The piece of human excrement that is Ward Churchill has received an enormous amount of coverage by the MSM over the last week. I’m sure he’s loving it, eating it up, accepting speaking engagements, getting an agent for his book and maybe even trying to sell the rights of his life story to Hollywood.
The question of Mr. Churchill continuing with his tenured position at the University of Colorado has enabled both the thoughtful and the clueless to weigh in on whether or not “Professor” Churchill deserves to be fired for his insensitive, idiotic, and nauseating remarks following the September 11 attacks.
I posted on his specific remarks here so I won’t stink up the pages of this site any more with his rhetorical vomit.
The question is now one of freedom of speech…even speech that is so full of lies, distortions, exaggerations, hyperbole, and hate that decent people everywhere have condemned it and even leftist radicals have questioned the “timing” of the remarks.
It is also a question of academic freedom; the idea that professors and students should be free to express their opinions without fear of being fired or expelled. Academic freedom is essential to maintaining the free flow of ideas that makes our University system so valuable in a free society.
In this vein, Evan Coyne Maloney writes in Academic Bias.com that Professor Churchill’s job should be protected:
We find these comments reprehensible. But we also believe that the best way to combat Professor Churchill is by opposing him with more speech. Creating an environment where tenured professors can be fired for controversial remarks is a dangerous precedent to set. Academic freedom provides a wide berth, and that’s by design. Sometimes, controversy is merely the result of childish, mean-spirited remarks, but it’s also true that many of mankind’s most brilliant thinkers aroused controversy in their day. If they’d been silenced because others were upset by what they had to say, then we’d all be poorer for it. To ensure that professors can safely pursue the most innovative thinking, academic freedom should be respected.
Shoddy scholarship–not a knack for generating controversy–is the primary reason Professor Churchill shouldn’t be holding his professor position. Still, the University of Colorado should have noticed that and acted when Churchill initially came up for tenure. Instead, low standards on the part of the university allowed him to gain tenure and even to chair a department. By giving Churchill tenure, the university made a tacit promise to stand behind him in the face of controversy. The university should respect that promise and protect his job. (Hat Tip: Instapundit)
Maloney points to the University’s incompetence for giving this Jacobinical lickspittle tenure in the first place.
BUT ONCE THAT TENURE IS GRANTED, THE UNIVERSITY HAS A DUTY AND RESPONSIBILITY TO DEFEND CHURCHILL REGARDLESS OF THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES.
Tenure, according to the Rocket at Powerline, may have outlived its purpose and reform is in order:
HINDROCKET: I think the whole tenure system needs to be rethought. It doesn’t make any sense to cover all misdeeds with the blanket of “controversy,” and say that because a professor is “controversial”–regardless of whether that means he’s a Republican or a pederast–he is protected. The taxpayers of Colorado are paying Professor Churchill’s salary, and they and others pay tuition so that their children can be competently educated. Churchill is obviously not a competent educator. There is no reason in the world why taxpayers and parents should be compelled to pay his salary in perpetuity, no matter how much of an idiot he is. If it requires a change in the tenure system to inject a modicum of common sense into our universities, let’s reform the tenure system.
Some will say: but that will leave our universities susceptible to currents of politics or fashion. To which I answer: Really? You think? As opposed to what–the situation we have now, in which any scholar who admits to conservative or Republican tendencies is less likely to be hired as a professor than I am to play in the NBA? Cry me a river.
While Hinderaker makes a point of sorts, I must take strong issue with it. Just because the left is myopic and biased in their hiring practices shouldn’t mean that as conservatives we should advocate joining them in their hypocrisy. “Two wrongs don’t make a right” is simplistic but, I believe, apt in this case. We should rise above that sort of intellectual arrogance and continue to press for the hiring and tenuring professors with bona fide conservative credentials. This, I believe is the way to counter moron’s like Churchill; through thoughtful and reasoned debate rather than suppression of his lunacies.
Mark Noonan has a little different take:
All speech is not protected, and no one has a right to suffer no penalty for what they say. I’m with Samuel Johnson on the matter: “I have got no further than this: Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.” You may say whatever you wish, but before you open your mouth, think carefully; are you fully prepared to accept the consequences of what you say?
Mark is at least half right. While the statement “All speech is not protected” is true up to a point, (the famous free speech test that one cannot holler “fire” in a crowded theater being one of the exceptions) I would hope that any court in the country would uphold Mr. Churchill’s right to spew his anti-American fantasies to his heart’s content. Where Mark hits the nail on the head is enduring the consequences of your speech.
Recently, we’ve seen celebrities like Linda Rhondstadt, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, and her husband Tim Robbins complain about being “blacklisted” for their anti-American statements. What these egotistical lightweights can’t seem to grasp is that there are people like me who will never watch another movie with any of those actors again based entirely on their politics. This, of course, is not censorship. It’s me exercising my right of choice. I choose not to watch them because the thought that any of my money going into their pockets makes me physically ill. The fact that they can’t accept that their loony ideas and hateful speech about America has real-world consequences shows how out of touch they are with the their fans and with the people who hire them to make movies; the studio heads and producers in Hollywood.
So Churchill’s outburst should be seen in this light. And he shouldn’t be fired for speaking his mind (that mind being devoid of rationality though it may be).
