BOULDER, Colo., Feb. 4 -- The University of Colorado staunchly defends its
faculty's rights of free speech and open academic inquiry. Most of the time.
But Friday, interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano launched an "academic
investigation" that could lead to the firing of Ward Churchill, a tenured full
professor who ignited a national firestorm by applauding the 9/11 terrorist
attacks and condemning the victims as greedy, arrogant and cruel.
In a commentary he says he wrote on 9/11, Ward Churchill called some victims
"little Eichmanns." (Mark Leffingwell -- The Daily Camera Via Ap)
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In a rambling, acidic commentary he says he dashed off within hours of the
attacks, the 57-year-old professor of ethnic studies described the bankers and
stock traders who died in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns." He
called their deaths a "penalty befitting their participation in . . . the
'mighty engine of profit' to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has
always been enslaved."
For years, those remarks went largely unnoticed. Indeed, Churchill was promoted
to chairman of his department. He enjoyed a devoted corps of student supporters
on the campus here and commanded four-figure lecture fees across the country for
speeches on his academic specialty, poverty among Native Americans.
But then Ian Mandell, the 21-year-old editor in chief of the student newspaper
at New York's Hamilton College, did the homework that nobody else had done.
With the professor scheduled to speak at Hamilton -- in a forum titled, aptly,
"Limits of Dissent" -- Mandell googled "Ward Churchill" and found the
phosphorescent 2001 essay.
One Web site version, available at www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html,
has text under Churchill's byline saying that the trade center victims in New
York were ignorant of the evil they did every day "because they were too busy
braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging
power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out
of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of
infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of
visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns
inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in
hearing about it."
Mandell's story last week in the Hamilton Spectator drove conservative radio
commentators into full-scale fury. The static from the airwaves, in turn, has
prompted battles over academic freedom at Colorado, Hamilton and a few other
schools that have pending invitations to Churchill for lectures.
At first, the colleges involved stood by the professor, citing the transcendent
value of unfettered scholastic debate. "Prof. Churchill's comments have
precipitated a discussion we ought to have," said Colorado President Elizabeth
Hoffman. Chancellor DiStefano said, "I must support his right . . . to hold and
express his views, no matter how repugnant." At Hamilton, Prof. Nancy Rabinowitz,
who runs the forum where Churchill was to speak, argued last week that "the
students should hear his whole argument before they boil it down to a few sound
bites."
But in media-saturated America, a few incendiary sound bites can easily
overpower esoteric discussions about the right of tenure and the value of free
discussion. Hamilton President Joan Hinde Stewart announced Tuesday that the
"Limits of Dissent" discussion would be canceled. She cited numerous threats of
violence among the thousands of e-mails that poured in after Churchill's 9/11
commentary was lifted from its previous oblivion.
And Colorado's DiStefano, after an angry grilling from the university's Board of
Regents -- an elected body dominated by conservatives -- reversed himself and
announced a 30-day investigation of all of Churchill's lectures and
publications. This is the first step, the chancellor said, in the legal process
required to fire a tenured professor.
Meanwhile, there have been Web site calls for the resignation of Stewart for
allowing Churchill to be invited in the first place.
Walking across the snowy Boulder campus this week, with his graying hair hanging
to his shoulders, a cigarette hanging from his lip and a phalanx of students
hanging on his every word, Churchill himself seemed less flustered than
virtually anybody else about the uproar surrounding his opinions. He sounded
almost amused as he described the "mass" of death threats he has received and
the swastikas that were painted on his truck. Asked whether his job is in
danger, Churchill hitched his thumbs into his jeans and drew a chuckle from the
adoring student crowd by promising to sue if his tenure is violated: "They
really don't want to do that unless they want me owning this university."
Still, Churchill did try to reduce the tension this week by agreeing to step
down four months early from the administrative post of chairman of the ethnic
studies department. That move reduced his annual salary from $115,000 to
$94,000. It did nothing, though, to soften the bipartisan fury among Colorado
politicians who had known little about the popular professor at their state's
flagship public university.
Churchill is a Vietnam veteran who became a full professor in the field of
American Indian studies without the benefit of a PhD -- he holds a BA and MA
from the University of Illinois-Springfield. He has published several books. He
was acquitted last month with other Indian activists on charges of blocking the
Columbus Day parade in Denver. Jurors said they accepted Churchill's contention
that a parade honoring Christopher Columbus amounts to "hate speech."
Students said Churchill makes a similar argument in his undergraduate course
called "American Holocaust." His books, including "Fantasies of the Master Race"
(1992) and "Colonization and Genocide in Native North America" (1994) regularly
compare the American establishment to the Nazis, the same comparison he made
about financial industry workers killed on 9/11.
At their meeting Thursday, university regents said they were determined to act
against Churchill. The regents have gone through a tough patch in recent months,
accused of inaction on a series of scandals that badly sullied the school's
reputation. When the Boulder County prosecutor charged that Colorado football
coach Gary Barnett was using "sex and drugs" to recruit 17-year-old high school
football stars, the regents held endless meetings and spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars on a detailed investigation -- and then decided that nobody
needed to be disciplined.
A lawsuit by two undergraduates who say they were gang-raped by Barnett's
football players and recruits is pending. After a student athlete was accused of
referring to a female student by a four-letter slang term referring to part of
the female anatomy, President Hoffman declared that this "c-word" can sometimes
be a "term of endearment." Students and faculty denounced the president for
"hate speech." The regents again took no action.
Accordingly, board members were clearly eager to act when they gathered Thursday
to consider the Ward Churchill affair. Once again, though, the trustees lost
control. Having issued an agenda for a "public meeting," the regents informed
the packed auditorium that no students would be allowed to speak on the issue of
free speech. This prompted a raucous outcry. The board members' discussion was
almost completely drowned out by catcalls from the crowd: "This is 1984!" "This
is McCarthyism!" "Worse than Saddam!" "Ward was using a 'term of endearment!' "
As the noise grew, the regents and the school president fled the room, and
police in riot helmets cleared the audience, arresting two particularly noisy
protesters. Afterward, a shaken Hoffman said the Churchill affair reminds her of
a dark memory at the University of Colorado -- the treatment of former
philosophy professor Morris Judd. At the height of the McCarthy era, in 1951,
Judd was investigated and fired after anonymous students charged that his view
of the Korean War sounded "communistic." More than 50 years later, the
university held a lavish ceremony to apologize to Judd and create a scholarship
in his name. "I hope we don't do anything now," the school president said
Thursday, "that would cause future generations to have to apologize."