They've had an extremely difficult semester. They had to cover my classes. They've had to hear the racism and suffer all kinds of administrative indignities. They've been told. over and over again, tacitly or explicitly, that they're not qualified to make their own hiring decisions. They've been dismissed. They've been subject, in other words, to the full array of colonial logic that governs the practices and ethos of the modern American university. The decision killed an idea just as much, if not more, than it killed a career or killed a department. I don't believe that the administrator sat down and said, oh, wow. their modes of decolonization are going international. They're starting to include Israel as a colonial entity that in many ways is separable from the US as a colonial entity. We gotta stop this. And the reason I don't think they did that is because I don't think they're that smart. I think that that was just a you know inadvertent benefit of it but we don't look at intent as critics right when we're when we're trying to figure out you know a particular phenomenon we we look at results and the result of their decision was to have smashed this this idea and smashed this move before it could be implemented and put into practice. And I'm not going to say that it would have worked beautifully. I could have gotten there. They all could have hated me. They could have said, you know what? All of a sudden, your work stinks. So you're not going to become full professor. And we encourage you to leave. I don't know what was going to happen. But we never got the chance to find out. We never got the chance. And I say that because it's absolutely indicative of a particular administrative attitude, at least in the US. I'm guessing it's the same in Canada, but I can't speak authoritatively to that. A particular administrative attitude that views these sorts of material commitments not only as fiscally problematic, but also as philosophically undesirable. They don't want us making connections among colonial entities. They don't want us examining the modes of neoliberal imperialism vis-a-vis indigenous communities in different parts of the world who share a profound interest in analyzing these iniquitous structures in concert with one another. goes against everything that the corporate or the Imperial University stands for. The corporate and the Imperial University desires docility. It desires grant money for the STEM fields. It desires a type of knowledge production that always, in the end, supplements the practices of state power. That's what the corporate imperial university desires. It does not desire academic units and academics themselves who are interested in situating the university itself within these broader processes of imperialism, continuing colonization, and so forth at the state level. And the university is implicated in these things. I noticed at UBC that they call it, so actually I didn't notice, I'm lying. Somebody told me, and the person who told me is probably in this room, right? Told me that it's on what they call university endowed lands. And in the US, every state has, I think every state has what they call a land grant university. The University of Illinois is the land grant university. Usually, it's the state flagship. Not always. In Virginia, Virginia Tech is the land grant institution and so forth. But even then, in this kind of language, we see a complete disconnect from a particular historical reality. Who endowed that land? Who decided that that land was endowable in the first place, and to whom was it endowed? To whom was it granted? Who had the authority to grant it? These are indigenous lands. That's the same thing with public lands. Public lands are actually indigenous lands. And so the university, just by its physical existence in many cases, is a colonial structure, literally and figuratively. But then in terms of its particular set of commitments in terms of its supplication and supplementation of state power, they are colonialist institutions in terms of how they operate as well, in terms of how they have a remarkably sophisticated way of making sure that everything, everything remains within a particular boundary. And once somebody breaks across that particular boundary, the notions and the ideals of free speech and academic freedom go out the window. One thing that I like us to think about, and again, I'm coming at it from a Yank point of view, a Yankee point of view, because that's just, is that what you call Americans in Canada, Yankees? Or is that just a British thing? Am I insulting you all tacitly? I don't mean to. I'm from the southern part of the U.S., so it's weird for me to ever refer to myself as a Yankee. But, you know, we talk about free speech, but free speech in terms of its discursive performances, think about it. In the U.S., we have some... We have some canonical examples of the glories of free speech. One of them is Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. The Supreme Court allows them to protest service people's funerals. Another canonical example is the KKK doing a march. This is probably 20 years ago in Skokie, Illinois, through a heavily Jewish neighborhood. Another example happened at the University of Illinois. Right around this time last year, we had that polar vortex that went all the way