A leading Jewish studies scholar has cancelled a lecture at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the ouster of professor Steven Salaita. The university withdrew a job offer to Salaita last year after he posted tweets harshly critical of the Israeli assault on Gaza. Todd Samuel Presner, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA, criticized university Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s insistence on “'civility' as the dubious touchstone for all academic discourse,” citing examples of “uncivil speech acts” by prophets in the Hebrew Bible who condemned injustice, nationalism and war.