Diet And The Graduate Student

In my recent post on my vexed relationship with food I made brief note of my changed dietary habits after migration from India to the US. My brief response does not do justice to the full complexity of that change over the past twenty-eight years. One important component was the change induced by my altered financial situation upon arrival in the US (and my work and study schedule as a graduate student.)

There’s no getting around it: my financial circumstances, as an international graduate student, were dire, and I was busy with a full schedule of classes and working in the cafeteria as a dishwasher. No glamorous graduate student research or teaching assistantship for me, not even a library gig.  So I buckled down and cut back on expenses. (I made a little over $300 a month, and $157.50 of that went to rent.) Unfortunately, good food–come to think of it, just food, period–was one area where I chose to economize.  I drank coffee–terrible crap, brown water most of it–and smoked cigarettes all day; those two classic appetite suppressants obviated the need to spend precious dollars in the school cafeteria. On the days I worked there, I was given a free meal at night. Once I went home at night I ate a big meal; more often than not, this amounted to a heaping plate of rice and beans (or lentils.) Once in a while I would make myself a white-bread sandwich or two with mayonnaise, American cheese slices, and bologna. On the weekends, because I worked again at the cafeteria deli and pizzeria, making sandwiches and baking pizza, I would indulge in those two food items. Alcohol, obviously, ameliorated some of the misery of this state of affairs, and I would gulp down bad beer and cheap wine by the liter whenever I had the opportunity.

This dietary regime was, to say the least, an unmitigated disaster.  There wasn’t one culinary catastrophe that I had forsworn. I snacked on candy, soda, and orange juice at the cafeteria; a deluge of sugar. I ate refined carbohydrates by the boatload; I ate processed meats; I smoked; I drank acidity-inducing coffee; I starved myself and then feasted; I drank calorie-rich alcohol excessively.

My weight ballooned. My face grew puffy. My belly initiated a policy of rapid, aggressive expansion. I began a rather pathetic exercise routine after my first year in the US–by which time I had secured a graduate fellowship–but could not keep it up. And despite my financial circumstances improving, thus rendering unnecessary my coffee-n-cigarette diet during the day, I did not eat any better.

Bizarrely enough, when I was able to make my first visit back to India–two and a half years after my arrival in the US–my changed appearance was greeted rather cheerfully: “Well, look at you; you look rather healthy. A rather nice change from your former skinny self, don’t you think?” (Or something like that; the translation isn’t precise, but it captures the spirit of what was often said to me.)

It took a very long time for me to become educated about the right way to eat; I haven’t mastered that art yet. (More on that transformation anon.) Meanwhile, I remain convinced those early years in the US did incalculable damage to my long-term health.

The Most Useful Algebra Lesson Of All

I first encountered algebra in the sixth grade. Numbers disappeared–or at least, were consigned to secondary importance–and letters, mysterious ones like x, y, z, took center stage.  A mathematical expression called the ‘equation’–an incomprehensible sentence underwritten by an esoteric grammar–emerged on my intellectual horizon. (Strictly speaking, my teachers were rigorous enough to call these things ‘linear equations’ but all I could remember was the second word.) The rules for manipulating it, and triumphantly emerging from these machinations with the value of x held high as a trophy for all to see were, as my descriptions above might indicate, utterly incomprehensible to me. I stepped into the water and I immediately floundered, casting about in panic.

Unwilling to seek help outside the confines of my classroom–I did not press my brother, two grades senior to me, or my parents, for assistance with my lessons or my homework, which I was often submitting incomplete and incorrect–I was setting myself up for disaster. The axe fell eventually. In the first of the year’s so-called ‘terminal’ exams–because they were staged at the end of an academic term–I obtained a grand total of sixteen ‘marks’ out of hundred. It was an ‘epic fail,’ long before that term had acquired any currency.

