Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise - Sacked Lecturer Steven Salaita for Supporting the Palestinians - Now She's Resigned!

I’ve written before about Steven Salaita, who was fired by Illinois University and its Chancellor Phyllis Wise for tweeting messages in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.  His messages weren’t very civil and that was used as an excuse to terminate his contract.

Steven Salaita had given up a previous lectureship to take a position at Illinois but the University pretended that he hadn’t yet been hired.  Well a judge last week held that was untenable.

And then Phyllis Wise resigned.  She had been hiding e-mails on her own personal account and deleting them and advising others to hid emails.  All of which is illegal under the Freedom of Information Act once litigation starts.  She has possibly committed criminal acts, hence the resignation.

She agreed a $400,000 pay off and then resigned but the Trustees overturned the agreement refusing her resignation because it preferred to dismiss her.  It has now agreed to accept a second resignation but there will be no pay off.

Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada has written extensively on what has been happening and the 2 articles below are by him.

Tony Greenstein

Is Univ. of Illinois scapegoating Phyllis Wise to maintain Salaita coverup?

Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 12 August 2015

New Administration

Chancellor Phyllis Wise during the University of Illinois Homecoming Parade, 24 October 2014. (via Facebook)

Is the University of Illinois telling the truth about when it knew that some of its top officials were sending – and deleting – emails from private accounts to evade disclosure of their discussions of controversial matters including the firing of Steven Salaita?

Emails released last week raise serious questions about the university’s official story.

The university’s board of trustees is voting today on whether to approve a $400,000 bonus for Phyllis Wise who resigned on 6 August as chancellor, the top official of its flagship Urbana-Champaign campus.

Wise is a key figure in the firing of Salaita over his tweets critical of Israel.

What’s the story?

The day after Wise announced her resignation, the university issued a press release which begins:
The University of Illinois became aware in late April that certain members of the Urbana-Champaign campus administration and other campus employees might have used personal email accounts for University-related communications, and that those emails may not have been made available to those at the University responsible for responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The university then released more than 1,000 pages of the previously undisclosed emails about three controversial matters: Wise’s attempts to set up a college of medicine, the disqualification of James Kilgore from teaching contracts due to his criminal record and the employment of Steven Salaita.
But at least one of the emails (below) suggests that the university knew, or should have known, about the secret email ring months earlier.

The email, dated 16 December 2014, was sent from Chancellor Wise’s personal email account to Scott Rice, the university’s chief legal counsel.

In the email, Wise forwards talking points prepared by her son Andrew Wise, a Washington, DC, attorney, about the Salaita affair.

It is not clear whether Wise sent it to Rice’s official work email or to a private account.
What it suggests is that Rice, the university’s top lawyer, knew that Wise was using her personal email account.

Wise’s son

Moreover, as Andrew Scheinman points out at his Samizdat-Startup blog, the email Phyllis Wise sent to Scott Rice from her personal account “is clearly about university business – in fact, sensitive business that should NEVER have been shared by Wise with her son, Andrew.”

Scheinman adds that Rice, as university counsel, “should have immediately flagged [this] for discussion with Wise.”

According to Scheinman, who is himself an attorney, Phyllis Wise’s email ought to have raised alarms for Rice because “disclosure of information that may be otherwise claimed as exempt from discovery because it is shared internally LOSES that claim if sent to third parties, as Andrew Wise clearly was.”

What this means is that by sharing internal discussions about the Salaita case with her son, Wise could inadvertently end up helping Salaita make his case in court.

Questions

I have put these questions to the university spokesperson’s office:

·         Why is there a discrepancy between the university’s statement that it only learned of the use of private emails in April 2015 and the fact that university counsel Scott Rice apparently knew, or should have known, the previous December?

·         Did Scott Rice use a personal email address to conduct university business?

·         Was Scott Rice a subject of the “ethics inquiry” the university says it conducted into the use of personal emails?

The university does not have a good record of responding to my inquiries, but if they do on this occasion I will update this post.

Scapegoat

The bigger picture is this: while Wise certainly deserves all the blame she is getting for her handling of Salaita and other matters, she is not the only person responsible.

Indeed the talking points prepared by Andrew Wise seem aimed at protecting his mother from sole blame for Salaita’s firing and casting the primary responsibility on then board of trustees chair Christopher Kennedy.

In the pungent view of Scheinman, Wise is being “thrown under the bus as a way of preventing the flipping over of the rock on the rats-nest of enablement that surrounded her.”

The university must not be allowed to just shuffle her out of the door – with or without her outrageous bonus – and carry on business as usual.

Update

The executive committee of the University of Illinois’ board of trustees voted unanimously to reject Wise’s resignation along with the $400,000 bonus. Instead, the university will initiate dismissal proceedings against her. Barbara Wilson, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been named as her temporary successor.

Illinois chancellor who fired Salaita accused of serial self-plagiarism

Did Phyllis Wise violate university’s “criminal”warning over Salaita emails?

Ali Abunimah

University of Illinois employees were formally warned by lawyers last September that they could face civil and criminal penalties for failing to preserve records related to the Steven Salaita case, The Electronic Intifada can reveal.

Last week, the university acknowledged that senior officials, including Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis Wise, had over the past year used private email addresses in an attempt to conceal their communications about the August 2014 decision to fire Salaita after he posted tweets critical of Israel.

Wise resigned suddenly on 6 August under a growing cloud over her conduct. The next day, the university released more than 1,000 pages of the previously hidden emails concerning the Salaita matter and other controversial university business.

As The Electronic Intifada reported, the emails indicate that Wise and others believed that using private addresses and other practices would allow their communications to evade disclosure.

