Are We Victims or Volunteers? A New Fall-From-Grace Memoir Dodges the Question

I worked at Trader Joe’s for over five years.  “It’s the first honest work I’ve ever done,”  I said over and over again, usually with a wink and a grin. People often agreed, and some asked if I was disparaging the entire academic profession, or merely commenting on my own checkered teaching career. I assured them it was the latter, but I winked again as I did so.

An Honest Living is the title of the new memoir from Steven Salaita, out this month from Fordham University Press. Salaita has been on my radar ever since the summer of 2014, when he was fired from a tenured position in the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois. Salaita, who is of Palestinian descent, was fired for his incendiary anti-Zionist (and to the minds of some, anti-Semitic) tweets. He sued the university, won a settlement, but was unable to return to academia. As he details in his new book, he fell on hard times. Desperate to support his family, he became a school bus driver in Chicago.  Eventually, Salaita returned to college teaching – but this time, at the American University of Cairo.   

At the time Salaita was fired in 2014, I was reeling from the loss of my own tenured position the previous year. I had spent twenty years as a full-time instructor at Pasadena City College before my professional self-immolation. I had resigned my job, lost my marriage, and wiped out my savings. By the fall of 2014, I had a little job as a file clerk in an accountant’s office. I was shame-soaked. And I not only Googled compulsively to read what people were saying about me, I eagerly searched for stories of other college professors who had lost their jobs in contentious circumstances.  The fact that Salaita ended up driving a bus (rather than immediately finding another teaching gig, or becoming a television pundit), intrigued me.  It still intrigues me all these years later.

Steven Salaita

Both Salaita and I were minor public figures. The stories of how we lost our tenured positions both made the press. After our defenestrations, we both spent years in blue-collar jobs, doing what we each agree was indeed “honest work.” We have each moved on – Salaita back to an academic job (and back to anti-Israel activism) and I to a career as a ghostwriter.  We both look back at our honest seasons fondly. For his part, Salaita is at his best when he recalls the kids he drove on his bus everyday: “I gave them all my attention. I offered myself to loving ridicule. I lied in order to entertain. In turn, they provided me with a tremendous gift: a much-needed sense of purpose. I will miss them.”

My co-workers and customers at Trader Joe’s gave me that same gift, the gift of being needed, the gift of being seen for what I could do now, rather than only for what I once was.  It's an old theme in literature of course, and neither Salaita nor I are the first to experience the sudden of loss of tenure and respectability. We are not the first middle-aged men to have had to reinvent ourselves, and to have discovered dignity and pride in doing something that the rest of the world regards as evidence of a fall from grace.

Salaita knows that other professors – and indeed, many other white-collar professionals – are morbidly fascinated by his life. “For the precarious, I embody a particular kind of worry,” he writes, “my story evokes a common fear among academics of being left without a job and inadequate training for anything else.”  Salaita not only had to learn how to drive, but to maintain his school buses: I had to learn to use a cash register, a pallet jack, a forklift, and a box cutter. I was fifty and living in my car when I learned these things. Salaita was only a little younger, and his precarity nearly as significant.

And yet, the differences between us are vast. Salaita lost his job not just because of his political positions, but because of the vehemence with which he stated them. He refused to delete the tweets that bordered on naked bigotry. (For example, in July 2014, Salaita tweeted Zionists: transforming 'anti-Semitism' from something horrible into something honorable since 1948). Before he was fired, while he was being fired, and for a decade after he was fired, Salaita continued to insist he had only done what he had to do. “In the end,” he writes, “I did what was necessary to hold on to a few beliefs that I consider non-negotiable.”  He doesn’t call himself a martyr, but he is quite clear that he was right, and the University of Illinois was wrong.

Shot through Salaita’s book is a sense of defiance, and the sense that he was dealt a very real injustice. As a man of the (far) left, Salaita sees what happened to him as just one unfairness in a long litany of great cruelties perpetuated in the name of, um, (checks notes) unbridled capitalism, systemic racism, and the monstrousness that is Zionism.  When you believe that there is a Great Crime, but that you are not yourself the great criminal, it is hard to avoid bitterness.  Salaita, to his credit, tries not to be bitter, but it seeps through in his writing. He does avoid outright self-pity by noting that whatever he endured pales in comparison to what those less fortunate than he experience.  In other words, he contextualizes his condition by acknowledging that others have it worse, but not by admitting that he might have done anything wrong.

There is an advantage to losing your teaching job because you slept with your students. The advantage, of course, is that you are inoculated against believing yourself a victim of a cruel and unjust system. When you know that your own habitual acting-out cost you your career and your marriage, you don’t have anyone else to blame. I was left filled with shame and remorse, which are unpleasant but not entirely unwarranted emotions.  As a white man from a comfortable background, I was very clear that my fall from grace (a phrase Salaita explicitly rejects) was not due to racism or some other systemic bigotry.  My white privilege inhibits any sense that I am some sort of a martyr. Maybe most importantly, it serves as a vaccination against bitterness.

