Steven Salaita's Historiography of Victimhood

Steven Salaita’s Historiography of Victimhood

Steven Salaita

Steven Salaita’s academic work emerges from a highly politicized, Manichaean historiography that champions anachronistic concepts of victimhood over a rigorous examination of sources. CW director Winfield Myers examines this work today at American Thinker:

Had the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign not nixed Steven Salaita’s appointment as professor of American Indian studies after his extended string of vituperative, vulgar Tweets, blog posts, and other communications exposed his anti-Semitism and radicalism to a broad audience, he would have likely remained an obscure academic. Today his legions of professorial supporters view him as a cause célèbre and alleged victim of the “Israel lobby” and rich alumni.

Salaita may not have presented himself as a victim of academe’s alleged perfidy before Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s action in August, but his fields of study assume the victimhood of indigenous peoples worldwide. Since world history is replete with conquests, intermarriage, assimilation, and the rise and fall of expansive empires, separating victims from victimizers through the millennia is a difficult process -- unless, that is, the purpose of one’s academic work has less to do with the pursuit of truth than with achieving political goals through a quixotic, politicized reading of history.

To read the rest of this essay, please click here.

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University of Oklahoma University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Winfield Myers

Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.