Legal hold

In an 18 September 2014 email related to Salaita, Chancellor Wise wrote from her private account that university spokesperson Robin Kaler “has warned me and others not to use email since we are now in litigation phase. We are doing virtually nothing over our Illinois email addresses. I am even being careful with this email address and deleting after sending.”

The very next day, university employees connected with the Salaita matter, undoubtedly including Wise and others participating in the secret email exchanges, received a warning called a legal hold from the university’s external law firm Perkins Coie.

The Electronic Intifada has obtained a copy of the document, which is published in full below.
A legal hold is standard practice any time litigation is expected and its existence indicates that the outside counsel were being diligent.

Headlined in capitals, “Important legal notice for your immediate attention,” it warns that “Failure to comply with this Notice could subject you and the University to civil and criminal penalties.”
The document reveals that Salaita’s lawyers informed the university’s counsel on 16 September 2014 of their intention to file a lawsuit.

The detailed four-page memo warns emphatically: “Under no circumstances should you delete potentially relevant emails from your computer or from the network server.”

The hold applies to “any documents you create or receive at any time prior to receiving notice that the legal hold has been terminated.”

It includes among other things:

• Documents related to or in any manner discussing Steven G. Salaita;
• Documents related to statements on social media by Dr. Salaita in 2014, including any materials provided to the University by any third party commenting on any such statements by Dr. Salaita;
• Documents relating to the decision not to recommend Dr. Salaita to the Board of Trustees for approval.

It also states that “we are required to preserve relevant documents wherever they are kept,” including “on your work and home computers” and “in your email account (including your personal email account, if you have sent or received relevant documents using that account).”

When did Wise know?

Wise’s email apparently admitting that she had deleted messages related to Salaita was sent one day before the hold notice went out, but after the university had been formally notified by Salaita’s lawyers of possible litigation.

The same email indicates that Wise herself had already been informed that “we are now in litigation phase.”

But it would be bizarre if Wise, the Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) campus’ top executive, only learned of the imminent litigation from the university’s spokesperson rather than being told directly by the lawyers as soon as they knew.

Wise’s official schedule, obtained by Urbana attorney Andrew Scheinman under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), shows that Wise was in Urbana-Champaign all day on 16 September 2014. (On 17 September she traveled to Chicago to catch a flight to Portland, Oregon, for a meeting of the board of Nike Corporation. In 2011, Wise was paid $237,000 for sitting on Nike’s board.)

Moreover, Wise would surely have been aware that a week earlier, on 9 September 2014, Salaita held a widely covered press conference at the University YMCA in Champaign where his attorneys announced his intention to sue.

There is no doubt that if Wise, or others, continued to conceal or destroy evidence after the hold was officially imposed, it could have serious adverse consequences for the university’s legal defense against Salaita’s ongoing lawsuit over his firing.

But according to Scheinman, who runs the investigative online publication Samizdat-Startups, Wise was likely advised of her duty to preserve evidence even earlier.

He notes that soon after a 24 July 2014 board meeting at which Salaita was discussed, the name of Scott Rice, the university’s in-house counsel, begins appearing in Salaita-related emails previously released to him under FOIA. Everything in the emails is redacted except for Rice’s name.

“This kind of redaction – nothing but the attorney’s name – indicates UIUC is likely claiming attorney client privilege, which it would only do if they were discussing, e.g., a litigation matter such as likely litigation by Salaita,” Scheinman told The Electronic Intifada.

The fact that Wise and other officials expected, or should have expected, litigation long before the formal legal hold was sent out suggests they already had a legal duty to preserve evidence during a period when Wise admitted to deleting emails.

“I would think Rice would have taken great pains to point out to Wise early on his – Rice’s – duty to UIUC – his client – to prevent any UIUC employees including Wise from destroying documents,” Scheinman said.

“My conclusion is that Wise was likely advised of possible or likely litigation as early as 25 July 2014,” Scheinman added.

Indeed Wise herself admits to anticipating a lawsuit as early as 31 July 2014, the day before she sent a letter to Salaita telling him that his job had been rescinded.

“It will be the beginning of a lawsuit, I am sure I will be deposed no matter who sends the letter,”

Wise predicted in an email to Provost Ilesanmi Adesida. “You may need to get ready as well.”

Windfall for Wise

On Wednesday, the board of trustees of the University of Illinois will vote on whether to approve Wise’s golden parachute, a “negotiated” windfall of $400,000.

Though she will give up her $549,000 chancellor’s salary, Wise will also get a faculty appointment that will still pay her $300,000 a year.

In an editorial, The Chicago Tribune criticized the massive sum promised to Wise, coming as it does after a “parade of scandals and the attempts to evade not only public scrutiny but state law through unsavory secrecy.”

In a twist of irony, former board chair Christopher Kennedy, another key figure in Salaita’s firing, also slammed the payment to Wise.

“I wouldn’t give someone $400,000 to leave peaceably if they [did what she did],” Kennedy told the Tribune.

On Tuesday afternoon, the administration of Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner called on the university to reject the $400,000 payment to Wise.

According to the Tribune, the board’s three-member executive committee – Chair Edward McMillan and members James Montgomery and Karen Hasara – will take the decision on behalf of the board.

It should be recalled that Montgomery was the only trustee to vote in favor of Salaita’s appointment in September last year.

Denying the History of Irish Racism in the US - Prof. Richard Jensen of Illinois University

Re-writing History from the Perspective of the Powerful - Junking a Junk Historian

Historians of the Right have an important role in seeking to justify oppression past whilst rehabilitating those who were in power.  This means doing their best to discredit, where possible, what they consider myths of oppression.

