Boycott UIUC pledge for scientists and engineers

The pledge:

We, the undersigned scientists and engineers, will not visit the University of Illinois at  Urbana-Champaign campus until the Steven Salaita case is equitably resolved. 

You may sign the pledge by entering a comment below, giving your name, discipline, and institutional affiliation, which is understood to be for identification purposes only and does not imply that you act on behalf of your institution. Comments are moderated and may take a few hours to appear. Please spread the word among your friends and ask them to sign as well. If you tweet the URL you may wish to use the following hashtags: #boycottUIUC and #Salaita.

The following is an open letter from Alan Sokal of the NYU Department of Physics. 

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My friend Paul Boghossian (NYU Philosophy) has drawn my attention to a shocking case involving academic freedom at the University of Illinois, which has drawn a protest from over 3000 American and international scholars.

Professor Steven Salaita resigned his tenured position at Virginia Tech on the basis of a tenured offer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 2013. (link) While the offer was awaiting routine approval by the Board of Trustees, UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise summarily revoked the offer on August 1, 2014, apparently on the basis of some of Professor Salaita's Twitter comments concerning Israeli actions in Gaza; some commentators (not all) consider the tweets to be intemperate. 

More disturbingly yet, the Chancellor attempted to justify her position by saying that

What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them. (link)

Putting aside the bizarre notion that an idea can feel "demeaned" or "abused", the Chancellor's position implies that the University of Illinois will not tolerate biologists or physicists who are "disrespectful" (in her sole judgment) of creationists or even of creationism.

Moreover, and perhaps more disturbingly, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees officially endorsed the Chancellor's decision and reasoning, using the same specious "civility" standard (link).

For two excellent legal analyses, see the article by Brian Leiter (University of Chicago, Law) in Huffington Post (link) and this article by Michael C. Dorf (Cornell University, Law)   (link).

In response to the Chancellor's and Trustees' intransigence, over 3000 scholars worldwide (link) have publicly declared that they will boycott the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until this decision is reversed.

If you wish to join them, you may sign this pledge by commenting to that effect below, giving your name, discipline, and instutional affiliation. 

        -- Alan Sokal

P.S. After an FOIA demand, Inside Higher Education published a story on August 25, 2014 revealing that Chancellor Wise had, prior to her August 1 decision, received e-mails on the issue not only from students, parents and donors, but also from the fund-raising arm of UIUC. (link)

For some comments prompted by the Salaita case but also touching on the larger issue of how administrations are nowadays riding roughshod over faculty prerogatives, see this piece by Lennard Davis of the University of Illinois at Chicago (link).

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**Please note that institutional affiliations of the signatories are for identification purposes only and do not imply that the signatories are speaking on behalf of the institution.**

Comments

[Christian h.]

Signed:

Christian Haesemeyer
Professor of Mathematics
UCLA

[Paulo Faria]

Signed:

Paulo Faria
Professor of Philosophy
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
Brazil

[Ophelia Deroy]

Signed
Ophelia Deroy
Researcher
School of Advanced Study, University of London
UK

[Brenda J Buck]

Signed
Brenda J Buck
Professor
Department of Geoscience
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

[Rob Wallace]

Signed
Robert G. Wallace
Visiting Scholar
Institute for Global Studies
University of Minnesota

[Olivier Fouquet]

Signed
Olivier Fouquet
Assistant Professor
Department of Mathematics
Université Paris-Sud

[David Steinsaltz]

Signed:
David Steinsaltz
Associate Professor of Statistics
University of Oxford

[Charles Lane]

Signed:
Charles Lane
Professor of Physics
Drexel University

[Omar M. Ramahi]

Signed:
Omar M. Ramahi
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

[Troy Shinbrot]

Troy Shinbrot
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Rutgers University
Piscataway, NJ, USA

[Laurence Romsted]

Academic freedom and free speech must be vigirously defended. Chancellor Wise and the UIUC should reverse their decision and hire Steven Salaita. Lawrence Romsted, Professor of Chemistry, Rutgers University.