Shame and self-loathing are no fun for the person experiencing them. It can be exhausting to love someone who is racked with guilt and tormented by self-hatred. Especially in the first few years after I lost my teaching job, I was no fun to be around. I was often filled with despair and sadness, and I obsessed on the details of my own sins. On the other hand, I didn’t rage at anyone else. I didn’t try and connect my own personal pain to the Great Crime, or to a transcendent politics. I wasn’t consumed with rage.

As a result, once I was able to forgive myself, begin to make amends to those I had harmed, and accept that I would never go back to teaching, I could at least start to let go of anger towards Hugo Schwyzer.  “There never was a war that was not inward,” wrote Marianne Moore. The corollary to that truth is that if we are able to stop fighting ourselves, the war stops altogether.  My war has stopped, because my war was with me and my demons. Steven Salaita’s war goes on, because the enemies he fights are not within, but without. He is fighting systems and entities, powers and principalities. Their dominion is still great, and Salaita is still desperate to defy them.   I still battle my shame, and Salaita still battles his bitterness, but I sense that one of us is going to have an easier time putting down his sword. I think that one is probably going to be me.

When I lost my job, I lost a great many friends.  So many people were furious with me. I had lied to so many, betrayed so many, inflicted so much embarrassment and heartache. Here again, I was strangely lucky. No one – no one – said, “Hugo, you did nothing wrong!” Not a soul on this earth declared that screwing students less than half your age was heroic. No one rushed to my defense.  Some people said they would stand by me and still love me, but even those who thought it acceptable for a professor to take willing young women to bed could not condone dishonesty and cheating. I had no one to co-sign my behavior. The whole world was united in a chorus: “You done fucked up, son, and you need to turn your whole life around.” Without anyone to defend my behavior, I was able to avoid the seductive temptation to believe that I was more sinned against than sinning.  My healing was conditional on taking full responsibility, and it was a great deal easier to take that responsibility when every last person who loved me was disappointed in my behavior.

When you believe, as Steven Salaita does, that you lost your teaching job because of the pro-Israel lobby, or right-wing university trustees, or anti-Arab bigotry, you do believe yourself “more sinned against than sinning.” And when you believe that you suffer because of an injustice done to you, it is far more difficult to distinguish areas where you actually fell short of the mark.  Thousands rallied to Salaita’s defense when he was canned. It was not enough to prevent him from “falling” to the point he needed to be a bus driver, but he never lacked for supporters willing to tell him he was a victim, or a martyr, or a poster child for why we need a more full-throated defense of academic freedom.  As the emperor in the fable learned, it is much harder to realize that you’re actually naked when everyone tells you that you are adorned in beautiful clothes. It is much harder to take stock of your own shortcomings when everyone tells you that you’ve done nothing wrong.

Steven and I both found hard and honest livings. I would suggest that real honesty also involves acknowledging your own complicity in the crime. We are all architects of our own adversity. I am lucky enough that life forced me to see that. I am not sure that Steven has been so fortunate.

Yes, there is a difference between sleeping with your students and tweeting angry tweets. One is more easily defended by notions of academic freedom. I do not claim that Salaita’s case and mine are identical. I am quite prepared to say that I probably deserved to be fired for my conduct, and that Salaita probably should have kept his gig with the Fighting Illini. Even so, it is striking that we both found such peace and such healing doing “honest work” with our hands and with the public. I hope for his sake he continues to find peace.

I’d like to take Salaita out for coffee. I’d like to sit with him and say, “Let’s put aside our ideological differences, and swap stories of what it was like to be notorious, micro-infamous, and in the crosshairs of our respective administrations.” I’d tell him I enjoyed his stories about his son, and his wife, and his parents. I’d tell him I loved the way he described the faces and foibles of his fellow bus drivers. 

I suspect Salaita would refuse, saying that he wasn’t interested in sharing cappuccinos with a self-absorbed Zionist. I would reply that I thought of my politics and my faith as being like a jacket. For the sake of an hour’s conversation, I would happily take that jacket off, and hang it on the back of my chair. I have known many men and women like Steven Salaita. When I tell them my politics and my faith are like a jacket, they give a very tight smile that is more like a grimace. “For you it is a jacket,” they say, “For me, it is my skin.”

I wear my convictions lightly. I also wear lightly the shame of my past and what I did that cost me my career and so much else. Salaita’s memoir makes it clear his convictions go down to his marrow, and his similar career loss is inextricably bound up not just with who he was, but who he is -- and who he intends to be.

Steve, if you’re reading this, and you make your way to L.A., the offer stands anyway.