In this case Richard J. Jensen of Illinois University, posited as fact the idea that ‘no Irish need apply’ signs were merely a myth that the bog Irish used to guilt-trip other Americans.  Their victimisation and discrimination had been just a matter of self-indulgent fantasy and not based in fact.  It took a 14 year old girl to junk the junk historian.

His article "No Irish Need Apply":  A Myth of Victimization was printed in the Journal of Social History 36.2 (2002) 405-429 and he can be contacted at RJensen@uic.edu.

In fact through undertaking a little research myself it appears that other people did uncover evidence that Jensen's poorly researched article was just that.  For example 'No Irish Need Apply' by Jarlath MacNamara on May 27, 2013

Tony Greenstein 

New York Times 10.5.1859

The Teen Who Exposed a Professor's Myth

The Internet has been buzzing about how discrimination against the Irish was a myth. All it took was a high schooler to prove them wrong.

Rebecca Fried had no intention of preserving the record of a persecuted people whose strife was ready to be permanently written off in the eyes of history as exaggerated, imagined, or even invented.

That's because Rebecca was too busy trying to get through the 8th grade.

the ubiquitous signs that Jensen couldn't find

In 2002, University of Illinois-Chicago history professor Richard J. Jensen printed “No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization.” His abstract begins:

“Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming ‘Help Wanted—No Irish Need Apply!’ No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent.”

Ohio Democrat 10.5.1883

In short, those famous “No Irish Need Apply” signs—ones that proved Irish Americans faced explicit job discrimination in the 19th and 20th centuries? Professor Jensen came to the blockbuster conclusion that they never existed.

NYT 10.5.1859

The theory picked up traction over the last decade, but seemed to reach an unexpected fever pitch in the last few months. Explainer websites this year used it to highlight popular myths of persecution complexes that are, as Vox put it, “stand-ins for an entire narrative about how immigrants are treated in America.” That’s from the lede of an article printed in March called “‘No Irish Need Apply’: the fake sign at the heart of a real movement.”

Here, of course, is the problem: After only couple of hours Googling it, Rebecca, a 14-year-old, had found out these signs had, in fact, existed all along. Not only in newspaper listings—in which they appeared in droves—but, after further research, in shop windows, too.

New York Times

The Irish were persecuted in the American job market—and precisely in the overt, literally written-down way that was always believed.

All of this would have been written off as a myth if it weren’t for Rebecca Fried, a rising high school freshman—who one of the preeminent scholars on the Irish diaspora in the United States now calls a “hero” and “quite extraordinary”—and who simply couldn’t believe it, either.

Yorkville enquirer March 08, 1877

Rebecca never set out to prove the thesis wrong. She was just interested in an article her dad brought home from work one day.

“Now and then I bring home stuff for the kids to read if I think they will find it interesting or will convey some lesson,” says Michael Fried, Rebecca’s father. “Half the time they don’t read them at all. Sometimes they’ll read something if I suggest it. Nothing has ever come of any of these things other than this one.”

Rebecca wasn’t even trying to disprove her dad—let alone an academic at the University of Illiniois-Chicago. She just figured she’d Google the words and see what came up over 100 years ago.

"Just for the fun of it, I started to run a few quick searches on an online newspaper database that I found on Google,” she says. “I was really surprised when I started finding examples of NINA ads in old 19th-century newspapers pretty quickly.”

So she started collecting a handful of examples, then dozens, then more. She went to as many newspaper databases as she could. Then she thought, somebody had to have done this before, right?

“I didn’t see anything right away. This led me to wonder if it might be worth writing up in some form,” she says. “I showed my dad right away when I started finding these NINA ads. We just didn’t know whether this was already widely known and, if it wasn’t, whether it would be viewed as a topic worth considering for publication.”

Enter Kerby Miller, a newly retired history professor from the University of Missouri. He’s written everything from Guggenheim-funded books about the 18th-century Irish to the PBS documentary Out of Ireland with Paul Wagner. In 1986, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for history.

“It was out of the blue on May 1st, May Day—which is sort of fortuitous, now that I think about it,” says Miller. May Day is International Workers' Day, which celebrates laborers and worldwide.

They wanted to know if they were missing something. They weren’t.

In fact, for years, Miller wanted to know why everyone else was missing the opposite.

“From the first, my responses to Jensen’s claims had been strongly negative, as were those of a few other scholars, but, for various reasons, most historians, social scientists, journalists, et cetera accepted or even embraced Jensen’s arguments,” says Miller.

Miller says it all makes sense when you consider the parallels between Jensen’s arguments and the tone of anti-Irish propaganda after the Irish Civil War.

“This was a period dominated in Irish writing by those who collectively came to be known as ‘revisionists.’ What they did was, in some cases, take every traditional Irish Catholic belief concerning British Colonialists—some of which were heroic, even—and turn them upside down,” says Miller. “The British and Britain’s supporters were not to be seen as oppressors. They were now to be considered those taking down Irish Catholic oppression.”

Miller says it applies to all of Irish history, but recent history as well—even events and acts of persecution that the Irish lived through themselves.

“A lot of people were getting sick of this, but were afraid to speak out. They wanted to say it’s bullshit, but you would be regarded as an uncouth barbarian or an IRA sympathizer,” says Miller.  “The narrative was that, ‘They should stop their whining! They weren’t victims! They weren’t oppressed!’”

He’d been trying to bat down the conclusions in Jensen’s paper for 13 years. Miller says he knew something was fishy from the outset. First of all, he’d seen the advertisements years ago—well before something like Google Scholar made them easy to search for—as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1970s. But something else tipped him off.

