Ward Churchill and Free Speech
Thomas C. Reeves, The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute
[Editor's Note: This entry also appears HERE on the History News Network.]

The Ward Churchill case is more interesting than it appears. In case you've been out of the country for the past several weeks, Churchill, a highly paid, tenured, University of Colorado ethnic studies professor, gained national attention when it was discovered he had called thousands of American victims in the September 11 attacks "little Eichmanns," a reference to the infamous Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The sin of those innocent people who died was that they were perpetuating America's "mighty engine of profit." Their killers, wrote Churchill, were "combat teams" that made the "gallant sacrifices" of targeting the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. By this reasoning, all capitalists, meaning virtually all Americans and citizens of industrialized nations throughout the world, may justly be murdered by terrorists. Churchill's statement is incredibly callous, morally absurd, and wholly irresponsible. And he's proud of it. The Governor of Colorado wants the professor fired.

When people began looking into Churchill's background, they discovered that he lacks a Ph.D., the usual requirement for scholarship and tenure at reputable colleges and universities. (He has assured me in writing that he did not misrepresent his academic credentials when being considered for employment.) While he was undoubtedly hired because of his claim to be a Native American, that assertion now seems highly doubtful. He is supposedly as much as three-sixteenths Cherokee but cannot name an American Indian ancestor. No Indian tribe has claimed him, and several Native American groups have been denouncing him as an imposter for years.

There's more. While Churchill has published several books (of a decidedly polemical nature), he is currently under investigation for plagiarism. He is also being charged with art fraud. He took a swing at the television reporter who first confronted him with that allegation. Moreover, Churchill is being criticized for incitement to violence. A Denver radio show has been playing tapes daily of the professor's talks, noting his inflammatory rhetoric. We've recently learned that during the 1960s, Churchill was a member of SDS and the Weathermen. Gentle folk, all. (See this article by David Kelly of the Los Angeles Times).

More interesting to me than Churchill is the issue of his free speech. A few colleges cancelled planned appearances by Churchill when the full impact of what he had said made some people nervous about security. The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater wavered a bit, but then paid nearly $5,000 to bring Churchill to campus for a talk. The politically correct Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, echoing Whitewater officials, called this act a "triumph for free speech."

According to press reports, Churchill didn't say much at Whitewater that isn't heard routinely on American campuses. He attacked racism, and claimed that his critics have been using it on him. He condemned the United States for using violence throughout its history, noting the decimation of Native Americans, the atomic bombs, and the loss of life in Iraq. America, in short, is evil. Churchill is radical, angry, and loud; he sports shoulder-length hair. Nothing new here. Quite naturally, he received a standing ovation.

But should Churchill have been invited at all? Legally, you can make a good First Amendment case for it. Still, are there no boundaries that rule out foolish, cruel, and ridiculous statements by professors? Of course there are. If a scientist claimed that the moon was made of green cheese, should that alleged scholar be awarded respect, tenure, and freedom to teach such nonsense in the classroom? If an historian advocated the return of the Holocaust, should he not be fired on the spot and his right of free speech denied flatly and unanimously by civilized people? What should happen to the anthropologist who campaigned for the continuation of slavery as an integral part of natural law? Or the political scientist who applauded the spread of AIDS? As the Supreme Court noted long ago, there are limits to what one can say in a free society. There must be. The right of a professor to say anything, anywhere, on any topic, is an extremist position that few Americans would endorse, and rightly so. One would think that the politically correct, with their passion for speech codes and "hate crimes," would be the first to understand this simple truth.

Now we are hearing about the threat of McCarthyism. The term has been raised by Churchill's Chancellor (recently resigned) and by a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who attended the speech in Whitewater. Such nonsense. McCarthyism has to do with false allegations concerning Communist and pro-Communist activities for political profit, and it is properly applied to the period 1948-56. It's a Cold War term and not a synonym for censorship. So let's remove the Joe McCarthy card and talk honestly about the limits of free speech. Without any, we are forced to live perpetually as prey for those who are irresponsible, ignorant, offensive, and irrational.

Were Ward Churchill's comments about the victims of 9/11 on the level of the moon being made of green cheese or the product of reasoned scholarship? Let's think long and hard about this. Informed, morally responsible opinion must be protected on campus. Insanity and fraud need not be.

For a first-rate argument to the contrary, focusing on the "slippery slope" argument, see Cass R. Sunstein, "War and PC: Obstacles to Free Thought," Academic Questions (Summer, 2002), 20-26. For an interesting assertion that the Ward Churchill case has opened for examination the whole question of tenure and the Left's domination of higher education, see the piece by journalist Milt Rosen, "CU is worth fighting for."

NAS12:22 PM

Perspectives on a Rogue Department at Columbia
K.C. Johnson, Brooklyn College—CUNY

Columbia's student newspaper, the Spectator, closed off February by publishing a remarkable editorial, which chastised the New York Sun for "vitriol," "yellow journalism," "biased reporting," and having "taken the focus of the debate away from the University community" regarding the crisis in Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) department.

