This month has brought a flurry of events in the ongoing case of Steven Salaita’s hire-firing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. First, on August 6, Federal Judge Harry D. Leinenweber, allowed Salaita’s civil suit against UIUC to go forward, effectively ruling that Salaita had, indeed, been hired by UIUC. To the satisfaction of most of us who had been following the case, Leinenweber correctly noted that ” [i]f the Court accepted the University’s argument, the entire American academic hiring process as it now operates would cease to exist.” That very day, UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise, who had publicly initiated Read more