“Even more suspicious is that it seemed to fit into a political or ideological framework, in addition to his own writing, which was obviously polemically bent,” he says.

This is, after all, how the abstract in Jensen’s paper ends:

“Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.”

Miller says he wrote to Jensen at one point to contest it.

“Jensen’s email response to my criticisms was that they were to be expected because I was an Irish-American and a Catholic,” says Miller.

“In fact, as I responded to him, I am neither.”

Miller says he realized this might be an unwinnable fight when he went to New Zealand to present some work and he was bombarded with questions on why he didn’t believe Jensen. One man asked who in his family was Irish Catholic. Miller kindly reminded the questioner that the answer is no one—until he remembered his wife is.

“They said, ‘That’s gotta be it!’ That’s why I’m sympathetic to these Irish rebel terrorist scum!” he says, laughing.

“I hadn’t realized how extraordinarily dominant Jensen’s argument had become. I don’t know if that says something about the hierarchy of power in academia, or the others who accepted it because they bought into this revisionist interpretation.”

He wasn’t alone. Miller could name other scholars who questioned Jensen’s motives. He even tried to talk some of them into writing about it.

“They knew from their own research—or strongly suspected—that Jensen’s arguments were wrong or fallacious,” he says. “They were just too busy [to refute it], or preferred not to.”

Then May Day came.

“We didn’t know who to contact, but we saw that Professor Jensen’s article cited Professor Miller as someone who had erroneously believed in NINA, so we thought he might be a good person to try,” says Rebecca. “And he was obviously an expert in this area.”

Miller opened up Rebecca’s thesis. He quickly realized all of the academics too busy to take on Jensen couldn’t have done it better than a 14-year-old.

“She didn’t need any help from me on what she did,” he says. “I’d be surprised if she changed a single word.”

Rebecca says Miller then helped her and her father walk through what a scholarly article should look like. After all, no one in Rebecca’s family is an academic. Her parents are lawyers, and a scholarly article is not a requirement to get out of the 8th grade.

“I don’t want people to think she did this because she got expert advice,” he says. “[Rebecca and Michael] truly deserve all of the credit.”

Then, on Independence Day—fortuitous again—it became official: Rebecca printed “No Irish Need Deny: Evidence for the Historicity of NINA Restrictions in Advertisements and Signs” in the Oxford Journal of Social History.

“The article concludes that Jensen’s thesis about the highly limited extent of NINA postings requires revision, and that the earlier view of historians generally accepting the widespread reality of the NINA phenomenon is better supported by the currently available evidence,” Rebecca writes in her abstract.

When a story was written about the findings on the Irish website IrishCentral.com, Jensen congratulated Rebecca for her scholarship in the comments section, but took issue with her conclusion.

“I’m the PhD who wrote the original article. I’m delighted a high school student worked so hard and wrote so well,” he writes. “No, she did not claim to find a single window sign anywhere in the USA.”

But Rebecca’s article does include that information. She made it clear in a reply.

“I do have to say that the article does in fact list a number of posted physical NINA signs, not just newspaper ads. Pages 6-7 catalogue a number of the signs,” she wrote.

Jensen retorted with a numerical list of all of the “No Irish Need Apply” signs he encountered in her essay—ending with, “That’s very rare. In Chicago, only 3 ads in over 50 years. How rare can you get?”

Then, ever politely, Fried dropped the hammer.

“Thanks again for the response. This discussion is really fun for me, and I appreciate the opportunity to have it,” she wrote. “Let me make one last point and then I promise I will shut up and give you the last word if you want it. You began this conversation by stating that the article ‘did not claim to find a single window sign anywhere in the USA.’ I think we now agree at least that this is not correct.”

She then makes a salient point: Even if it were 15 recorded instances per year or 1,500—the signs existed, the persecution was real, and discrimination of the Irish was not an imagined feeling, but a reality difficult to both express and quantify.

“NINA sign would be just as offensive and memorable to Irish-American and other viewers whether it was for a job, an apartment, a social club, a ‘freedom pole,’ or anything else,” she wrote.

Of course, then she ended with this:

“I’ll conclude by sincerely thanking you again for interacting with me on this. It is a real honor and I appreciate it.”

Later, Rebecca says she regretted how her comments came out, saying she "may have come off as insufficiently respectful."

“He has been doing scholarly work for decades before I was born, and the last thing I want to do was show disrespect for him and his work,” she says.

But Professor Miller says he could not possibly be more impressed.

“I have the utmost admiration and respect for her. I really just want to be in the background of this,” he says.

“Rebecca is the hero.”

Now, Rebecca says she might continue along this same path, “exploring other areas where digitized newspaper evidence might supply new historical insights.” She thinks there “might still be some low-hanging fruit for researchers.”

But maybe not. Maybe she’ll be something completely different. She’s 14 years old. She has to start high school in a month.

“For the longer term, it’s too early to tell,” she says. “But I’ve become really interested in history through this process, and I think that would be an incredibly fascinating career path.”

If she does want to be an historian, when she goes to college about a half-decade from now, it’ll be time for her to tell a story no one will believe, once again.

And, for a second time, Professor Miller will be happy to help her prove it.

“It is, indeed,” he says, “quite extraordinary.”

Illinois chancellor who fired Salaita accused of serial self-plagiarism

Zionist Censorship at Illinois University as Money Buys  Influence

Ali Abunimah Sat, 10/11/2014

A massive issue in the United States.  Steven Salaita, who had been contracted to lecture at Illinois University had his offer withdrawn after tweeting various pro-Palestinian messages.  University Chancellor Phyllis Wise sacked Salaita, who had already given up his previous job.  T he decision follows pressure exerted by big funders.

