On Sunday, Prof. Anita Hill (Heller) published an article in the Huffington Post stating that she will not be lecturing at the University of Illinois this semester after the escalation of an incident involving the school’s policy toward free speech.

According to the article, Hill had agreed nearly a year ago to give two talks this spring at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—a Chancellor’s Lecture and a keynote address to the Women Faculty of Color in the Academy Conference.

However, following the present escalation of a previous incident, Hill has made the decision to cancel her lectures.

The incident involves Dr. Steven Salaita, a professor who had accepted a job offer to teach at UIUC and quit his job at Virginia Tech University to do so.

Salaita was set to begin a position as a tenured professor in the university’s American Indian studies program.

However, the offer was rescinded two weeks before the start of the academic year due to a series of tweets Salaita made in August criticizing Israel’s role in last summer’s war in Gaza and their conflict with Hamas, according to a Huffington Post article published Sept. 9.

Salaita is currently suing several top administrators and officials at UIUC, saying that the university violated his constitutional first amendment right to freedom of speech. He is also suing several unnamed donors of the university, claiming that they interfered in the incident and with his university contract by influencing the university to terminate it.

Hill wrote in her Huffington Post article that the incident has “dramatically reshaped the conversational space on [UIUC’s] campus and erodes the possibility of the open conversation I had hoped to have during my talks there.”

After Salaita’s job offer was rescinded last fall, making headlines, Hill wrote in her article that she began to craft her upcoming lectures at the school “to address the tensions between the protections of civil rights laws aimed at providing equal educational opportunity, on the one hand, and freedom of speech, on the other.”

However, Hill noted that after the filing of the lawsuit and the increase in tensions on campus regarding the issue, the “productive discussion” that she had envisioned regarding this issue could no longer occur “in the shadow of active litigation and the resulting present intense polarity.”

“The litigation completely alters the context for any talk I can give,” Hill wrote.

Hill wrote that she regrets these two “missed opportunities” to address issues of freedom of expression on campus. She wrote that she had also planned to discuss both the reform of Title IX policies and the protection of student rights, specifically against “verbal sexual harassment and physical sexual assault” during her talks. According to Hill, both of these are topics that she has discussed and lectured on at length at various colleges and universities across the country.

“Whether I am present or not, there will come a time for the UIUC community to wrestle with the ongoing question writ large of how to protect both basic civil rights and freedom of expression,” Hill wrote.

—Rachel Sharer