An Honest Living: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries

An exiled professor’s journey from inside and beyond academeIn 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 for 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 ear