A boycott of Illinois amongst academics has sent shockwaves through the institution.

Tony Greenstein

Chancellor Phyllis Wise

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis Wise faces allegations of unethical behavior dating back two decades. 

(Ronald Woan/Flickr)

Chancellor Phyllis Wise, the top administrator who fired Steven Salaita from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after complaints from pro-Israel donors, is facing allegations from academic peers of unethical conduct that may stretch back two decades.

Evidence has emerged of several instances of duplicate publishing – a widely condemned form of unethical behavior sometimes called “self-plagiarism.”

It occurs when an author publishes the same research or the same or substantially similar paper in multiple venues without acknowledging the fact, in effect passing off the old research as something new.

Duplicate publishing is considered especially damaging in the medical sciences: the same results for a drug study published multiple times in different journals can give the false impression of numerous independent studies showing that the drug is effective.

Because of the risk that duplicate publishing may “double up creating faulty data,” the group Publishing Integrity and Ethics says retraction is often appropriate in cases of duplicate publishing.
Wise has already publicly acknowledged one case and The Electronic Intifada has requested comment from her regarding the other allegations reported in this post. No response has been received from Wise or the University of Illinois.

In one instance, research for which Wise was not the lead investigator was apparently republished in another journal with her as the lead author and the names of some co-authors removed.
As The Electronic Intifada has previously reported, there is already reasonable suspicion that Wise may have unlawfully disposed of public documents that could shed light on pro-Israel donor influence over her decision to fire Salaita.

The “missing” document and contradictory statements on the Salaita case by the university’s president Robert Easter have fed widespread doubts about the university administration’s honesty and transparency.

The allegations of unethical academic behavior will cast further doubt on the integrity of Wise’s statements regarding Salaita and are likely to increase the pressure on the beleageured chancellor.
More than a dozen university departments have already passed votes of no confidence in Wise over her handling of the Salaita appointment.

Wise “corrects serious errors”

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Friday that Wise has made “a significant correction to a paper, published in 2006, that presents non-original work as original.”

This fact was first reported by the website Retraction Watch.  The Chronicle explains:

According to a correction in the journal Neuroscience, Ms. Wise’s paper contained “a number of serious errors” and was “written in a way that misleads the readers to think that it is an original article.” The article, “Estrogen Therapy: Does It Help or Hurt the Adult and Aging Brain? Insights Derived From Animal Models,” is a review of a 2001 article co-written by Ms. Wise. But the previous article receives no attribution.

Several of Wise’s questionable articles involve studies on the effectiveness of the hormone therapy estradiol, which is sold under various brand names.

One analysis of ethical issues in scientific publishing states that the “unethical” practice of duplicate publishing “is done to increase the number of publications” an author can list on her CV and is “more common with the pharmaceutical industry.”

Wise told Retraction Watch “she agrees with the correction” to her 2006 paper and that “there are no plans to correct any other papers.”

But she may have to revise that position based on additional allegations that are surfacing.
More cases emerging

A September posting on the website PubPeer appears to have uncovered another egregious case dating back twenty years.

PubPeer describes itself as an “online community” that reviews scientific research after its publication.

It says it is maintained by a “diverse team of early-stage scientists in collaboration with programmers who have collectively decided to remain anonymous in order to avoid personalizing the website, and to avoid circumstances in which involvement with the site might produce negative effects on their scientific careers.” 

This allegation concerns the 1994 paper “Changing diurnal and pulsatile rhythms during aging” (by Phyllis M. Wise, Nancy G. Weiland, Kathryn Scarbrough, Jonathan M. Lloyd) in Neurobiology of Aging, which PubPeer notes is a duplicate of another paper published the same year in the journal Experimental Gerontology.

“Neither paper cites the other and they have different coauthors, although they share the same first author. One claims to be the Nathan Shock Memorial Lecture delivered by the first author in 1991, while the other does not,” PubPeer states.

But then, the post notes, “Upon further examination, both papers are taken almost verbatim from an earlier publication,” a 1990 paper titled “Contribution of Changing Rhythmicity of Hypothalamic Neurotransmitter Function to Female Reproductive Aging” in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

PubPeer states: “Again, this paper has different coauthors and the same first author. Ninety-nine percent of the text of both later papers appeared previously in this paper, which is cited in neither.”
It also notes that the same figures have appeared, but with slightly different labeling.
“Is such triplicate publication with errors remotely acceptable in this area of science?” the post asks.

Another case noted on PubPeer concerns a paper co-authored by Wise and first published in the Journal of Neurocytology in 2000.

The PubPeer posting alleges that this is a duplicate publication of data that had already appeared in a 1999 article in Neuroscience.

In the 1999 publication, Wise is not the lead author, but she has been promoted to lead author in the later version.

Diagrams from both articles then appear “without permission” or attribution in a third article published in 2000 in Biology of Reproduction.

Federal grants

Both the Neuroscience and Biology of Reproduction articles say that they were supported by grants from the Glenn Foundation and from the US government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). They both list one NIH grant number in common.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of the NIH, recently published a paper on its website on “unethical publishing behavior,” which includes precisely the kind of duplicate publishing in which Wise is accused of habitually engaging.

The paper states that “studies have suggested that retractions for plagiarism and duplicate publication have been increasing in recent years.”

Accountability

Given that Wise has repeatedly cited her paramount concern for the integrity of the University of Illinois in her decision to fire Salaita, she owes the citizens of Illinois and the university community an immediate, full and frank response to these allegations.

Her institution’s and discipline’s ethical bodies should immediately examine her full record of publications to determine whether these allegations are substantiated and whether there is more evidence of misconduct.

