You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
The University of Illinois Board of Trustees issued a statement Thursday that it will not reconsider its decision to block the hiring of Steven Salaita to a tenured faculty position teaching American Indian studies. The statement said that news accounts of a recent report of a faculty panel -- which found many irregularities in the way Salaita's hiring was blocked, and said that some of them raise academic freedom issues -- "may have given the mistaken impression that the decision regarding Dr. Salaita might be reconsidered. It will not." Salaita's hiring was blocked last year -- after proceeding so far that his courses were announced and he quit his prior job -- amid concerns about the tone of his anti-Israel comments on Twitter.
The board statement said: "Here, the decision concerning Dr. Salaita was not reached hastily. Nor was it the result of external pressures. The decision did not present a 'new approach' to the consideration of proposed faculty appointments. It represented the careful exercise of each board member’s fiduciary duty and a balancing of all of the interests of the University of Illinois. In the end, this is a responsibility that cannot be delegated nor abdicated."