He should be fired for this:
The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council representing the National and International leadership of the American Indian Movement once again is vehemently and emphatically repudiating and condemning the outrageous statements made by academic literary and Indian fraud, Ward Churchill in relationship to the 9-11 tragedy in New York City that claimed thousands of innocent people’s lives.
Ward Churchill has been masquerading as an Indian for years behind his dark glasses and beaded headband. He waves around an honorary membership card that at one time was issued to anyone by the Keetoowah Tribe of Oklahoma. Former President Bill Clinton and many others received these cards, but these cards do not qualify the holder a member of any tribe. He has deceitfully and treacherously fooled innocent and naïve Indian community members in Denver, Colorado, as well as many other people worldwide. Churchill does not represent, nor does he speak on behalf of the American Indian Movement.
Churchill is listed in his bio as a Keetoowah Band Cherokee, Coordinator of American Indian Studies at CSU, and a Native American Activist. If what AIM says is true (and they may have a bone to pick with Churchill for some past criticism of the radical Native American organization) the good Professor has been passing himself off as something he isn’t. In short, he has committed a fraud upon the University which would be ample grounds to yank his tenure and give his ass the boot it so richly deserves.
Don’t fire Churchill for his political views…fire him because he’s a lying piece of floating flotsam, not worthy of respect, title, or notice.
The jerk has had his 15 minutes. Let’s all move along now. There’s nothing more to see.
UPDATE: A “TEACHER’S TEACHER” RESPONDS
I’ve featured my brother Jim’s thoughts before on this site and I thought that since he’s a lifelong teacher, it would be valuable to hear his take on the issue of tenure and academic freedom.
Your response to Churchill’s words is characterized as always by that light touch for which you are so justly famous (!)
Of the welter of issues that the comments raise, the most prominent, I would think, has to do with whether or not Professor Churchill should lose his tenured position over them. If I read you right, you seem to be indicating that he should not for the comments themselves, but perhaps for the “shoddy scholarship” that they represent.
I know you love history, so I’ll invoke a similar case here. William Shockley, physicist and Nobel prize winner for inventing the transistor with John Bardeen (of my second alma mater, the University of llinois; Bardeen won a second nobel while I was there for the discovery os superconductivity), was in the latter part of his life a professor at Stanford. You may recall that Shockley began teaching and preaching almost exclusively about eugenics, race superiority, and forced sterilization - none of which has much to do with physics and transistors.
By all accounts, Shockley was a brilliant but exceedingly difficult man. His conclusions about race (the inherent intellectual inferiority of people in Africa and of African descent) were ideas that he felt he had researched thoroughly and that his prestige as a physicist and general intellect justified his use of his professorial bully pulpit to teach and spread ideas that most Americans, left and right, regarded as racist and on research methodology that was fundamentally flawed. He was, after all, a physicist and not a statistician, anthropologist, or neurobiologist.
Shockley could scarcely appear in public without being vilified and shouted down, even in debates. His conclusions were rejected by responsible scientists worldwide, and the flaws in his methodology revealed and publicized.
Yet Stanford never fired him, despite frequent calls to do so, and Shockley died in his home on the campus in 1989 at the age of 79.
Stanford was upholding the broadest possible interpretation of academic freedom, somewhat in keeping with the medieval tradition of free inquiry - that the intellect should follow its muse in the direction that it leads. We do not object to this when the results are benign: Linus Pauling was another Nobel prize winner in physics, not biology or nutrition, yet his research and fervent belief in the efficacy of vitamin C as a prophylactc measure against disease has largely been accepted now by elements in the medical community, even though Pauling too was speaking and proselytizing “out of his field.”
Now Churchill’s comments remind me of Shockley’s, with one important difference. The comments are on their face absurd and mean; no one other than a jihadist would take them seriously. But Churchill is talking out of his field if he is a professor of American Indian studies - unless he develops some linkage between 9/11 and something in Native American history, say something like the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre or the Pontiac or Tecumseh risings as a kind of pre-emptive strike against Euro-American encroachments on Indian lands. If he is an “expert” in such topics, it would have been really easy to try to develop an intellectually defensible (if emotionally reprehensible) parallel.
Churchill’s failure to attempt this even minimal linkage is surely “shoddy scholarship.”
As you observe, though, there is no question that these ideas, even spoken “out of field,” constitute political speech and are consequently protected by the first amendment and by the tenets of academic freedom.
I suppose that because UC Boulder is a state institution that the people of the state would have the right to insist that a particular orthodoxy be espoused at their tax supported institution, something akin to the “loyalty oaths” of the 50’s. Of course, doing so would absolutely gut whatever integrity that UC has as a genuinely academic institution - but that’s up to the people of the state, If they want a Clown College of academic puppets spouting soothing bromides at their expense, that is their right.
But if they and we want a truly democratic republic, something that we can proudly point to as a model in contrast to jihadist theocracy, then we have to acknowledge the right of the Shockleys and Churchills to vent their prejudices openly and without penalty except our rejection of them - our turning away from their hate and stupidity in disgust.
I had forgotten about that nutball Shockley. He didn’t seem to grasp the consequences of what he was saying. His appearance on Charlie Rose shortly before his death was memorable for the way that Rose, a truly remarkable raconteur with a gift for getting people to open up, made the Professor look like the racist idiot he was.
And the Brother makes an excellent point…political correctness can be just as damaging when it’s used by conservatives as by liberals. I hope my friends on the right keep that in mind while they continue to call for Professor Feces’ resignation or firing.