Unfortunately, my fame in this domain of academic achievement did not, and indeed, could not, go unnoticed. My grades were noted on a ‘progress report’ and I was asked to bring it back to school, duly signed by my parents.  When I, hoping to escape the wrath of my father, showed it to my mother, she took one look at my math grade and told me he would sign the report instead. (This transference of responsibilities reflected a traditional division of parental labor when it came to my education; my mother helped me with the ‘humanities,’ my father with the ‘sciences.’)

My ‘interview’ with my father did not go well. He was perplexed by my grade, but even more so by my exam answer-book. I had executed some bizarre, inexplicable mathematical maneuvers, strewing symbols and numbers gaily all over its pages, thus allowing my teacher to grant me a few charity points for visible effort. Most embarrassingly, my father was able to surmise I had cheated, for I could not explain why certain moves had been made by me. (Indeed, I had; I had sent several panicked sideways glances at my neighbor’s answer-book during that fateful exam.) My mother sat close by, watching this interrogation–and my discomfiture–quietly. I could see my father’s visage tautening, his nostrils flaring. A stinging slap that would inflame my cheeks and set my ears ringing was probably headed my way. This was a man who had brooked no incompetence in his subordinates in his days in the air force; he would not stand for this display of stupidity and confusion on my part.

My father finally spoke, “Go get your maths book.” I complied. My father pulled out a notepad and a pen, looked at me, and spoke again, “Algebra is easy if you follow the rules.” I had no idea what those were.

I soon found out. My father explained to me what variables, constants, and coefficients–fractional and whole–were;  he told me I had to “bring all the variables to one side, and all the constants to the other”; I was supposed to “change signs when you change sides”; and so on.  It was not smooth sailing: on one occasion, after I had failed, yet again, to internalize one of my father’s instructions and committed a howler, he, overcome by exasperation, turned to my mother and confessed he would like to throttle me. I quaked and quivered, but he did not make good on that threat. He did though, tell me he would not let me go to sleep till I had mastered the art of solving linear equations.

The night wore on. My mother went to bed. My father and I continued to work through one problem after another. Slowly, algebra became comprehensible; indeed, it made perfect sense, and even began to appear as a little bit of a lark, a sleight of hand, a riddle with a key that could be made to work for you, and not just wizards and magicians. It was entirely plebeian; the masses could partake of its pleasures too.

Finally, my father assigned a set of problems for me to solve and bade me go into the living room to work on them by myself. If I solved them correctly, I could go to bed at last. I got to work; my father began his bedtime ritual of changing clothes and brushing his teeth. A few minutes later, he opened the door of the living room to check on my progress: Was I moving along? I said I was.

Once I thought I was done, I took my work over to my father. For a minute or two, he sat there, looking impassively at my scribbles. Then, he looked up and said, “Good work; go to sleep. You’ve got it.” I complied again.

I never became a mathematician. But I never feared the ‘lazy man’s arithmetic’¹ again.

Notes:

  1. Legend has it that this is how Einstein’s father explained the heart of algebra to him: ‘you just act as if you know what x is.’

San Bernardino, Selective Surveillance, And The Paralyzed Gun ‘Debate’

Here are two related thoughts running around in my head since the San Bernardino massacre.

On past occasions, whenever one of these quintessentially American mass shootings would be carried out, I would wonder about what could happen to jolt the gun-control ‘debate’ in this country out of its well-worn grooves. (The scare quotes are necessary because there really isn’t a debate: some anguished wails and a stony silence don’t amount to one.) After some casting about, I thought perhaps a mass shooting carried out by ‘Islamic terrorists’ would do so. Surely, even the NRA and its Republican minions would agree then that guns had gotten into the wrong hands, and agree for stronger forms of gun control and regulation. After all, guns for Americans is all very fine, but surely not guns for Muslims?

