The Salaita Case

Steven Salaita had already quit his job.

He was a tenured associate professor at Virginia Tech when the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offered him a tenured position in American Indian Studies. He accepted, the appointment was signed, and the remaining board approval was the sort of formality nobody worries about. So he resigned his tenured post and prepared to move his family to Illinois.

Then, in August 2014, the chancellor told him his appointment would not be forwarded to the board.

What he wrote

During July and August of 2014, while Israel’s seven-week assault on Gaza was underway, Salaita posted a series of furious tweets from his personal account about the killing of Palestinian civilians and children.

They were not measured. One read: “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?”

That tweet is quoted here in full because the reader cannot evaluate the case without it. The university’s stated reason for the revocation was civility. It argued that the tweets showed he would create an uncivil classroom, and that this was a judgment about temperament rather than viewpoint. Anyone assessing whether that was a real concern or a pretext needs to see what was actually said.

What is not in dispute is what arrived in the meantime. The university was inundated with letters and emails from students, parents, alumni and donors demanding that the appointment be killed.

The emails

This is the part that separates the Salaita case from the many campus disputes that come down to competing characterizations.

After the revocation, public records requests went in for the university’s internal communications. What emerged was that Chancellor Phyllis Wise and other administrators had conducted university business about Salaita’s removal on personal email accounts, which had the effect of keeping those messages outside the reach of freedom of information law.

When the communications were eventually disclosed, they showed major donors pressuring the university over the appointment, and in at least one instance explicitly linking continued financial support to Salaita’s removal.

In August 2015, Wise resigned as chancellor amid the fallout from the concealed emails.

What the court and the profession said

Salaita sued, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the firm Loevy & Loevy, for breach of contract and violation of his First Amendment rights.

In August 2015 a federal judge ruled for him on both central questions: the university had entered into a binding contract, and his tweets were protected speech. That removed the university’s two principal defenses at once.

That November the Board of Trustees voted 9 to 1 to settle for $875,000, of which $600,000 went to Salaita and about $275,000 to his lawyers. The university admitted no wrongdoing. Salaita agreed not to be hired and to drop his claims. “This settlement is a vindication for me,” he said, “but more importantly, it is a victory for academic freedom and the First Amendment.”

Separately, the American Association of University Professors investigated and formally censured the university, finding its conduct inimical to academic freedom and due process. AAUP censure is uncommon and consequential: it places an institution on a public list, and it makes faculty recruitment harder until it is lifted.

The part that cuts the other way

An honest account has to include this.

One trustee, Timothy Koritz, voted against the settlement and said he believed the decision not to hire Salaita had been correct. Defenders of the university argued then and argue now that the tweets fell outside professional norms, and that an institution is entitled to weigh a prospective colleague’s demonstrated temperament when it hires.

That argument is not absurd, and the civility question is genuinely contestable in a way this article does not pretend to settle. What the record establishes is narrower: whatever the merits of the civility rationale, the documents show donors applying financial pressure for his removal, and administrators moving that discussion onto private email.

Salaita won the money and the ruling. He did not get an academic career back, and eventually left the profession.

Why it matters

Faculty and students at American institutions have faced investigations, non-renewals, disinvitations and disciplinary proceedings connected to criticism of Israel, and the volume of such cases rose sharply after 2023. Most of them are difficult to document conclusively, because each side has a plausible account and the internal records stay internal.

Salaita’s case is the one where the records came out.

A federal court found a binding contract and protected speech. The profession’s own governing body issued a censure. The university paid close to a million dollars. A chancellor resigned amid revelations that the communications about the decision had been kept off official systems. And those communications showed donors tying money to the outcome.

That does not prove every disputed case is suppression. It proves that in one fully documented instance, a major public university revoked a tenured appointment under donor financial pressure aimed at protected political speech about Israel, and then handled the evidence in a way that cost its chancellor her job.

Sources

• Center for Constitutional Rights, “Settlement Reached in Case of Professor Fired for ‘Uncivil’ Tweets,” November 12, 2015
• Loevy & Loevy, case summary of the University of Illinois litigation, documenting the federal ruling on contract and First Amendment grounds
• Inside Higher Ed, “U of Illinois Settles With Professor Unhired for Controversial Comments on Twitter,” November 13, 2015
• Associated Press reporting on the 9-1 trustee vote and the Koritz dissent
• American Association of University Professors, Academe, on the Salaita case and the censure of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Times of Israel, “Prof Who Lost Job Offer Over Anti-Israel Tweets Wins $600K Settlement,” November 17, 2015
• Contemporaneous reporting on Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s August 2015 resignation and the personal-email disclosures