Last year, Steven Salaita was fired — or, rather, “de-hired” — from a tenured job he’d been offered at the University of Illinois. Some bloggers and Jewish groups had publicized a series of angry tweets that Salaita, a Palestinian American, had written about Israel and Zionism in a moment of passion over the latest round of violence.

“You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the fucking West Bank settlers would go missing,” one of them said. “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948,” said another. Pro-Israel activists cried anti-Semitism and the board of trustees concluded that Salaita was beyond the pale. After all, Jewish students taking his classes might feel like they were in a “hostile environment.”

When Corey Robin launched a campaign to defend Salaita, I offered to help. To me, it was an obvious case. Those particular tweets seemed distasteful to me — though much less so, it turns out, when placed in context — and I’m generally allergic to intemperate rants. If I’d been Salaita’s department chair, I might have sent him an email urging him to tone it down. But firing him? A professor has the right to say what he wants.