But even as I thought this, it would seem to me that there was no way that a Muslim (or ‘Arab’ or ‘Islamic’) person would be able to buy the kinds of weapons and munitions needed to carry out such a deadly assault. Given the heightened surveillance of Muslims in America by its law enforcement agencies, and the paranoid response to even innocent activities like schoolboys building electronic devices, it seemed inconceivable a ‘brown Middle-Eastern looking foreigner’ would be able to walk into a store and buy armaments like the ones described below:

two .223-caliber semi-automatic rifles, two 9mm semi-automatic handguns, and an explosive device…The rifles used were variants of the AR-15: one was a DPMS Panther Arms A15, the other was a Smith & Wesson M&P15. One of the handguns was manufactured by Llama and the other is a Springfield HS2000. All four of the guns were purchased legally in California four years before the attack….the DPMS weapon used a high-capacity magazine, which is not legal in California. The couple had 1,400 rounds for the rifles and 200 for the handguns with them at the time of the shootout. 2,000 9-millimeter handgun rounds, 2,500 .223 caliber rounds, and twelve pipe bombs, along with a cache of tools that could be used to make improvised explosive devices. [From Wikipedia entry on the shootings]

Surely, even if such a sale was made, a phone call to the FBI or local law-enforcement agencies would follow? “Hello, FBI? I just want to let you know that an Ay-rab just boughta whole lotta guns and ammo. Something’s fishy, know what I mean?” I considered the possibility of electronic, online purchases and ruled those out as well. That would be even easier to track and investigate with the fancy profiling algorithms used to slot Americans into No-Fly lists. “Our program indicates a non-trivial probability that this purchase warrants investigation by G-men“. Right?

I was wrong on all counts. ‘Suspicious’ people can buy guns and ammo and materials for making explosives easily. It’s only when they try to live their lives as normal people that they are flagged as such. Moreover, when an ‘Islamist’ or ‘jihadist’ mass shooting will take place in America, it will provide the perfect cover for gun fans: guns don’t kill people, Muslims do. Even worse, it would spark the kinds of fascist fantasies passing for normal thought these days.

This American nightmare isn’t going away anytime soon.

A Well-Misunderstood Lyric

Misunderstanding the lyrics of songs is not a sign of cognitive deficiency; rather it is an entirely honorable–and creative–activity that for years has provided listeners with considerable pleasure, allowing them to experience, if only for a deluded moment or two, the satisfaction of being a songwriter of sorts. Consider, for instance, the genius who first submitted ‘Excuse me while I kiss this guy’ as an alternative lyric for Jimi Hendrix‘s ‘Purple Haze,’ or the budding McCartney–Lennon hybrid who thought that ‘There’s a bathroom on the right’ would work better in Creedence Clearwater Revival‘s ‘Bad Moon Rising‘. Surely they must have caught, for an instant, from their new vantage point that looked down on the teeming masses who could only hear the staid original versions, a glimpse of themselves as poets in the making?

These questions are not rhetorical. I ask because I have just experienced a profound misunderstood lyric moment myself, thus proving you don’t have to be a stoned high-schooler to experience the pleasures of hearing the Absent.

For years now–as befitting my vintage, I’d say for close on to three decades–I have been listening to Led Zeppelin‘s ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You‘. This distinguished member of the White Boy Blues Canon is justifiably considered an epic: that slinky frontman, Robert Plant–who would probably be considered too effeminate by most of today’s rock fans–wails and wails about the wrong his woman has done him, and Jimmy Page plays some of his most scorching, bluesy guitar pieces as accompaniment. Long-haired stoner heaven, indeed. (Incidentally, this is a good track on which to note that Zeppelin’s music production values gave a very prominent place to their percussion section: you can hear John Bonham, Zeppelin’s drummer, laying down the foundations loud and clear, front and center. )

Plant begins by noting that he’s been ‘Working from seven to eleven every night’ and quite rightly observes that that ‘really makes life a drag, I don’t think that’s right.’ And then, he launches into a line that I’ve always, always, heard as ‘I feel it in the best, in the best of food, I did what I could.’ I am not sure why but this line encapsulated the anguish and suffering at the heart of ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ perfectly. Imagine: a lover so lovelorn, so sickened by the fear, anxiety, and depression that are the hallmarks of the romantic relationship for the melancholy, that he cannot eat, his palate destroyed by the bitterness of an unreliable and shifting love. It was, along with ‘Do you remember mama, when I knocked upon your door?/I said you had the nerve to tell me you didn’t want me no more’ the line that best conveyed the torment so palpable in this song.

