Saturday, February 05, 2005

Churchill (Not Winston) Redux

The Rocky Mountain Post has a round-up on our good friend Ward Churchill (long may he rot.) Bruce Fein offers a servicable, but not forceful enough, call for Churchill's dimissal in CU would be perfectly within its rights if it fired Ward Churchill.

Eugene Volokh's pro-Churchill attempt, Dismissing controversial professor would set a frightening precedent comes off much the worse being nothing more than the most vacuous of slipperly slope arguments. Volokh seems to notice as much since he has posted a defense of using such arguments on his blog. His reasoning comes down to, "Its bad when others do it, but its just fine when I do." Yeah, real convincing.

Neither Fein or Volokh even mention Churchill's repeated advocation of violence against those that disagree with him. For me, that is what places this case in the "need to fire" category. I just don't see where there is even any room for doubt.

Neither does Paul Campos from Colorado's Law School: Real question is, how did prof get on CU's faculty in first place?

Anyone who reads widely in the collected works of professor Churchill, and especially anyone who listens to his speeches, will, if they are not blinded by certain ideological commitments, recognize the essentially fascist tendency of his work. If a white American were to speak of any foreign people or nation in anything like the way Churchill discusses America and Americans, the fascist character of his work would be obvious to everyone.

This point is only underlined by the behavior of Churchill's supporters, who, while not actually wearing brown shirts, did a quite convincing impersonation of fascist thugs at Thursday's meeting of the University of Colorado Regents.


All this was merely par for the course for Churchill, who believes that a Columbus Day parade is an incitement to genocide, and therefore something that he and his followers have a legal right to disrupt.

But while the question of whether a brilliant scholar with a fascist streak ought to be considered for a place on a university faculty retains at least some academic interest, it has nothing to do with Churchill, whose writings and speeches feature an incoherent farrago of boundless paranoia, wildly implausible theories, obscene celebrations of murder, and atrocious prose.


The question of whether a serious research university ought to hire someone like Churchill is laughable on its face. What's not so funny is the question of exactly how someone like him got hired in the first place, and then tenured and named the head of a department.

That, in the end, is a more important question than what will or ought to happen to Churchill now. Churchill is a pathetic buffoon, but the University of Colorado is far from alone in having allowed itself to toss intellectual integrity and human decency overboard in the pursuit of worthy goals.

Speaking truth to power, giving a voice to those who have been silenced, pursuing controversial and unpopular ideas in an intellectually rigorous way - these are all things that the university in general, and this university in particular, has done and continues to do.


That through whatever combination of negligence, cowardice and complicity we have allowed Ward Churchill to besmirch those ideals by invoking them in the defense of his contemptible rantings is now our burden and our shame.

Brave words coming from Campos, since its obvious that A) Churchill knows where he lives and B) Churchill advoctes violence against his political "enemies." How can anybody say with certainty that other members of the University of Colorado community have not been silenced because they fear that Churchill, or his "thugs" might actually do what they say they want to do? Is that really what a University community is supposed to be? The greatest amount of damage that could be done to the notion of "Academic Freedom" would be done by retaining Ward Churchill, not by firing him.

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