‘Ousted’ From Academe, Steven Salaita Says He’s Driving a School Bus to Make Ends Meet

Armando L. Sanchez, Chicago Tribune/MCT via Getty Images

Steven G. Salaita, whose tenured-faculty appointment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was withdrawn nearly five years ago over his harsh criticisms of Israel, has found a new job outside the ivory tower. He’s a school-bus driver.

Salaita, formerly a professor of English at Virginia Tech, was going to assume a new post at Illinois in the fall of 2014. But a string of tweets that he posted about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drew considerable outrage. Illinois trustees denied him the offer. And news of Salaita’s dismissal, and the extensive litigation that followed, made him a polarizing crusader for academic freedom.

Let’s cut to the chase:

If you’re defending #Israel right now you’re an awful human being.

— Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 9, 2014

I repeat: if you’re defending #Israel right now, then “hopelessly brainwashed” is your best prognosis.#Gaza #FreePalestine

— Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 20, 2014

This is not a conflict between #Israel and “Hamas.”

It’s a struggle by an Indigenous people against a colonial power.#Gaza #FreePalestine

— Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 17, 2014

Salaita then took a position at the American University of Beirut, from which he was “ousted,” he says, due to pressure from U.S. senators and university donors alike. (Neither Salaita nor the university immediately responded to requests for comment, but in 2016 the university denied accusations that Salaita had been purposefully kept from being appointed to a new post as director of its Center for American Studies and Research. Eventually the University of Illinois agreed to pay Salaita a $600,000 settlement and cover his legal fees.)

A door had slammed shut on academe, a career that had once “felt manifest,” Salaita wrote in a recent essay, “An Honest Living,” posted on his personal website. “I went to college at 17 knowing I would never leave.” Twenty-one years later, he was blocked from the Illinois position.

Salaita now spends his workday transporting children to and from school in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He performs safety checks, dozes in the driver’s seat during breaks, and deposits “mini-hordes of cantankerous pupils into bustling subdivisions,” he wrote.

The life of a school-bus driver is “surprisingly complex,” Salaita wrote. “We’re supposed to facilitate access to education without considering its function in the systems that inform our wages.”

Salaita doesn’t see himself as an academic anymore. “I no longer profess and therefore no longer assume the burden of professorial expectations,” he wrote. “No more civility or nuance or dispassion or objectivity or whatever term they’re using these days to impel obedience.”

The exodus from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage has been mired in hardships, as well as some new freedoms.

“There’s something profoundly liberating about leaving academe,” he wrote. You no longer have to care “about fashionable thinkers, network at the planet’s most boring parties, or quantify self-worth for scurrilous committees.” The industry’s culture of “social control” is “insidious and pervasive,” he wrote.

Still, after months without work, Salaita said his family had suffered financially. And he didn’t put himself through so much schooling to land a job that requires no college, he wrote.

“Then again,” he said, “neither did I attend so many years of college in order to be disabused of the notion that education is noble.”

Clarification (2/20/2016, 9:38 a.m.): A previous version of this article stated that “the university” had eventually paid Salaita a $600,000 settlement. The University of Illinois, not the American University of Beirut, paid the settlement. The article has been corrected.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.