I have been informed, however, that the line in question actually reads ‘I’ve really been the best, the best of fools, I did what I could.’ I’m afraid this version doesn’t quite do it for me; it does not show the true affliction of the soul that I think my version does.

I’m going to continue to hear my line (I suspect it’s too late for me to hear the ‘correct’ version now). Moreover, listeners are supposed to co-create the music they hear; every song has a distinctive role to play in our lives, one whose contours only we can describe. If the ‘actual’ or ‘correct’ lyrics don’t ‘work,’ I suspect we substitute, subconsciously or unconsciously, ones that do.

Meeting The Children (And Grandchildren) Of ‘Celebrities’

Have I told you about the time I met Richard Wright‘s grandson at an academic conference? A few seconds after we had begun conversing, I blurted out, “Your grandfather changed my life, my perception of this world; I saw and understood myself differently once I had read Native Son.” My interlocutor thanked me politely; he smiled; we talked a bit more about his project to make a documentary on whale hunting, and the pressing need to conserve those majestic leviathans of the deep. As our little meeting concluded, I half-jokingly offered my services as a volunteer assistant for his project. He promised to stay in touch.

Then there was the time when, strolling down a brownstone-lined street in Brooklyn on my way to my gym, I passed, for the umpteenth time, a man strumming on his stoop–on one occasion, a mandolin, on another, a ukulele, and of course, a guitar. Finally, one day, I stopped and struck up a conversation. A few minutes later, I had been informed the gentleman I was speaking bore the last name Westmoreland. When I asked, ‘That Westmoreland?,” back came the answer: ‘Yup.’ I was talking to the son of William Westmoreland, the man who conducted the Vietnam War for many gory and increasingly pointless years. But, as his son assured me, the last word on that sorry business has not been written yet; perhaps some vindication might yet make its way to his father.

And then, of course, my daughter goes to daycare with Amartya Sen‘s grandson; his mother, Sen’s daughter, is a friend of ours. We do the things that parents of children who are friends with each other do: playdates, birthday parties, impromptu dinners. Sometimes I hear that the great economist himself stopped over at her place for a quick visit, on his way, perhaps, to another keynote address or to receive another award. (Someday, I hope to run into him and press copies of my cricket books into his hands; I’ve heard he is a fan of the game and might be tempted to check these. I hold little hope that he would be interested in my academic writings.)

Encounters with the children of celebrities are a curious business. You make indirect contact with ‘fame,’ with ‘achievement,’ with ‘success’; you sense, dimly, a glimpse of the distinctive life that they live (or lived.) You feel, as an undercurrent running through your encounters, a brush with ‘history.’ If you are so inclined, you might grasp at these insubstantial offerings, and revel in them. Celebrity spotting of any kind, even with a twist like the one noted here, is always great party-conversation fodder. But you also come to realize a simple fact about the human condition, about the gulf that separates us from other individuals. These folks, your ‘friends’ of a kind, are gloriously distinct and separable from their celebrity ancestors; they live their own lives; they are their own persons. Talk with them all you want: you won’t get an autograph; the fame they might have  known intimately won’t rub off on you.

A Vexed Relationship With Food

Recently, I agreed to be interviewed by a graduate student in anthropology for research related to her thesis on food habits. As part of that process–as a subject of a particular demographic of interest, parents–I wrote out answers to questions sent to me as follow-up to our preliminary conversation. Here they are:

  1. When asked to describe your relationship to food, I remember you said “frustrated”. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

I use the word ‘frustrated’ to describe my relationship to food because there is a feeling of being thwarted: I want food to work for me, on my terms but that state of affairs does not come about. I want it to be tasty and satisfying; I want it to be  easy to prepare and cheap to buy; I want it to be prepared without effort, in fact. But it doesn’t work that way. Food needs purchasing, carefully; it needs the careful exercise of informed choice; it makes you fat or sick if you take your eyes off the ball. Having a good relationship with food takes work. And that work often seems like it requires too much time from a lifestyle that consists largely of feeling harried, between being a parent, a teacher and a writer (as a professional academic), as someone who wants to be fit and healthy. Eating right, in ways that satisfy the various dimensions and standards of eating right is increasingly hard, and increasingly easy to view as yet another zone of failure or mediocre effort and reward.