Many of those commenting on the PubPeer and Retraction Watch postings have noted that a student would be subject to severe sanctions, if not expulsion, for these kinds of offenses.

Separately, The Electronic Intifada is still awaiting a response from the office of the Illinois Attorney General to its request for a review of the University of Illinois’ claim that a document on Salaita handed to Wise by a pro-Israel donor cannot be located.

The Salaita case and the Big Money takeover of state universities

September 15^th 2014

Responding to an academia-wide furor about the firing of a faculty member over a series of provocative tweets on Israel and Gaza, the University of Illinois board of trustees last week took a vote on the case.

They voted 8 to 1 to uphold the firing. This can rightly be seen as a blow to the very concept of academic freedom, but there's another sinister undercurrent to the case: there's evidence that major donors put pressure on the board and the university administration to dump the professor, Steven Salaita. If so, it wouldn't be the first time that financial donors have tried to manipulate university administrations into doing their bidding, but it's certainly one of the most disturbing examples of a bad trend.

As we all know, there are no free lunches...We are not going to be able to hire anyone...if we do not work out an acceptable arrangement with Koch and its funding partners. - A Florida State University department head, explaining the strings attached to a 2007 Koch donation

First, the background. As we reported last month, Salaita is a respected scholar in American Indian studies and Israeli-Arab relations whom the University of Illinois hired away from Virginia Tech and placed in a tenured position. Salaita's moving expenses to the university's Urbana-Champaign campus were paid, and he was given a class schedule for the current semester.

Then a series of tweets he wrote about the Israel-Gaza battle surfaced. They were passionate and provocative. One read, "At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?" Others suggested that Israel's bombing of Gaza would spur anti-Semitism. His twitter feed is here 

The university revoked Salaita's appointment. Among its defenses is that, while out-of-classroom tweets like his would not lead to a faculty member's firing, Salaita wasn't really a faculty member because the board of trustees hadn't yet rubber-stamped his appointment.

University Chancellor Phyllis Wise said that she merely had decided not to refer Salaita's appointment to the board, so in effect he wasn't fired, just not hired. Salaita's supporters see that as a transparent pretense, since the trustees' vote is typically a pro-forma ratification of decisions that university departments and administrators already have made.

Related story: Is US academic freedom a casualty of the Israeli-Palestinian debate?

Michael Hiltzik

Even before the trustees' vote last week, emails became public showing that Wise and her fellow administrators were inordinately responsive to donors unhappy with what they saw as Salaita's anti-Israel tweets. One donor told Wise that two fellow donors "both have less loyalty for Illinois because of their perception of anti-Semitism" and pushed against Salaita himself: "He gave me a two-pager filled with information on Steven Salaita and said how we handle this situation will be very telling," she told members of her staff.

For any university, but especially a public institution such as Illinois, the encroachment of donor pressure on the administration is a harbinger of the destruction of academic freedom. Wealthy donors are able to step in and exert strong influence because public funding sources, such as the state legislature, have systematically withdrawn support for public universities.

Wealthy donors today seldom have an interest in independent, objective academic study; they're interested in advancing their own notions of how the world works or should work--in ideology, not ideas.

As we reported earlier this summer, examples of this trend have been proliferating in recent years. In 2007, the Charles Koch Foundation offered Florida State University millions of dollars to set up a libertarian hive in its economics department, according to documents recently disclosed by the Center for Public Integrity.

The university's response was weak: "As we all know, there are no free lunches," then-economics chairman Bruce Benson told his colleagues. "The reality is that we all live and work in an environment that is subject to all sorts of political manipulations.... We are not going to be able to hire anyone (for the funded program) if we do not work out an acceptable arrangement with Koch and its funding partners."

Related story: When universities sell their souls, why do they have to sell so cheaply?

Michael Hiltzik

Koch didn't get all the oversight it wanted, but did get a strong say in who got appointed, or not appointed, as faculty for the program.

More recently, Arizona State accepted $1.129 million from the Charles Koch Foundation, and then went looking for a professor to focus on "the relations between free-market institutions and political liberty in modern history"--a specification that sounds more like the mission statement of a Koch lobbying group than the qualifications for a university professor.

It certainly appears that the board of trustees of the University of Illinois is marching to the donors' drums, throwing principles of academic independence to the side. The only trustee to support Salaita in last week's vote was James D. Montgomery, an African American attorney who recalled protesting racial discrimination on the Illinois campus 55 years ago: "I guess I was almost as vocal as professor Salaita when I carried my picket signs around this campus," he said.

As a final irony, consider that the chairman of the trustees, Christopher Kennedy, is the son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. His approach to the Salaita controversy is to see it as a matter that can be papered over with a financial settlement: "We want to be fair, but we don’t want to be pushovers," Kennedy told the Chicago Tribune. "Either they will sue or we will settle." 

That's what happens when questions of academic principle get reduced to dollars and cents--the university comes to believe it can trample any principle, as long as there's money to make it go away.

Salaita By the Numbers: 5 Cancelled Lectures, 3 Votes of No Confidence, 3849 Boycotters, and 1 NYT Article

by Corey Robin

The New York Times has weighed in with a strong piece on the Salaita affair. This is significant for two reasons. First, while we in academia and on social media or the blogosphere have been debating and pushing this story for weeks, it hasn't really broken into the mainstream. With a few exceptions, no major newspaper has covered it. Now that the Times has, I'm hoping Salaita's story will get even more attention, possibly from the networks as well. Second, in addition to covering the basics of the case, the piece shows just how divisive and controversial Chancellor Wise's decision has been, and how isolated it has made the University of Illinois.

