Stupidity as a Firing Offense
Why is Bill O'Reilly chairing our faculty meetings?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Washington Post's SLATE/Posted Thursday, Feb. 10, 2005, at 2:51 PM PT
File Ward Churchill under "Annoying Blowhards Who Have Come To Embody Important
Policy Questions." One couldn't unearth a less attractive poster boy for
free-speech rights in academia. Churchill may be fired from his faculty
position at the University of Colorado for having written and spoken some of
the most moronic nonsense ever to emanate from the mouth of an alleged
academic. But he shouldn't be punished for being a hack. The folks who hired
him should.
Shortly after Sept. 11, Churchill authored an essay, "Some People Push Back: On
the Justice of Roosting Chickens," in which, among other things, he suggested
that everyone who died in the Twin Towers that day were "little
Eichmanns"-mindless capitalist functionaries somehow deserving of their fate.
(Churchill has since stated that the janitors, children, and firemen who died
should probably have been excluded from that charge.) He celebrated the 9/11
terrorists as freedom fighters. The essay is pretty much a sophomoric rant,
intended solely to shock, and indistinguishable in kind and in tone from some
of his earlier "scholarship," including this nonsense on the Jewish plot to
claim "exclusive rights" to the Holocaust, which is, in turn, based on this
drivel, lauded in some circles as groundbreaking political theory.
Now, nobody at the University of Colorado seems to have much minded that
Churchill's footnotes often took the form of creative exaggerations and
omissions, or that his trite little analogies to all-things-Nazi is a
rhetorical device most of us outgrew in the third grade. Indeed, Churchill-who
holds only a master's degree from Sangamon State University*-is a tenured
professor and was, until he resigned earlier this week, the esteemed head of
the university's Ethnic Studies Department.
What changed over the past week has nothing to do with Churchill's scholarship
or comments, or even with his increasingly dubious claims of Native American
ancestry. What changed was that Churchill was invited to give a speech at
Hamilton College-a small liberal arts university in upstate New York-on "The
Limits of Dissent." What changed was that someone on the faculty at Hamilton
Googled Churchill and reasonably felt his "little Eichmann" remarks were
offensive.
What changed was that the governor of New York called him a "bigoted terrorist
supporter," and the perennially classy Bill O'Reilly posted the address of
Hamilton College President Joan Hinde Stewart on his show. The predictable
flood of death threats she received convinced her to cancel the speech-for fear
of student safety at the event.
And suddenly, Ward Churchill is a household name. Garnering a hero's welcome
back in Colorado this week, Churchill deliberately taunted both Colorado Gov.
Bill Owens, who's called for his termination, and the school's board of
regents, who have opened an emergency 30-day review period in which to
determine whether he can legally be fired.
But fired for what, exactly?
For making Bill O'Reilly mad? For irking the Wall Street Journal's editorial
writers? For embarrassing the governor of Colorado?
If academic tenure means anything at all, it means professors must be allowed
to say and write what they choose without fearing removal by popular
referendum. That's why the decision to grant someone tenure must be taken so
seriously in the first place. One hundred percent of the blame for the
Churchill debacle rests with the University of Colorado's board of regents that
hired, granted tenure to, and promoted an individual whose scholarship and
personal qualifications are now, and must always have been, in serious
question. Churchill's silly notions have been in the public domain for years.
Firing him only now suggests that Bill O'Reilly, as opposed to his faculty
peers, gets the deciding vote on who is allowed to teach our young people.
Churchill's 9/11 comments were patently offensive. But they were not hate
speech, they were not treason, and they were not in any sense a call to
imminent violence on the part of his listeners. Read in context, his words are
the purest form of political speech. Does that mean students have to take his
classes? No. Does it mean any university needs to invite him to speak or even
hire him in the first place? No. But does it mean that the governor or the
board of regents are entitled to remove him now, simply because some "taxpayer
money" goes to pay his salary? No. That would make virtually every
professorship in the land subject to a heckler's veto.
A few years ago I wrote a piece about the kinds of violent protest witnessed at
Hamilton last week-suggesting that when students or community members block an
unpopular speaker through riots or death threats, it is they, rather than the
speaker, who have crossed the line from protected speech to assault. We've
become so persuaded that college students' fragile political sensibilities
trump both academic rigor and open discourse that when they silence unpopular
ideas through protest or threats of violence, we treat it as their sacred
right.
Virtually everyone who has called for Churchill's removal makes the same
argument: "What if it was your son/husband/mother killed in the towers?" But
that is not an argument for suppressing speech-particularly on college campuses
and particularly at a forum ostensibly testing the "limits of dissent." It's an
argument for making all political discourse conform to the sensibilities of the
most fragile victim. It's an argument for banning any discussions of the
American Revolution in history classes because some student may have burnt her
tongue on a mug of tea once.
In his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill wrote:
[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is
robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who
dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is
right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if
wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and
livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
We can none of us learn anything-not our college kids and not our choleric talk
show hosts-if our fixed notions aren't challenged. In a perfect world they
would be challenged by scholars and intellectuals rather than cheap
provocateurs. But it's ultimately the university's task, not mine or yours, to
draw that distinction.
Correction, Feb. 11: The original article mistakenly spelled Ward Churchill's
alma mater as Sangaman State University. The correct spelling is Sangamon. The
name of the school is misspelled on Churchill's University of Colorado faculty
bio page. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine
