The American Association of University Professors voted overwhelmingly at its annual conference here on Saturday to censure the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for withdrawing a tenured-faculty appointment from Steven G. Salaita over his Twitter posts harshly criticizing Israel.
"The world — or, at least, the academic world — is watching," Troy D. Smith, an assistant professor of history at Tennessee Tech University and secretary of the AAUP’s Tennessee conference, said in urging fellow association members to censure the Illinois flagship for violating academic principles.
The vote to censure Illinois followed a lopsided debate in which Cary Nelson, a former AAUP president and a professor of English at Urbana-Champaign, found himself alone in arguing that the association would be acting prematurely in passing such a judgment. On the other side, several AAUP officials and Illinois faculty members argued that the association needed to send a clear message that the university’s treatment of Mr. Salaita violated AAUP guidelines dealing with shared governance, due process, and academic freedom. ...