down to Florida. And it was like, I'm talking in Fahrenheit here. Don't even expect me to know what the hell it is centigrade, right? It became like 17 below in Champaign-Urbana. And the students were clamoring to cancel classes. Phyllis Wise, the chancellor, decided to hold classes. And Phyllis Wise, if you've never seen her or don't know of her background, she's of Chinese origin. And Phyllis Wise was subject to horribly racist and sexist abuse on Twitter for not canceling classes under a hashtag called Fuck Phyllis, right? And you can imagine the horrible things that they were saying about her. And she released a statement a day or two later saying, you know, I'm really disappointed in the way that they chose to express themselves, but... They have rights of speech. And there's no reason that I should punish them based on that. So what I'm talking about are articulations of extremism that challenge the liberal self-image of the multicultural state. So free speech can accommodate those things. Because in accommodating those things, it actually reinforces a certain sort of nationalistic narrative. But when people challenge the basis and the structure of the state itself, free speech tends to go away. That's why you see people who engage in systemic structural analysis of racism or colonization getting into so much trouble. Because free speech does not accommodate a rejection or a deep skepticism about the glories of the liberal state. The liberal state and its legal institutions, its juridical institutions, have to respond to it, to that sort of critique, in different ways. And it does so by summoning the power of recrimination. Anybody, anybody who has worked with so-called radical ideas in North American universities knows extremely well how conformity to this particular limitation is coerced in ways both direct and indirect. Now upper administrators, again, in the US, they're all banging the civility drum. Are they doing that here, too? Are they talking about civility? Yeah, that's the new thing. It's actually an old thing. They've been actually talking about civility for a while. But now they're doing it, it seems like, in a systematic way. It's like they all have a conference, and they're like, OK. What's a good word to use?

Speaker 2: Civility.

Steven Salaita: All right, excellent. Shelf here. I know I'm going to end up spilling this water. Okay, so civility encodes all of the problems that I've been talking about and that so many other academics and activists have been analyzing over the past five, six months and well before that also. Civility is the language of genocide. Civility calls into existence profoundly violent histories. Civility is the term most frequently used in European colonization around the entire world. That was the rationale for colonizing India, the rationale for colonizing the Arab world, Sub-Saharan Africa, North America, South America, East and Central Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Civility. It was always a binary of civilized versus savage, and a binary that ended up informing notions of modernity versus premodernity. I've been criticized a bunch for pointing out that a term like civility is deeply invested in violent histories, but I see no other way to analyze it. People respond by saying, You can't actually believe that these people, they may be stupid, but they're not genocidal. I never said that they were genocidal. I said that the discourse they're using is genocidal, whether they're aware of it or not. And in fact, because they appear to be unaware of it, that shows us just how powerful the term is and just how easy it is in North America to recycle and reinscribe and normatize these histories of colonial violence and to keep them into existence and to continue practicing them. The fact that the administrators have no sense of what civility has done in the past, and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here, makes it all the more insidious. That doesn't let them off the hook. It absolutely doesn't let them off the hook. It makes them even more complicit in a type of narrative that those of us who are working in indigenous studies and elsewhere have a profound interest in identifying, unpacking, and ultimately eliminating. Another way that this presents itself is through the university administration's justification of my firing, which was done not simply through the language of civility. The administrators kept invoking the students. Salida's going to sauté and eat those students. We can't let those precious students in his classroom. Terrible things are going to happen. Salida won't make them feel comfortable. All of these inane platitudes about my abilities in the classroom. And by the way, there's not a whit of evidence, none, nowhere, anywhere, that I've ever mistreated this student, ever. In all my teaching, I fielded zero student complaints, none, not a one. I know that there's a crew of people, and I know this sounds conspiratorial, but it's true, I know it. There's a crew of people, I wish that they would get a life, but apparently trying to find something bad about me is their life, who have dug through every single word I have ever written anywhere. I mean, they started going after my Goodreads reviews. I had to shut down my Goodreads account. They were like, oh my god, look