Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Increasingly as we have witnessed across the US and in spaces around the globe, communication on new and social media has been targeted by power structures as an object of censorship. Through various human resource decisions, organizational policies, as well as national level policies, those in positions of power have sought to silence discourse on social and new media. Censorship in most of these instances is performed through top-down human resource decisions which are framed as personnel decisions. In almost all these instances, the decision is not informed by the social scientific study of communication. Instead, the decisions are mostly guided by donor pressure, foundation staff, human resource staff, and people who have been hired to perform management functions within these organizations. Rather, in most of these instances, the attempt to silence discourse is justified by an apparent commitment on behalf of these power structures to some invisible standard of civility. I sa...

The Board of Trustees at Illinois voted 8-to-1 to dehire Professor Steven Salaita. Recordings of the meeting and interviews with reporters depict the smugness with which the Chancellor and the Board responded at the meeting and in response to questions about the decision. These leaders had an opportunity to perform the meeting with civility, a concept they have offered as a core pillar of commitment for the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. They had the opportunity to demonstrate the ethic of care and openness to dialogue that the idea of civility depicts. They had an opportunity to foster a space for humility and acceptance of diverse worldviews and ways of being, commitments that the Chancellor has so often used as a branding strategy in the last few months. They had an opportunity to foster a space that opens up to diverse interpretations and worldviews. Most of all, the Trustees had an opportunity to correct their past actions clouded in opaque deci...

That day in the simmering cloud of dust. When the images of the crumbling towers inundated your TV screens. I sat in silence, sharing your pain and feeling ashamed of my brownness. That day when you looked at me with the assumptions, you wondered, do I come from the Middle East? You tried to decipher my accent. My brown body evoking your suspicion. That day when you walked in anger and declared your Operation Freedom to hunt down the terror. At home and abroad My brown body became marked once more. That day How could I forget. When you declared your commitment to make a hole in the place of Afghanistan. I shivered in pain knowing that many brown bodies like mine, Will pay the price.

If there is one element in the Salaita affair that is most striking, it is the use of diversity as a rationale for the firing of Professor Salaita. Chancellor Wise noted this in her blog post and this has been widely shared by those that support the firing: it is not the content of Professor Salaita's speech but the style of his twitter posts which called for strict action. His style, according to the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees, was uninviting of civil dialogue. The question that becomes relevant here is the following: What is civil communication? What are the criteria that are applied in the evaluation of the civility of a speech act? In appealing to diversity as the reason behind the firing, the Chancellor privileges a narrowly construed definition of diversity that serves the White mainstream and leaves its powers intact. The formulation of an openness to diversity as the underlying reason for firing Professor Salaita is reflective of a power structure that go...

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...