Steven Salaita Wins $600K Settlement Over Anti-Israel Tweets
A professor whose tenured job offer was revoked after he posted controversial anti-Israel tweets has reached a settlement with the University of Illinois.
The university will pay Steven Salaita $600,000 to drop two lawsuits and “neither seek nor accept employment at the university now or in the future.” The settlement also requires the university, which in the fall of 2014 dropped a tenured job offer after learning of several vitriolic tweets that Salaita posted during Israel’s August 2014 war in Gaza, to pay Salaita’s lawyers $275,000, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.
“This settlement is a vindication for me, but more importantly, it is a victory for academic freedom and the First Amendment,” Salaita said in a news release issued by his attorneys, the Daily Illini reported.
A federal judge ruled in August that the university had violated its contract with Salaita.
In July, Salaita accepted a position as the Edward W. Said chair of American studies at the American University of Beirut.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO