The University of Illinois Board of Trustees voted to reject Professor Steven Salaita's tenure Thursday in a decision that has everyone from the campus to the nation talking, The Chicago Tribune reports.





The university voted in an 8-1 decision to deny tenure, ostensibly Salaita because of some inflammatory, and in some cases vulgar, anti-Israel tweets he made about Israel's military action in Gaza.





Salatia's controversial tweets include the following:



The @IsraelMFA is utterly deranged. The people of #Gaza have every reason to be damn proud. Nobody admires #Israel. pic.twitter.com/Hk7UXcMmpf — Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) August 1, 2014

If you're demented, amoral, dimwitted, and have sociopathic tendencies, might I suggest applying for a job in the @IsraelMFA? #Gaza — Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) August 1, 2014

If you haven't recently been called a terror-loving anti-Semite, then I'm sorry to say that your critique of #Israel is totally weak. #Gaza — Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 29, 2014

Zionists: transforming "antisemitism" from something horrible into something honorable since 1948. #Gaza #FreePalestine — Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 20, 2014

This is rare in academia where tenure is pretty much guaranteed if you do a good job as a professor, and The Chicago Tribune reports that it may set up grounds for a lawsuit:

The rare, if not unprecedented, board decision to reject a faculty hire set the stage for either a lawsuit or a financial settlement in a case that already has led to a difficult fall semester at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the state’s flagship public university. Students have held protests on campus while faculty have argued the decision is an affront to free speech and academic freedom — the principle that protects faculty who have unpopular and controversial views.

Turns out that for a professor, Salaita seems to have had difficulty staying in one place for long. The Chicago Tribune reports that he started his gig at the University of Illinois back in October of last year after he left a position at Virginia Tech:

Salaita had resigned from his position on the faculty at Virginia Tech University after accepting the U. of I. job in October, but Wise began raising concerns about his Twitter posts after getting feedback from donors, students and parents in July.

This isn't the first time Salaita's had trouble gaining rapport among his colleagues, however. Salaita also had some problems with many of his colleagues at Virginia Tech, according to The Chronicle For Higher Education

Nearly 40 of Virginia Tech’s faculty members have signed a letter protesting how the university has distanced itself from an associate professor of English whose public critique of patriotic slogans angered some political conservatives. The associate professor, Steven G. Salaita, became the target of threats, racist emails, and demands for his firing after the website Salon last summer published his op-ed arguing that public appeals to “support our troops” serve to discourage legitimate criticism of the nation’s military actions while actually doing little to help military personnel or veterans. Within days of the op-ed’s publication, in August, Lawrence G. Hincker, Virginia Tech’s associate vice president for university relations, began sending people who complained about Mr. Salaita a statement that defended the faculty member’s right to express his views but said those views “in no way represent an official university opinion.”

It seems Salaita has not ruled out legal action, however.





He's acquired the services of Anand Swaminathan of the Chicago law firm Loevy & Loevy to seek out litigation.





“Professor Salaita is in some sense reeling. He has got to figure out what to do now and pick up the pieces with an academic career in complete jeopardy,” said Swaminathan, of the Chicago law firm Loevy & Loevy. He said that while Salaita, 38, wouldn’t rule out a financial settlement, “what we do now is move toward litigation. He is not dropping it.”





In the video below, the measure the trustees are voting on concerns that Steven Salaita is item number 14, page 23.