Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Board of Trustees University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign Dear colleagues on the Board of Trustees, I am writing this letter to respectfully request you to reinstate Professor Steven Salaita in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. I am not an alum and not a donor, but a humble Professor of Communication who has been touched in some of the most fundamental ways by your esteemed University. As a student-scholar of Communication, I hold the UIUC in the highest of regard as one of the oldest institutions that served as a springboard for the scholarship of Communication. Professor Wilbur Schramm, acknowledged as one of the founders of the discipline, invested his time and energy at UIUC in building some of the most vital roots of my discipline, and in articulating key principles of free speech. The Department of Communication Studies at Illinois is home to some of my most valued and productive colleagues, and has p

As more and more information on the firing of Professor Steven Salaita appears, including the letter that was sent to him, it becomes apparent that the language of civility and open dialogue was used precisely to perform violence and to foreclose opportunities for dialogue and debate. In a classic exemplar of communicative inversion, Chancellor Wise, the Board of Trustees of UIUC, and the donors who ran a backdoor campaign to pressure the Chancellor to fire Professor Salaita participated in uncivil behavior. Politeness, defined as a normative principle of speech, and as integral to codes of civility, has been constructed as the reason for the decision to fire Professor Salaita, based on the implicit argument that impolite speech silences opportunities for dialogue. Civility then, and this is emphasized in the blog post by Chancellor Wise explaining the UIUC decision, closes off discursive spaces and discursive opportunities. When Chancellor Wise states " As chancellor, it i

Chancellor Phyllis Wise has issued a blog post titled " The principles on which we stand " to UIUC colleagues defending her decision to not recommend Professor Steven Salaita for further action to the Board of Trustees concerning his appointment as Associate Professor.  The post responds to the widespread criticism of the violation of academic freedom by the UIUC decision voiced internally by Illinois academics as well as externally by academics globally . The message articulates the resolve of the University leadership to stand by the decision, noting the commitment of the University to the twin principles of academic freedom and civility, observing that the University has a vital role to play in encouraging debate and in doing so in civil and respectful ways. In this piece, I will draw upon the notion of "communicative inversion" that I have presented elsewhere to argue that (a) the way in which Chancellor Wise went about making/communicating the decision to no

In 2012, based on a promotion and tenure case in Singapore, a number of US academics, many of them who had served on the promotion and tenure review committee of a Singapore academic, had initiated a petition observing what they felt as violations of tenure and promotion processes. The petition was organized around the concept of academic freedom, powerfully suggesting the importance of upholding the principle of academic freedom in the context of Universities and the important role that can be played by faculty. A number of Singapore academics had initiated another petition requesting the University administration to reconsider their decision. Along the same time, a number of US academics had raised their voices on the case, suggesting that the decision-making processes reflected the lack of academic freedom in Singapore and had called for a boycott of Singapore universities. In response to these calls for the boycott of Singapore universities based on this one case, I had penne