at the way he reviewed this book. He doesn't like Christopher Hitchens. Holy shit. Really, every word I have ever written, they were pulling out shit from 1998. It stunned me. And I know that they're looking. And I know that the legal team representing the university is looking. for former students and former colleagues who will come forward and say, this guy was a real asshole. He was a terrible teacher, or he was a terrible colleague. They haven't found a single one, not a single one. So you tell me who is more appropriate for university work. Somebody who has no complaints about his teaching or his professional life versus somebody who makes extraordinary decisions based on extraordinary claims that don't have a single piece of evidence to support them. That shit will get you an F in English 101. You shouldn't pass undergrad if you don't understand that claims must be supported by evidence. But they're always talking about the students and doing this for the students. And I'm going to go on another quick tangent. And then I'm going to forget where I was at. So if somebody would be kind enough to remind me that I was talking about the students. If the administrators really want to help students, firing me is not a good way to do it. Even if I were a horrible teacher, firing me is not going to help students. What will help students? It's cutting down on administrative bloat, in which we have dozens upon dozens, in some university systems, hundreds of administrators who are making $200,000 plus for doing nothing. You know, they have like, campuses now have like, seriously, like the associate provost. for making sure underage drinking doesn't happen. The administrator salaries are going up and up and up and up. University presidents in the US, many of them have $1 million plus annual packages, so forth and so on. It's a racket. It's a capitalist racket. If they want to help students, they can cut down on their tuition by cutting down on administrative bloat. If they want to help students, they can quit putting students in the classroom of adjunct and contingent faculty who are saddled with extraordinary teaching loads that don't leave them enough time to give students the proper attention. If they want to help students, they can quit infantilizing them and treat them like adults rather than as communities of consumers. right, who the institution can exploit for profit at every possible moment. You think the proliferation of restaurants on college campuses has anything to do with making sure the students are comfortable? Making sure they spend money on campus rather than off. They're consumers. They're not students. And many students are aware of that reality and react accordingly, which is inevitable. But anyway. I actually remembered where I was at, the students. I've been thinking about students because when they say students won't be comfortable in my classes, I realize that students is not a neutral term. They're talking about normative students, talking about white students or Jewish students even more particularly. So in one sense, they're totalizing Jews. that's more anti-Semitic than anything I would have ever dreamed of saying my entire life. Saying that, first of all, Jews are too weak to handle ideas that don't suit them, which goes against every single intellectual tradition of the Jewish people for about 8,000 years. Also, it's saying that they have a homogenous view political worldview that doesn't distinguish and that is unwilling to entertain the very existence of an Arab at the front of the classroom. And that certainly hasn't been my experience throughout my life either. What about the Palestinian student? What about the Muslim student? What about the black student? or the indigenous student. Do the administrators ever fret about their comfort? When I was a student, I heard so much orientalist shit almost every single week that it became extremely difficult sometimes for me to even go to class in the first place. I did because the administration didn't give a damn about my comfort. I had to suck it up and I had to go. Non-normative students had to do the same thing. Trans students, women students. ethnic minority students. They have to suck it up and go. And they have to hear sometimes explicitly horrible things, sometimes implicitly horrible things. And very often, they have to deal with a continuous set of microaggressions from both their professors and their peers. They have to do it. And if they go complain to the administration about it, Fox News isn't going to pick it up and express outrage on behalf of the precious students who are uncomfortable. In fact, that's why I feel like non-normative students leave college, those who make it to the end of college, with a much better education than their white male counterparts. We learn things in the classroom that other students never learn because they don't have to. We come away with a different set of knowledge and a different experience that helps prepare us in a way for the professional world that we're about to encounter. So when the administration says students aren't going to be comfortable, it occurs to me that they're not talking about actual human beings. Students are just an invention of the administration's disposition They're not real. They're not talking about communities of