2. I remember you mentioned eating feels like a chore sometimes – why is that?

Eating feels like a chore for the reasons I allude to above. Buying food and preparing it takes time, and when you have to feed another human being–in this case, my child, a three year old-toddler with her own idiosyncratic take on food–everything associated with it becomes just a little more onerous. I find myself eating worse now than I did before I became a father, and its a much harder struggle now to eat healthy and eat right. I wish I could satisfy my desires to eat healthy and tasty food more easily and balance them/trade them off against the need to eat quickly and efficiently in a healthier way.

3. I recall you expressing frustration with our “six pack culture” – can you tell me a little bit more about this?

Men, not just women, are pressured by our culture to act and look a particular way, to conform to social standards of male ‘looks’ or ‘beauty’ or ‘physical appearance.’ As a result, even as you struggle with diet, with remaining physically active, you struggle with appearance too; you experience insecurity and inadequacy in the physical domain; ‘you don’t look as good as you could.’ Men obsess over getting the right body too; they too feel pressured by unrealistic body images; they too find themselves obsessing over presentation. In this picture, food has an uncomfortable role; it is essential, but it can also do you ‘damage.’

4. How does how you eat now differ from how you ate growing up in India?

I pay more attention to what I eat; that follows from having greater involvement with what I eat. I eat more meat; I eat less bread; I eat less rice; I eat fewer vegetables, and practically no lentils now (grains in general are almost gone from my diet); I eat more processed meats like bacon and sausage.

On Becoming More ‘Confessional’ In The Classroom

A few weeks ago, in the course of a conversation with a colleague here at Brooklyn College, I remarked that over the years I had become more ‘confessional’ in my classroom  interactions with my students. When gently pressed to explain what I meant, I said that I had become more unguarded there, in that space–in expressing some previously undisclosed sentiments of mine about the teaching experience and about my ongoing relationship with my students.

To wit, I have become more open about telling my students that I regard my teaching as a kind of continuing education for myself, one in which they have a significant role to play. I tell them that I teach the material on my reading list in order to understand it better; I might have read an assigned article or book or excerpt before, but I do not consider myself to have truly understood it till I have discussed it in a classroom with those who are experiencing it for the first time. I tell my students that I consider philosophical education to proceed in three stages: first, reading the text by my self; second, discussing the book with a ‘teacher’; third, discussing the book with ‘students’; I, as a teacher, am now in the third stage with regard to the texts I have read before. I tell them that I teach a wide variety of classes because I consider my philosophical education incomplete and hope to make it more well-rounded by doing so. (This leads to a related confession: that I often place material on my syllabus that I have not read before precisely so that I will be obliged to take the time to read it. Sometimes I even tell them that old joke about an academic who asked another if he had read a particular book and was told, “Read it? I haven’t even assigned it!”) I tell them that when they do not do the readings, my disappointment is made more acute by the fact that these objectives of mine have been thwarted. I ask them to consider me a co-learner in the enterprise that we undertake in the classroom; I express the hope they will take this responsibility seriously.

Most of these ‘confessions’ occur in the first class of the semester but on occasion, I find myself returning to them during the semester too. I hope, of course, in doing all of this, to make them regard the classroom experience as something more than a mere passive exercise in receiving wisdom from on high. I hope that my ‘confessions’ will make them take the task of reading the assigned texts more seriously and help them come to class prepared to talk about it with me–and other students.

