Friends, its time to step up to the plate financially for Steven Salaitas legal case and personal situation. Please read of his case and financial situation here, and please do donate to his cause, and please share this information. I just donated. Here are my reasons: I am anxious to see Steven supported emotionally, financially and in any other way he and his family need so that they have they fortitude to see this case through to the bitter end. In so doing, I know he will be calling our academic institutions over the carpet for this grotesque injustice and help safeguard all of us from this danger to our fundamental rights as academics and Americans generally who care about the right to engage constitutionally protected speech with reasonable protections. I donated because my country, the US, is in need of major reform at a time where non-corporate power seems to be dwindling every year. In this context academia is one of the only spaces left for inculcating change, and this space is very clearly now threatened. If not now, when? This is the moment. Also sharing some of Corey Robins thoughts which resonated with me: What depresses me is how little power we seem to have. With many of you, Ive fought a lot of these battles around Israel/Palestine and academic freedom; weve always won. But on this one, as I said in a post last week, we seem to lack the real kind of institutional power and counterweight that we need. And while I appreciate the excellent analysis everyone has offered of Wises statement today, tonight all that brilliance feels like just one more symptom of our powerlessness. I sometimes worry that academics really believe that in situations like these, the better argument wins. Or that the better argument is what matters. We suffer terribly for that kind of blindness. Its time we developed genuine modes of power that can help us overcome it and really fight back. Second, it looks like there is going to be a legal battle after all, and Steven is going to need our financial help. As the post I link to in the comments says, Salaita now has no job nor does his wife who quit her job in Virginia to support the family’s move, no personal home to live in, and no health insurance for their family, including their two year-old son. Again, Ill post on this later, but I hope folks are prepared to donate some money. The university has time and money; Steven has neither. We can at least help him out with money. Third, for all the depressing notes of this post, despondency really isnt an option. Certainly not for Steven, and really not for the rest of us. This is all of our fight. So while there will inevitably be a tendency to ask why did we do this (the assumption of that past tense being that its all over), the fact is, we have a lot more to do. We have close to 3000 scholars boycotting UI (unprecedented, Id say!) We have individual scholars already canceling their lectures at UI. We have conferences being canceled there. The university is banking on the idea that with this statement, they will put this issue to rest because everyone will feel demoralized. That can only be true if we oblige them with our despair. So lets not.
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 04:12:40 +0000
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