This back-and-forth between Cary Nelson and Feisal Mohamed about the Salaita case is pretty weird, mostly because Nelson initially seems to be trying to backpedal but then doesn’t make much progress. But I thought this part, from Mohamed, was quite well put:

“‘Civility’ has always been a convenient pretext for excluding certain people and ideas from the academy, which I imagine is why the national AAUP voiced reservations about it. There is some irony, first of all, that such terms as ‘civility’ and ‘collegiality’ were often used in the postwar years to justify the exclusion of Jewish faculty. That is just one instance when a threat to civility has really meant ‘too ethnic for our comfort’—though it could also mean ‘too leftist’ or ‘too feminist.’ It is especially troubling, then, that the university has used the term to trump the internal decision-making of an ethnic-studies program—and a program of American Indian studies, no less, as though the natives were not capable of civil conduct if left to their own devices.”

There is indeed “some irony” there.