The decision, which raised questions about contractual loopholes and academic freedom, almost immediately drew pushback from the academic community. Thousands of scholars in a variety of disciplines signed petitions pledging to avoid the campus unless it reversed its decision to rescind the job offer. A number of prominent academic associations also urged the university to reconsider.

In the past few days, several people have followed through on promises to boycott the institution. Two scholars declined invitations to speak at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study/MillerComm Lecture Series this fall, and a campus-based project called off a four-day national conference that it was scheduled to host there in October.

David J. Blacker, a professor of philosophy and legal studies at the University of Delaware, notified the Center for Advanced Study on Aug. 20 that he no longer wanted to participate. His lecture had been scheduled for Sept. 29.

“Instead of choosing education and more speech as the remedy for disagreeable speech,” he wrote to the committee, the University of Illinois “has apparently chosen ‘enforced silence.’ It thus violates what a university must stand for — whatever else it stands for — and therefore I join those who will not participate in the violation. In my judgment, this is a core and nonnegotiable issue of academic freedom.”

Mr. Blacker added that he “would be delighted to reschedule my talk” if the university should decide to reinstate its offer to Mr. Salaita.

The following day, Allen F. Isaacman, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, also pulled out of the series, offering a similar message. His talk had been scheduled for Oct. 30.

“The University of Illinois’s recent decision to disregard its prior commitment to appoint Professor Salaita confirms my fear of the administration’s blatant disregard for academic freedom,” Mr. Isaacman wrote in a letter to Wayne Pitard, a professor of religion and head of the lecture-series committee. “I do hope that the university administration will reverse its decision before it does irreparable harm to your great institution.”

That same day, the Education Justice Project, which is part of the department of education policy, organization, and leadership at Urbana-Champaign, announced that it was canceling the National Conference on Higher Education in Prison, which it had been scheduled to host.

“This decision has not been easy,” Rebecca Ginsburg, an associate professor in the education policy department, said in an announcement posted on the project’s webpage. The project’s leaders reached the decision only after speaking with would-be presenters and attendees, she wrote. “We concluded that for EJP to host the conference at this time would compromise our ability to come together as a national community of educators and activists.”

Ms. Ginsburg could not be reached for comment Friday; university administrators also did not respond to calls for comment.

On the campus, tensions are just as high.

That evening, however, faculty members in the American Indian studies program, a unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, cast a unanimous vote of no confidence in Ms. Wise’s leadership, criticizing her handling of the last-minute withdrawal of the offer to Mr. Salaita.

“In clear disregard of basic principles of shared governance and unit autonomy, and without basic courtesy and respect for collegiality, Chancellor Wise did not consult American Indian studies nor the college before making her decision,” reads a statement posted on the program’s webpage.

“With this vote of no confidence, the faculty of UIUC’s American Indian studies program also joins the thousands of scholars and organizations in the United States and across the world in seeing the chancellor’s action as a violation of academic freedom and freedom of speech,” the statement says.

The note goes on to encourage other departments to do the same, and to question whether the chancellor deserves the confidence of Illinois’s full faculty.

My only objection to the piece is that its numbers are out of date.

Cancelled Lectures

As of today, five scholars, not two, have canceled lectures or turned down an invitation to a University of Illinois campus. (And there may be more I am not aware of.)

In addition to David Blacker and Allen Isaacman, Eric Schwitzgebel has canceled a talk he was due to give on campus in December and also notified the organizers of a conference on experimental philosophy that he would not be able to deliver the keynote address, as he had been invited to do.

Jonathan Judaken, a humanities scholar, was asked to deliver the keynote address at conference at the UIUC in October; he was also scheduled to speak, while on campus, at the Program in Jewish Culture and Society. He has turned down the invitation. Despite his opposition to the idea of an academic boycott of Israel, and despite his visceral reaction to Salaita's tweets, he believes the academic freedom issues in this case are so vital that he must boycott the UIUC.

[Chancellor Wise's] new doctrine of civility ostensibly created to foster a climate where open dialogue, discourse, and debate must be respected has actually planted the latest land mine in this academic battlefield. The result will be opposite of what she intends. Now faculty and students will feel more anxious than ever that views or viewpoints that go beyond the policed confines of what administrators -- or worse, the lapdogs of the watchdog groups -- define as the norm, will be able to be expressed as part of an open conversation.

It is consequently on the basis of the principles of faculty governance, academic freedom, and freedom of speech that I will not speak at Illinois until Salaita's job offer is upheld.

This all could have been avoided if Chancellor Wise trusted faculty governance procedures. The faculty who hired Salaita were fully aware of his position on Israel and Zionism and fully equipped to determine if it would negatively impact his ability to teach his classes. There are international experts on the faculty who could have aided the administration in assessing Salaita's tweets. It is faculty as the leaders of the communities of inquiry in universities and colleges that are best equipped to judge in such cases.

Contrary to the muddled ways it is being used today as a political cudgel, academic freedom is about the right of academics to say what they will without the interference of groups outside the academy policing their positions. Faculty governance is about giving faculty the right to make all decisions within the academy pertaining to their domains of expertise, most significantly hiring decisions. And freedom of speech is our most basic right as Americans.

Campus watchdogs who monitor the academy claim they do so to uphold what is best in higher education. But Salaita's case shows once more that they threaten to turn campuses from refuges of critical inquiry into battlegrounds of political correctness and narrow norms.

