Jon L. blogs below on the celebrated case of Ward Churchill, who was disinvited from speaking at Hamilton College and has stepped down as chair of his own ethnic studies department. Many are calling for his dismissal from his position at the University of Colorado. There are basically three accusations standing at the moment, and I think we need to make some distinctions here.
First, Churchill wrote the the victims of 9/11 were "little Eichmanns" who deserved to be killed by the "combat team" that turned an airliner full of innocent people into a guided missile. This is about as corrupt and nasty an opinion as it is possible for a mortal spirit to entertain, but it is neither grounds for firing him nor, I think, for dis-inviting him from speaking. Hamilton College might have been well advised not to invite him in the first place, had they known whom they were inviting; but once the invitation had been offered I think it should have been honored. Nothing would have been better than to present him to an audience now aware of his appalling views. Nor are his opinions grounds for firing him. The idea that Americans deserve to be murdered just because they are Americans, and thus complicit in the Iraq war, is a political idea and thus is entitled to protection. There may be a line here to be crossed, but it would have to be very extreme indeed and I do not believe this nut bag has yet crossed it.
Second, the Rocky Mountain News reports that there was a more disturbing and dangerous side to Churchill's rhetoric.
Indeed, for much of his career, Churchill has been belittling the activist left for abandoning armed struggle for various forms of non-violent protest. Without violence as a tactical option in its arsenal of weapons against state capitalism, he argues, the left ends up defending and reinforcing the same status quo it claims to oppose.
Such calls to action are given fuller treatment in Churchill's main polemical work, Pacifism as Pathology, which pays special tribute to Diana Oughton, one of three members of the terrorist Weather Underground who accidentally blew themselves up in 1970 while making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse.
Predictably enough, the book, which was published in various forms between 1986 and 1998, evolved from a workshop Churchill delivered in the early 1980s entitled "Demystifying the Assault Rifle," the objective of which was to help squeamish pacifists conquer their fear of weapons. After two hours of handling Heckler & Koch assault rifles, participants were apprised of the "applicability of various types of guns to different situations" and "the role of arms in assorted political contexts . . ."
It wouldn't be unusual for a professor whose field is ethnic studies to decry injustices committed against indigenous peoples in the United States and elsewhere. But in his public lectures around the country, Churchill has exhorted his troops to violence. In one speech, for example, he urged using violence to prevent tourists from going to Hawaii. "You want to do something constructive for indigenous Hawaiians? Stay home. And if you have to break their kneecaps in order to get them to, do it."
Here, I think, are grounds for dismissal. Such conduct is reckless in the extreme and might well encourage assault or murder. I can't imagine a university wanting to risk complicity in that by giving this guy a forum.
Third, it appears that Churchill gained his position in part by pretending to be a Native American. This is the safest grounds for throwing this malevolent clown out on his ear. Falsifying his resume is a firing offense, and even better, and it is about as offensive to Native American Tribes as it is to the those who lost love ones at the World Trade Center. Give him the boot.
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