DB: And, just to be clear, is this a done deal? You've been unhired?
SS: It seems to be a done deal but I'm hoping ... a lot of us are hoping that reinstatement will still be possible.
DB: Did you get a letter?
SS: I got a letter, yeah.
DB: What did the letter say?
SS: It really didn't say anything. It was an exceptionally vague letter. I actually had to read it about three or four times to make sure that I had actually been fired, or unhired, or whatever you want to call it....
But it basically said "We..." ... it was signed by Phyllis Wise, the Chancellor, and Christophe Pierre, the Vice President for Academic Affairs, and it simply noted that they don't expect Board of Trustee approval for my hire and that therefore there is no reason for me to turn up. They didn't give any reason, nothing specific, nothing.
DB: And did you hear from those folks you got to know in the department, about what the behind the scenes dialogue was about?
SS: See, they didn't know either.
DB: They didn't even know that you were unhired"?
SS: They didn't know until I knew. The Dean of the College didn't know. The Chair of my Department didn't know. The members of the hiring committee didn't know. We all sort of found out at the same time.
DB: So who fired you?
SS: We don't know for sure. It is the responsibility of Chancellor Wise, the Board of Trustees, and I think the system President Robert Easter. I don't exactly know who made the decision but it appears that it was donors who made the decision. And that the board and the chancellor and the president are just carrying water for them.
DB: In terms of the content ... I mentioned the senior producer here considers indigenous folks in this country, the Palestinians of North America. These parallels are made all the time. There's extraordinary unity between these communities across global lines, and at the United Nations, when they work together. Tell us what you think we're all losing by this kind of action.
SS: I think so many people are invested in the outcome of this process because a lot of people inside and outside of academe understand that first of all we're losing a legal definition and a notion of practice of academic freedom. We're losing the ability to criticize a foreign nation state without recrimination. We're losing ability to question the imperatives of the American government without recrimination. We're losing the First Amendment, as problematic as its practice has been throughout American history. It still has remained an important protection against government incrimination, for political speech.
We're losing faculty governance and democratic educational practices in the universities. And it's really in some way ... symbolic of what's become of the country in general. And so in universities we have boards of trustees, made up of business people, sort of making decisions about the university in which campuses are becoming, U.C. Berkeley, among them, completely corporatized and models of neo-liberal engagement, just like American society in total.
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