AN HONEST LIVING: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries, or "needs must when the devil drives"

AN HONEST LIVING: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries
STEVEN SALAITA
Fordham University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: 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 to 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, professional 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 an occasion for defiance, not conciliation. An Honest Living presents an intimate personal narrative of the author’s decade of professional joys and travails.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I have experienced being in the crosshairs of the True Believers. It was not as awful for me, old retiree and disabled, as it was for able-bodied new dad and advanced-degree having Steve. My career is an avocation, not a livelihood; I read books and write about them whether or not anyone pats attention to me. I do not do this for money so I am more insulated from that harm, which made me feel the nervousness of Author Steve's situation more sharply. If I'm this tense when piled on, dismissed in demeaning terms, then blocked by people I'd assumed were not judgmental, how must someone with a job he likes and wants to keep doing as well as a family to support feel?!

One thing is for sure, he felt the need to get a paycheck very quickly. Leaving a professorship for a seat at the front of a schoolbus was not the comedown I think his enemies within academia thought it would be. It certainly makes me understand Mao's cultural revolution more clearly...tell an academic he's now a "menial worker" and watch him wither like a salted slug. Not Author Steve. He did the "menial" job, thought about what principles and ethics are for, and came out of the situation with very cute anecdotes about his kid passengers, and a damn good job in Cairo working for the American University in Cairo. (I read a lot of their press's books.) I'm very glad for that because I think Author Steve belongs in the driver's seat of young peoples' education, always has but even moreso after his recent experiences. He can now speak with authority about the hypocrisy and the shabbiness of the Establishment's vaunted belief in the free exchange of ideas and the protection of the right to free speech within their institutions.

It's worthwhile to read a memoir by someone who's been victimized for standing up for his principles. It's fun to read the wry reflections of a man who's never lost his principles under pressure. It's deeply instructive to take the tour of modern cancel culture with one of the canceled. A book doing all of these things is a must-read in my never-remotely-humble opinion.