In an earlier post on free speech, I suggested on possible case in which a university might be justified in interfering with a Professor's expression of his or her opinions. The case was a professor who openly advocated genocide. Well, what do you know, such a case just popped up. I will have to make an offering to the god of bloggers. Townhall.com describes the remarks of one Dr. Kamau Kambon, who, at the ""Black Media Forum on the Image of Black Americans in Mainstream Media," . . . presented on October 14th at Howard University," made these remarks:
And then finally I want to say that we need one idea, and we're not thinking about a solution to the problem. We're thinking about all these other things, but we're not dealing with a solution to the problem. And we have to start to think about a solution to the problem so that these young brothers and sisters who are here now, who are 15, 16 or 17, are not here 25 years later talking about these same problems.
Now how do I know that the white people know that we are going to come up with a solution to the problem? I know it because they have retina scans, they have what they call racial profiling, DNA banks, and they’re monitoring our people to try to prevent the one person from coming up with the one idea. And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people because that in my estimation is the only conclusion I have come to. We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem. Now I don’t care whether you clap or not, but I’m saying to you that we need to solve this problem because they are going to kill us. And I will leave on that. So we just have to just set up our own system and stop playing and get very serious and not be diverted from coming up with a solution to the problem and the problem on the planet is white people.
Wow. Professor Kambon has advocated genocide alright, and identified himself as a 24 karat racist. Do these words entitled the university to force Dr. Kambon to shut up, or recant and apologize, as the peril of his job? Maybe.
He has certainly said things that reflect badly on his institution. Howard University should be mortified that it employs him. But that, I think, is a very bad argument for threatening him. Any college worth its admission price will employ people whose ideas seem crazy or objectionable to the public at large. Almost all will include persons who irritate most of their colleagues, like Harvey Mansfield at Harvard. It is an imperative for higher education that such persons be protected.
But that same imperative requires that the university be open to all voices. Dr. Kambon surely works to close the minds of his students if he tells them that all white people are their enemies. How could they take seriously any scholarship or literature written by the cursed white race? Besides, racial purity is a hard thing to come by in America. Howard University is an historically important Black university, but many of its students, I suspect, have white ancestors. What would a student in one of his classes think of this message if she had a white mother or father? Surely, by Kambon's reasoning, she would be suspect? That kind of message is very pernicious to the climate of a university classroom.
So I think that Howard University has a problem. I am not sure that Kambon ought to be fired. Having such folk around is useful, if only to make everyone else look more reasonable. But surely Kambon's colleagues and the Howard Administration are free to distance themselves from his views. If they do not, that would indeed reflect badly on the institution.
Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.
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