Cashing in on his celebrity status in leftist academic circles, Steven Salaita spoke at UNC-Chapel Hill last Thursday. The event was entitled “Uncivil Rites: Academic Freedom and the Silencing of Speech” and drew a mostly sympathetic audience that applauded his talk vigorously. One person in the audience who wasn’t impressed by Salaita was the Pope Center’s Jesse Saffron, who writes about the event in our article today. He states that the talk “was more of a rant against Israel’s government than a commentary on academic freedom and censorship.”

Salaita became famous last year when University of Illinois chancellor Phyllis Wise decided against submitting his proposed professorship in the school’s American Indian Studies department for final approval after it came to light that he had written a lot of extremely nasty tweets about Israel and Israelis prompted by his pro-Palestinian sympathies. On the basis of those tweets, Wise concluded that the university would be better off without someone on the faculty who was evidently incapable of expressing his opinions in a respectable, academic manner. So, no professorship at Illinois for Salaita — but he had already relinquished his previous position at Virginia Tech. With lots of time on his hands, he’s going around the country declaiming that he’s a victim, while preparing a lawsuit against Illinois and a number of donors to the university who stand accused of interfering with his alleged contract because they said they’d stop donating if Salaita were hired.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of this controversy is the way Salaita has reacted to the argument that the problem with his anti-Israel tweets was not that he has taken a side, but that his communications are uncivil — not appropriate for a scholar. To that, Salaita retorts that civility is a racist concept. Saffron writes, “Salaita claimed that those who refer to his tweets as ‘uncivil’ are actually perpetrating a deep-seated ‘colonial’ racism.” Alleging racism has become the first line of defense whenever someone on the left faces criticism. (Opposing Obamacare proved you were a racist; right now, you’re a racist if you don’t think Loretta Lynch should be the next attorney general.) The assertion that the concept of civil discourse, as distinguished from nasty and uncivil discourse, is a product of colonial racism is so absurd that for Salaita to make it further supports the conclusion that he shouldn’t have a faculty position.

Is this affair an affront to free speech? No. Salaita remains entirely free to say, write, tweet, whatever he wants to about Israel. His notion seems to be that others should not be free to react in any way that’s unfavorable to him after reading or hearing what he has to say, but freedom of speech doesn’t provide a shield against all adverse consequences following your speech.