The decision by the chancellor and Board of Trustees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to revoke a job offer to Steven Salaita because of his anti-Israel tweets prompted a wave of activism by faculty and students on my campus—protests, rallies, teach-ins, no-confidence motions, petitions, and open letters to the chancellor and president.
I joined in those actions both as an individual and as a member of the three departments in which I work: English, Asian-American studies, and the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. The university’s decision also triggered a sweeping boycott signed by thousands of scholars in the United States and around the world, who refused to participate in any lectures, conferences, or events organized at the university until Salaita was reinstated. That boycott inspired additional discipline-specific boycotts, some of which further specified that the signatories would not participate in any tenure and promotion reviews for the university.
For someone like me, who is inside the university and supports Salaita, the boycott represents an experiential impasse. I find myself in the impossible position of being the target of a boycott as a member of an institution whose actions I and many others here have challenged. Unlike faculty members outside Urbana-Champaign whose safe target is another university, our target is our own. The frequently repeated joke here—How do we boycott ourselves?—captures this problem. How do you oppose your own institution yet protect valuable parts of it at the same time?
In the 10 years I have been on this campus, we have built some of the strongest ethnic- and indigenous-studies programs in the country. I have worked on several searches, and we have hired stellar faculty of color in the departments of English and Asian-American studies.
But in less than six months, I have watched the results of my own labor and that of so many others weakened as the crisis batters vulnerable units, demoralizes the faculty, and intensifies student anxiety. Junior faculty members who accepted positions here just before the Salaita crisis are now part of a stigmatized institution, struggling to understand the implications for their careers. Should they stay or try to leave? Can they leave?
For the faculty in the American Indian-studies program, the work that went into hiring Salaita and the time and energy being spent on challenging the withdrawal of his job offer and responding to the fallout have taken an enormous toll. For scholars and students in other units, too, the costs have been high, as they have logged countless hours at meetings, rallies, and working groups and in maintaining websites and gathering signatures. This is labor that is unaccounted for and largely invisible.
Much of the work we have done this year has been the soul-killing kind—undoing. Planning and then canceling or redefining searches. Deferring program reviews. Canceling talks, conferences, and speaker series. Dealing with the irrecoverable costs of airfares and room bookings from last-minute cancellations. Taking “no” for an answer time and time again when searching for reviewers for manuscript workshops. Documenting all the rejections and cancellations.
Being inside a boycott has forced me to think hard about the nature of this political weapon, not because I oppose its use but because I have come to see the difficulty of using it with the care it requires. A boycott whose target is a university—particularly one where the faculty has challenged the decision that led to the boycott—carries serious responsibilities for its supporters.
A striking feature of the boycott against the university is the extent to which it deviates from many other boycott campaigns. It does so in three ways.
First, in most boycotts, the relationship between external and internal groups is crucial to the campaign’s efficacy. Various arrangements are set up to enable the two groups to coordinate strategies and organize actions together, and to provide support for those on the inside. Throughout, the concerns of those within the boycott help determine the choice of tactics. By contrast, the actions and narrative of this boycott have been shaped mostly by those on the outside. Outside actors have taken the lead in organizing it and defining its stakes, sometimes without sustained input from those on the inside, although often in stated symbolic solidarity with them.
Second, boycotts typically are only one tactic among many—and usually one of last resort—in a multipronged political strategy to bring about change. Boycotts usually work in tandem with economic sanctions and protests that reinforce the boycott’s effects. In this case, however, the boycott has been the primary weapon for pressuring the university to reconsider its decision and thus has been wielded with unusual punitive force and inflexibility. The boycott is a blunt instrument to begin with, but when it is used as the primary means to effect change, it is liable to be used heavy-handedly.
That seems to account for some of the escalation of the various boycott statements. While signatories of some refuse to participate in any lectures, conferences, or other events on campus, signatories of other statements extend the boycott to any form of reviewing activity and assistance with promotion and tenure cases. This escalation in the scope of the boycott shows the difficulty of bringing about change solely through this method.
Third, usually the media for organizing a boycott and disseminating information about it are varied, including print, radio, TV, email, texts, and social media. Those work together with face-to-face meetings, group sessions, and marches. A notable feature of this boycott has been the pivotal role played by the Internet in organizing and publicizing it and producing its narrative.
But the dominance of social media and its capacity to shift discursive control to those on the outside has contributed to the erasure, distortion, or selective amplification of voices on the inside. New media create a semblance of inside information by providing real-time access to publicized events. They enable remote participants to produce narratives of the boycott that depend heavily on online public statements and texts that are themselves selective transcriptions of events taking place on the ground. But those statements tend to be skewed toward authority figures, people with an established online presence, and groups with political capital.
It is crucial, then, that programs, faculty members, and students directly affected by the boycott and bearing its costs regain control over its discourse. We need to create venues for face-to-face deliberation and exchange and document their impact by assembling an archive of texts, narratives, and strategies that highlight our work and our concerns. These actions will not only further our own understanding of the situation but also be a resource for others engaged in similar struggles.
Six months into the boycott, with no clear end in sight, how will we reckon with and make visible the fatigue, silencing, invisibility, demoralization, and isolation that seep into our daily lives? What strategies will allow us to keep up exchanges with outside faculty members, maintain the vitality of units and programs that have borne the brunt of the effects of the boycott, and support the development of our faculty and students while the boycott continues?
The decision of some signatories not to participate in tenure and promotion reviews or to refrain from helping in workshops for junior professors and graduate students does little good and much harm to the most vulnerable groups in our campus community, many of whom have risked a great deal themselves in opposing the administration’s decision. Such mentoring or development support cannot be indefinitely deferred but must be available when it is needed at critical moments in a person’s career. This year I have tried unsuccessfully to find scholars willing to participate in manuscript workshops for three junior faculty members, all people of color.
Finally, while the primary focus in the last few months has been on the negative actions of the boycott—what outsiders will not do for the university or its faculty and students—affirmative actions, or what outsiders will do for those inside, have been few or largely symbolic.
It has become too easy to support the boycott from the outside—to share, “like,” and forward one’s political commitments; to update oneself through the musings of star boycott bloggers; and to “give up” invitations that one could hypothetically receive from the university. Meanwhile, on the inside, the costs are steep and mounting.
Many colleagues outside the university have posted their rejections of university invitations on their Facebook pages, blogs, or websites, or have written open letters to the chancellor condemning the university’s actions. These actions are invaluable in exerting pressure on the university. But despite a few calls to invite Urbana-Champaign faculty and students to their campuses to counter the debilitating isolation those on the inside are facing, few have followed through on those proposals.
Perhaps colleagues could post with as much passion on their Facebook pages the affirming actions they have taken to support the boycott—listing the graduate students they have hired from our university, or the professors they have invited, or the collaborations they have undertaken with groups here.
Programs at other campuses could also create partnerships with ours in American Indian studies or other units that have been disproportionately hurt by the boycott, so that they could jointly sponsor off-campus events related to the injustices that are the focus of the boycott.
Over the last six months, dozens of universities have organized boycott-inspired panels on Palestine, academic freedom, and civility. Glaringly absent from those conversations are our professors in American Indian studies who hired Salaita, and who have led the battle for academic freedom on our campus. Similarly, many professional organizations have organized panels on academic freedom without including any of our faculty on them. Thus, even important events dedicated to the injustices related to the boycott have enacted their own systematic erasures.
We need to put in place affirmative dimensions of this boycott. Only then can we engage the complex challenges of boycotting a university that many of us are working hard to change from within.