Pretty serious charges, especially given that the Spectator cites not even one factual error from the Sun's voluminous coverage of the controversy. It seems as if the Spectator is suffering from journalistic envy, given that it has been scooped by the Sun from the start on this story. The Sun was first, for instance, to report the existence of the David Project film, in which students described events of bias and intimidation in MEALAC classes; to look into MEALAC professor Hamid Dabashi's astonishing claim that university guidelines allowed him to cancel his class at the last minute so he could speak at an anti-Israel rally; to bring us inside one of MEALAC professor Joseph Massad's classes by obtaining notes from several students describing Massad's anti-Israel lecture rants; or, most recently, to discover that a member of the Law School's board of overseers had written President Bollinger to compare a Massad public address to a "neo-Nazi" rally at which one audience member dismissed the testimony of Bill Clinton's Middle east negotiator, Dennis Ross, by approvingly shouting, "Dennis Ross is a Jew!"

The most ominous assertion from the Spectator, however, comes in its claim that on MEALAC, the opinions of the press or "even of the public at large should not play a role in what is fundamentally a University-based issue."

Brooklyn College took exactly the same stance during my tenure controversy. The only hostile member of the department willing to speak on the record fumed that "it is outrageous that reputable scholars would go on at such length" about a case not from their campus. (Embarrassed by his defensiveness and the blustery tone of these words when they appeared in print, the professor then ceased public comment.) Arguing that outsiders have no right to comment on MEALAC's abuses is equally inappropriate to the Columbia situation.

The Spectator apparently envisions a campus environment divorced from reality. It assumes, first of all, that a system of checks and balances exists within the university, making illegitimate the mere act of an outside appeal (to other scholars, to the media, to trustees, to interested parties). Yet on curricular and personnel issues featuring those willing to subvert established academic norms in pursuit of an ideological or personal agenda, too often no checks and balances are present-and not solely, or even primarily, for ideological reasons. Faculty from other departments don't want publicly to criticize activities from outside their turf, lest this be used as a precedent against them at a later stage. Administrators, eager to avoid ruffling the feathers of the faculty, often perceive the path of least resistance as not challenging rogue departments like MEALAC. Students have little or no say in internal university mechanisms. Under such circumstances, the choice then becomes -- as I discovered in my tenure case, and as the Columbia students who have stood up to MEALAC intimidation have learned now -- going beyond the campus walls or conceding an unfair defeat.

The Spectator also errs in claiming that, as the MEALAC affair is "fundamentally a [Columbia] University-based issue," it is inappropriate for others to comment on it. Public opinion provides a deterrent effect. Perhaps professors in other Middle Eastern Studies departments will now be less inclined to imitate the behavior of their MEALAC colleagues. And, more important, all of us now have a better sense of the distorted sense of "instruction" that occurs in classes taught by ideologues such as Joseph Massad.

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If the Spectator doesn't like the Sun's response to the MEALAC crisis, exactly how does it think the story should be handled? A good clue comes from the newspaper's fawning coverage of an event organized by the New York Civil Liberties Union claiming that the students' protests about MEALAC foreshadow arrival of a "new McCarthyism" on campus.

As the NYCLU was last heard from when commenting that students can challenge professors' opinions only if the faculty member supplies written approval to do so, in advance, few would have predicted a diverse presentation. But I would have thought the NYCLU at least would have attempted to provide the veneer of balance. Instead, the speakers were Anthropology professor Mahmood Mamdani, signatory of what President Lee Bollinger termed the "grotesque and offensive" petition demanding that Columbia divest from firms doing business in Israel, and recent author of an article detailing what he termed the "key parallels between neoconservatives and jihadists"; Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of The Nation; and Yeshiva University professor Ellen Schrecker, whose rather intriguing view of the past I've previously analyzed. Having assembled such a panel, Kate Meng-Brassel, president of the Columbia ACLU, remarked, "I'm glad we had opposing viewpoints in the debate." I can only assume that her comment was made tongue-in-cheek.

The positions of the NYCLU or the Spectator, lamentably, are not surprising; but their misuse of an enormously serious allegation (McCarthyism) raises more concerns. As the president of Columbians for Academic Freedom, Ariel Beery, observed the day before the NYCLU event, "the perversion of a term like McCarthyism by some residents of the Ivory Tower to make it mean any criticism of any idea whatsoever threatens the right to dissent." In a compelling essay, Beery urged the Columbia "administration to recall lessons from McCarthyism -- the real period, and not the imagined purge supposedly carried out by students at Columbia. It was during that time that intellectuals learned the real value of unfettered discourse and the importance of academic freedom."

Indeed, the only instances of suppression of opinions thus far in this controversy have come from such MEALAC such as Joseph Massad, who ordered a student who refused to acknowledge Israeli atrocities to leave his class. The NYCLU's conception of free speech, like Schrecker's interpretation of "McCarthyism," seems to turn logic on its head. As Beery concludes, "The whole point of free speech is to disagree with the orthodoxy of the time -- to ensure that those with dissenting voices are able to make their claims without fear of reprisal. At Columbia, however, it seems that free speech is only for those people with whom one agrees."

NAS1:58 PM