An exiled professor's journey from inside and beyond academe
In the summer of
2014, Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position in American
Indian Studies at the University of Illinois for his unwavering
stance on Palestinian human rights and other political controversies.
A year later, he landed a job in Lebanon, but that, too, ended badly.
With no other recourse, Salaita found himself trading his successful
academic career for an hourly salaried job. Told primarily from
behind the wheel of a school bus--a vantage point from which Salaita
explores social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation,
racial oppression, working-class solidarity, pro-fessional
malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from
school--An Honest Living describes the author's decade of
turbulent post-professorial life and his recent return to the
lectern.
Steven Salaita was
practically born to a life in academia. His father taught physics at
an HBCU in southern West Virginia and his earliest memories are of
life on campus and the cinder walls of the classroom. It was no
surprise that he ended up in the classroom straight after graduate
school. Yet three of his university jobs--Virginia Tech, the
University of Illinois, and the American University of Beirut [AUB]
--ended in public controversy. Shaken by his sudden notoriety and
false claims of antisemitism, Salaita found himself driving a school
bus to make ends meet. While some considered this just punishment for
his anti-Zionist beliefs, Steven found that driving a bus provided
him with not just a means to pay the bills but a path toward freedom
of thought.
Now ten years later,
with a job at American University at Cairo, Salaita reconciles his
past with his future. His restlessness has found a home, yet his
return to academe is met with the same condition of fugitivity from
whence he was expelled: an occasion for defiance, not conciliation.
An Honest Living presents an intimate personal narrative of
the author's decade of professional joys and travails.