actual people. Students are being exploited and they're being summoned as a stand-in for administrative discomfort. It's the administrators who are uncomfortable. It's the donors who are uncomfortable. Yet they're outsourcing their discomfort to an imagined set of students who in reality don't exist and have never existed throughout my entire teaching career. And another thing that I'm going to wrap up soon because I've been talking a lot and I do want to leave time for questions. I think also about the reasons that I was fired and beyond the fact that there's a colonial logic inscribed in it, beyond the fact that it happened in American Indian studies, beyond the fact that I've always made explicit my commitment to decolonization in North America in addition to Palestine. I think my role in BDS, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, particularly the infamous ASA boycott resolution from It was a little more than a year ago now. I published a lot of pieces supporting that decision. And I think that caught the attention of a number of organizations that specialize in getting pro-Palestine academics fired, or harassed, or at the very least in some sort of trouble. I remember during the debate about the ASA that opponents of BDS weren't defending Just like I noticed that during Operation Protective Edge, the slaughter in Gaza, that they weren't really defending Israel. Israel has become largely indefensible these days. It has. You can defend it on ideological or theological grounds. You can defend it in very abstract ways. But what was the one thing we heard during Protective Edge? over and over and over about all those dead Palestinian children. Whose fault was it? It was Hamas's fault. It was the Palestinians' fault, right? So they were outsourcing their responsibility to the victims of the violence. And during the ASA, nobody or very few people were contesting the basic facts at hand that Israeli institutions are deeply complicit in Israel's military occupation. Very few people were contesting those facts. Go back, look at the literature, you'll see. They were contesting it on the grounds of academic freedom. Well, fast forward about seven, eight months, I get fired. It's the exact same set of people who are lining up with the university administration in its decision to abrogate academic freedom and fire me. So we can see how academic freedom acts as a red herring. We can see how it can have a coercive, discursive function. And we see how understandings of academic freedom can be profoundly inconsistent based on the political outlook and desire of the person deploying the term. That's one reason why I'm a little bit tepid about understanding my situation with the University of Illinois simply through the prism of academic freedom. Because if you look at the way academic freedom has been deployed around conversations, in my case, and then the preceding boycott, you'll see that academic freedom has been distilled to little more than a shibboleth. This is not to say that I want to get rid of academic freedom. I think that academic freedom is deeply important. I just don't think that academic freedom is particularly productive as an approach to understanding the constellation of issues that informs my firing and the arguments that have ensued from it. I'm going to go ahead and take questions. This is really my first event after a long time. Holiday break, but last semester I was asked often, and I never mind the question, by the way, I don't. I'm not complaining, I promise. I was asked often about what to do. Graduate students are anxious. Assistant professors are anxious. Adjunct faculty are anxious. Hell, tenured professors are anxious, right? Because they know the university wins this battle, it will have set a terrible precedent for all of us. It will change both the meaning and practice of academic freedom, and it will empower people who already have a tremendous amount of power in the first place.

Speaker 2: They don't need any more.

Steven Salaita: They really don't. And I'm not very good at giving advice. I'm just kind of, hey, do whatever makes you feel comfortable kind of person. If you want to do something, do something. If you don't, you don't. Whatever. But I like to think about what we can do maybe more conceptually. than materially, and think of it as an attitude and as a commitment that influences who we are on a day-to-day basis. So what can we do? We continue to struggle. As long as indigenous peoples, who face corporate malfeasance and continued colonization, endless racism, the indignities of colonial discourses, broken treaties, misappropriated land, as long as they continue to struggle, and as long as Palestinians who face a military occupation and who face continued dispossession and who face routine slaughter of their children and other family members continue to struggle, as long as black folks who face police brutality who continue to face anti-black racism, who continue to face housing discrimination and redlining, and who continue to be subject to brutal forms of state power, continue to struggle. As long as women who face misogyny and abuse and rape culture continue to struggle. As long as the poor of the world who face the heavy, unforgiving boot of capitalism continue to struggle, so too must we. Thank you very much.