[Sean Carroll]

Signed:
Sean Carroll
Senior Research Associate
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA

[Stuart A. Newman]

Signed:
Stuart A. Newman
Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy
New York Medical College
Valhalla, NY

[Pankaj Mehta]

Pankaj Mehta
Assistant Professor
Boston University
Boston MA

[Craig Larson]

Signed:
Craig Larson
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
Virginia Commonwealth University

[Paul Elbourne]

Paul Elbourne
Professor of Semantics
Department of Linguistics
Queen Mary, University of London

[Samir Okasha, Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol]

Signed

[Ivar Ekeland, FRSC]

Ivar Ekeland, FRSC
Professor of Mathematics
University of British Columbia

[Cliff Ragsdale]

Signed,
Cliff Ragsdale
Department of Neurobiology
University of Chicago

[Tony Guttmann]

Happy to sign. This is disgraceful behaviour by the Chancellor.
Tony Guttmann
Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics,
The University of Melbourne

[Victoria Scowcroft]

Victoria Scowcroft,
Postdoc,
Carnegie Institute for Science

[Sahotra Sarkar]

Signed,
Sahotra Sarkar,
Department of Integrative Biology,
University of Chicago.

[John Protevi]

I am posting this on behalf of

Sergio Caracciolo
Professor of Physics
Università di Milano
http://pcteserver.mi.infn.it/~caraccio/index.html

[Christopher Rose]

Signed,
Christopher Rose
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Rutgers University

[Tara Smith]

Signed,
Tara C Smith
Associate Professor
College of Public Health
Kent State University

[K.-Michael Aye]

Signed,
K.-Michael Aye
Earth, Planetary and Space Science
UCLA

[Sudhir Paul]

Signing in support of academic freedom and in opposition to politically motivated interference by bureaucrats.

Sudhir Paul
Professor
Department of Pathology
University of Texas Health Science Center
Houston

[Ray Gedaly]

Signed:
Ray H. Gedaly
Principal Geophysicist
Houston, Texas

[Desmond Smith, Professor, Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA]

Signed,

[Patrick Wintrode]

Signed,
Patrick L. Wintrode
Associate Professor
Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences
University of Maryland

[Roger Albin]

Signed,
Roger L. Albin, MD
Anne B. Young Collegiate Professor of Neurology,
University of Michigan

[Krishna Rao]

Signed,
A. Krishna Rao, M.D.
Clinical Lecturer
Division of Infectious Diseases
Department of Internal Medicine
University of Michigan Medical School

[Wei Ji Ma]

Signed,
Wei Ji Ma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology
New York University

[David Ozonoff]

David Ozonoff, MD, MPH
Professor of Environmental Health
Boston University School of Public Health

[Stephen Siegel]

Stephen F. Siegel
Associate Professor of Computer Science
University of Delaware

[Garrison Cottrell]

Signed,
Garrison W. Cottrell
Computer Science and Engineering
UCSD

[Gordon Williams]

Signed,
Gordon I. Williams
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Alaska Fairbanks

[Govind Menon]

The retraction of a tenure offer to Steven Sailata on the basis of "uncivil speech" infringes on his first amendment rights to free speech and violates the AAUP guidelines on freedom of speech.

Further, the violation of standard hiring practices based on a technicality, have brought disrepute to the University of Illinois.

Govind Menon,
Professor,
Division of Applied Mathematics,
Brown University

[John Protevi]

Posting on behalf of

Susan Carey
Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elizabeth W. Morss Professor of Psychology
Harvard University

[brett stevens]

Signed:

Brett Stevens
Professor of Mathematics
Carleton University

[Dave Spiegel]

Signed:
Dave Spiegel
Astrophysicist, Institute for Advanced Study

[John Protevi]

Posted on behalf of:

Frank B. Cannonito
Professor of Mathematics
University of California, Irvine

[Derek Dreyer]

Signed,

Derek Dreyer
Tenured Faculty
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)
Saarbruecken, Germany

[Peter C. Kahn]

Signed
Peter C. Kahn
Professor of Biochemistry
Department of Biochemistry & Microbiology
Rutgers Unibersity
New Brunswick, NJ

[Morton Brussel, Professor Emeritus of physics, UIUC]

I am gratified that scientists and engineers, globally, have seen fit to protest the University of Illinois' actions on the Salaita affair. Unfortunately, many here at UIUC, particularly faculty from STEM departments, wish to preserve Chancellor Wise from deserved reprimand, and so have signed sttements supporting her, while finessing/ignoring the actual reasons for Salaita's "firing".

[harold nations]

Signed
Harold L. Nations
Prof. of Astronomy
College of Southern Nevada

I think Prof. Salaita is actually a complete ass. But as long as he's a competent complete ass, the action to rescind is offer is intolerable and should be reversed.