And Julie Livingston, a Rutgers historian and MacArthur Fellow, has canceled a talk at the University of Illinois at Chicago (a UIUC sister campus, whose chancellor came out in support of Chancellor Wise). Livingston writes:

"With great sadness I am writing to cancel my upcoming talk at UIC scheduled for September 17, given your chancellor's recent statement of support for the actions of Phyllis Wise and the U of I Board of Trustees in the Steven Salaita case. While I had been looking forward to engaging with colleagues and students at UIC, I cannot in good conscience visit your campus until the Steven Salaita matter is resolved in a manner that upholds the principles of academic freedom and shared governance that are fundamental to American higher education and the necessary exchange of ideas, especially where difficult and potentially polarizing issues are concerned. I very much hope that your leadership will listen to their faculty and to the several thousand scholars (including myself) who have signed a pledge to boycott the University of Illinois, reflect on their actions, and reverse the errant course on which they have embarked in this matter. Should that happen I would welcome very much the chance to come and speak."

So five cancellations or refusals of an invitation.

No Confidence Votes

In addition, three departments at the UIUC, not one, have taken a vote of no confidence in the leadership of UIUC. In addition to the American Indian Studies department vote discussed by the Times, the Asian American Studies department and the philosophy department have voted no confidence in the chancellor. 

The philosophy department resolution states:

Whereas the recent words and actions of Chancellor Phyllis Wise, President Robert Easter, and the Board of Trustees in connection with the revocation of an offer of employment to Dr. Steven Salaita betray a culpable disregard not only for academic freedom and free speech generally but also for the principles of shared governance and established protocols for hiring, tenure, and promotion, the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign declares its lack of confidence in the leadership of the current Chancellor, President, and Board of Trustees.

Boycott

The philosophy vote is especially important, to my mind, because it demonstrates the power of the boycott. Of all the disciplines, philosophy has been the strongest in defending academic freedom at the UIUC. Over 530 philosophers have joined the boycott, more than any other field. Why that's the case, I'm not sure. But the fact that philosophy is the only department at UIUC—besides Asian American and American Indian Studies (where Salaita's  connections are strong)—to have voted no confidence is symptomatic of the power of the boycott. Seeing so many of their colleagues across the country and around the world take this strong stand, the philosophers at UIUC have now communicated to the administration that the campus is growing increasingly ungovernable. Chancellor Wise will not get any peace on campus till she and the trustees reverse their decision. As even this generally negative piece in a local paper acknowledges.

This is why I  want to press one of the newer boycott initiatives, from Alan Sokal of NYU, for natural scientists. Getting support among the natural scientists is critical, as they are often a favored constituency at big research campuses like UIUC. They draw the big money from federal grants; they have a lot of power. I want to urge any one of you who is a natural scientist to join this boycott pledge and to urge your friends and colleagues in the natural sciences to do the same. With just the right amount of pressure from all of you, we might see something similar to the philosophy vote on the natural sciences side of the UIUC campus.

For a complete list of the boycott statements, go here. While I haven't gotten a complete update on the numbers, we have at least 3849 signed up for the boycott as of tonight.

AAUP

The American Association of University Professors has issued a strong statement on the Salaita affair. Here are some of the highlights.

The letter details the extensive dealings between Salaita and the University of Illinois subsequent to his signing of the offer letter he received in October 2013. Among other things, the AAUP reveals that Chancellor Wise invited Salaita to a welcome reception for new faculty.

Toward the end of January, Professor Salaita wrote to Professor Byrd about scheduling a visit to Urbana-Champaign in order to make arrangements for a place to live for him and his family. He states that they visited the area in March and subsequently initiated the purchase of an apartment, including payment of “earnest” money, which was subsequently forfeited when the agreement was voided following the abrupt notification regarding his appointment. During this visit, the AIS faculty hosted a dinner for him and his family to welcome him to the faculty. In early April he was notified of his fall teaching assignment, and he finalized his course book orders in mid-summer.

In the intervening months between his October 2013 acceptance of the appointment and early August 2014, when you notified him of its termination, Professor Salaita received information from various offices of the university, indicating that they had been informed of his appointment, including an invitation from your office to attend your August 19 reception “welcoming faculty and academic professionals who joined the Illinois community in 2014,” as the invitation stated. Nothing was said to Professor Salaita about board action still to come, and we are informed that it is not uncommon for board action on new appointments to take place only after the appointment has begun and the appointee is already at work.

Because the AAUP recognizes that Salaita was in fact hired by the UIUC, they reach a vastly different conclusion about what Chancellor Wise has done to him and what Wise must now do.

Aborting an appointment in this manner without having demonstrated cause has consistently been seen by the AAUP as tantamount to summary dismissal, an action categorically inimical to academic freedom and due process and one aggravated in his case by the apparent failure to provide him with any written or even oral explanation.

...

Until these issues have been resolved, we look upon Professor Salaita’s situation as that of a faculty member suspended from his academic responsibilities pending a hearing on his fitness to continue. Under the joint 1958 Statement on Procedural St andards in Faculty Dismissal Proceedings, any such suspension is to be with pay. As detailed earlier in this letter, Professor Salaita has incurred major financial expenses since he accepted the University of Illinois offer. We urge–indeed insist–that he be paid salary as set in the terms of the appointment pending the result of the CAFT proceeding.

Brian Leiter has an interesting followup on the AAUP letter, which I urge you all to read, along with the fascinating comment thread that ensues.

The AAUP brings up the issue of Salaita's financial standing. If you haven't donated to the fund set up by his friends and colleagues to help him fight his case and support his family, please do so now. Click on this link and then go to the right-hand side of the page. People often urge individuals in Salaita's situation to sue. He may have to. But lawsuits cost money. Like a lot of money. Unless you're independently wealthy, they're hard to paid for. Like really hard to pay for. So please help Salaita out. And while you're over there, check out these awesome testimonials from his former students. You know, students: the very people Chancellor Wise and Salaita's critics claim to be protecting.