Like every other pedagogical ‘strategy’ I have adopted, this has only had limited success. I do not know if my students take me seriously, or if they can bring themselves to believe that they could actually move my education along. But because I do not consider myself to be insincere when I indulge in these confessional sessions in class, I intend to keep persisting with this ‘strategy’ for the time being.

An ISIS Communique For Our Times

From: Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi

To: All Jihadi Brothers

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

My warriors, after Paris, much work remains to be done. But we have many new recruits. They are infidels, but they have to come to our aid, they will do our work with us. They will ensure that the Caliphate will find new capitals, that it will spread from sea to shining sea. They will turn upon the Muslims in their midst, the devout, and the apostates, those Muslims who–for whatever reason–do not grow their beards, whose women do not cover their heads, whose children do not memorize the Koran, who do not pray five times a day, who study in schools where the Koran is not taught, who do not fast in the holy month, who pledge allegiance to infidel flags. They will turn back refugees from their shores; they will prosecute their own citizens. They will drive them back into our fold.  We shall welcome those who show contrition for their desertion; for the rest, apostasy means death.

Every attack we launch upon the infidel West shows its tenuous hold on its  precious civil liberties, their freedoms that we supposedly covet. One attack on the Great Satan was enough to make it torture, spy upon its citizens, kill many Muslim brothers, and entrap yet others through perverse law-enforcement schemes. A few more artfully placed and timed attacks and we will bring the residents of these dens of fornication and perversity to their knees. In this task, we will be aided, as we already are, by those who continue to disenfranchise their own citizens and commit to oblivion their own esteemed moral, legal, and political principles. They continue to kill our innocent brothers and sisters and their children from the sky; they continue to imprison Muslim brothers without trial, scorning their own precious legal parchments from which the words ‘due process’ have so easily been scrubbed.

Between the anvil of the New Crusaders and the hammer of our armies, the apostates, those who left Muslim lands and vainly sought a better life elsewhere–believing foolishly in the propaganda and lies of secular written constitutions with their pathetic Bill of Rights, and in mock-revolutionary declarations of liberty, equality, and fraternity–will be crushed. They will find no new homes; they will be turned back from the shores that were to welcome them. Those Muslims who imagined they could  live in peaceful co-existence with infidels will find that there will be no such peace for them. They will be blamed for our work; they will be punished for it. Among them, we will find yet more soldiers.

Truly it is by Allah’s Grace that those who imagine themselves the New Crusaders are instead our Jihadi brothers. Such is Allah’s Infinite Wisdom that our enemies become our soldiers.  They speak of waging war against us but first they will wage war against themselves. They are termites who nibble at their own foundations; we need only direct them from afar.

Allah is Great. Victory will be ours. Welcome the New Crusaders.

The Post-Apocalyptic World Of The War Refugee

A year or so ago, in writing about classroom discussions centering on Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road, I had noted that the homeless–whom the Man and the Boy most resemble–live in a post-apocalyptic world of their own:

The central characters in The Road are homeless folk….the homeless among us live in such a post-apocalyptic world now: an apocalypse has already occurred in their lives. They are without homes, dirty, hungry, on the edge of starvation, reduced to foraging for scraps, smothered in their own waste, stinking to high heaven, perennially in danger of being set on, assaulted, set on fire, or murdered…they can sense there is little hope in their lives, little to drive them onwards except the brute desire to stay alive.

If we want to engage in an exercise of the imagination and think about how the Man and the Boy might feel we might want to think of those homeless folk we see in New York City’s subway stations and streets. If we wish to conjecture about how the man and the boy experience the cold in their world, which will eventually freeze their starving, impoverished selves to death, we need only think about how every winter, in subzero temperatures, the homeless desperately try to survive, using cardboard boxes, sleeping on top of subway gratings, seeking warm corners and nooks, hopefully safe from marauders at night….the homeless remind us the apocalypse–conceived as fantasy in novel and movie–is already all around us.

There is another way to think about the Man and the Boy in The Road: they are refugees. They have lost their home; their family is devastated; they are fleeing violence; they are seeking shelter and food and warmth; they are, as their name implies, seeking refuge. The world they knew is no more; they seek another world, one in which they might, perhaps, begin life anew.

It is easy to imagine–as we voraciously consume products of the post-apocalyptic genre in literature and film–that the post-apocalypse is a fantasy, a possible world about which we can safely speculate from a distance. But we forget all too soon that apocalypse stalks this world of ours; it is present in the lives of many. For zones of  war are zones of apocalypse. ‘Normal’ life is no more; daily existence is subsistence. Homelessness and sudden, violent death is the norm for civilians. Abandon all hope indeed, ye who enter here, and ye who dare escape.

It is worth reminding ourselves of this as we think about this war-stricken world’s refugee crisis. And in particular, of course, about the refugees fleeing the four-year old Syrian war. Over four million are now displaced, and many more will be, for the conflict shows no sign of abating. Most, if not all, have lost loved ones; all have lost their homes. They too, have passed through landscapes not too dissimilar to the ones depicted in The Road. Their life is reduced to the most elemental of all missions: food, shelter, clothing.

Perhaps this world might stop fantasizing about survival strategies in an imaginary post-apocalyptic worlds, and think about how it might address the problems of this all too real one.

On Not Celebrating Steven Salaita’s Settlement With UIUC

I cannot bring myself to celebrate the news of Steven Salaita‘s settlement with the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). The reasons for this are fairly straightforward–as noted in a petition now circulating: the crucial legal issues at the heart of his dismissal remain unresolved, and his job has not been reinstated.

Shortly after Salaita announced he would be taking legal action against UIUC, I made some caustic remarks–in the company of many friends–to the effect that UIUC should fire its legal team. How could they possibly have advised a public university to take action that seemed clearly punitive and retaliatory against the exercise of political speech by one of its employees? Did they not envisage the terrible damage that would be done to the university in the discovery stage of trial, where email correspondences and internal deliberations would go public, where it would become clear that the university had succumbed to the pressure exerted by donors?

In conversations with my wife–a lawyer herself–another disturbing possibility presented itself. That the university’s legal team had not discounted such a possibility, that a cost-benefit analysis had been carried out, one which reckoned the financial damage to the university resulting from the loss of donor money if Salaita was appointed as being greater than that resulting from the terms of any out-of-court settlement with Salaita. (The amount that Salaita settled for, $875,000, is far less than some big-pocket donor might have threaten to withhold had Salaita’s appointment not been rescinded. By way of comparison too, think of the salaries of football coaches at large university systems like the University of Illinois.)

And so it has come to pass. Salaita’s case never went to trial; the crucial First Amendment issue that lay at its core was never resolved; and instead, a simple calculus for violating academic freedom has emerged. In saying all this, I do not mean to second-guess the decision made by Salaita and his legal team; he must have wanted put the legal dispute behind him and get on with his life, which has been subject to terrible emotional pressure, and that is not an insignificant consideration. He has a life to live, and it does not need to include being the poster child for a political movement. But it remains unclear whether he will ever find employment at an American university again, for as we might well expect news of his hiring will be greeted by the same furor that precipitated the loss of his UIUC job. His academic future remains in limbo.

To reiterate, the courts of this country were not called on to put their considerable weight behind Salaita’s plea to be reinstated on the grounds that his First Amendment rights had been violated. An important legal precedent would have been set had he won, and academic freedom–seemingly perennially under threat when it comes to particular issues in the current political climate–would have received important legal, political, and moral protection. Perhaps I’m too glib in assuming that Salaita would have won, and perhaps his legal team, based on its knowledge of the relevant case law, felt this was the safest path. Fair enough.

Still, when the smoke has cleared, the landscape looks much like the one before. Indeed, university administrators have learned from Chancellor Phyllis Wise‘s behavior how not to fire someone for exercising their  academic freedom, and the amount of settlement lays down a marker all its own. Academics will still remain uncertain about what their free speech rights in this situation.