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Free Speech or Hate Speech
Rich Galen Friday February 18, 2005
[This edition of Mullings was spurred by a conversation with Jim Blasingame of the Small Business Advocate web page and national radio program.]
I am conflicted by this whole Ward Churchill business. Churchill is the University of Colorado professor who made disgusting comments in an essay comparing 9/11 victims to Adolph Eichmann or more precisely "little Eichmanns."
Churchill, whose claims to be an American Indian are now under some scrutiny, is an unabashed left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti just about everything even Blue state Democrats hold dear.
He was also, until recently, the chairman of the department of ethnic studies at Colorado, a position he gave up when this whole business hit the front pages.
But he is still a tenured professor at a major state university.
Tenure is the teaching equivalent of a Federal judgeship. It is a life-time guarantee of a job. According to the Merriam-Webster Unabridged, tenure is:
"A status granted usually after a probationary period to one holding a position especially as a teacher and protecting him from dismissal except for serious misconduct or incompetence determined by formal hearings or trial."
Tenure at the University of Colorado is awarded to promote academic freedom, which is, according to University documents,
"defined as the freedom to inquire, discover, publish and teach truth as the faculty member sees it, subject to no control or authority save the control and authority of the rational methods by which truth is established."
All right. This is a good thing. I might not agree with a college professor's view of the world, but we need to hear opposing views to test our own theories and our own perspectives.
So Churchill has the right to pretty much publish - orally or in writing - anything he wants so long as it meets the fairly vague standard of "the control and authority of the rational methods by which truth is established."
But what if Churchill had not compared victims of the atrocities of 9/11 to the perpetrator of atrocities in Nazi Germany; but, instead had compared African Americans or Hispanics to animals, or suggested that Gays and Lesbians should be separated from heterosexual society?
That would not been seen as protected free speech. That would, properly, be seen as unprotected hate speech.
There is a difference between what would be seen as acceptable speech by a professor at Bob Jones University and one at the University of Colorado. A professor at Bob Jones who advocated for interracial marriage would, we suspect, be on the next bus out of Greenville, South Carolina.
On the other hand, a teacher in Boulder who voiced the position that only same-race marriages were permissible would be soon put on a bus going in the other direction. The University of Colorado faculty members would pretend to defend the position as "academic freedom" but tenure would never be dangled as a carrot in front of someone who held such a view.
Which brings us around to the question of whether Churchill's views were arrived at by "rational methods" and whether the publication of those views constitutes "serious misconduct or incompetence."
The answer is no. On both.
Churchill's statement disgusting, but is not so virulently dangerous that it merits his dismissal as a tenured member of the university faculty.
I have a better way to get rid of him.
According to the University of Colorado Regents' web page, every faculty member is required to take an oath as follows:
"I solemnly (swear) (affirm) that I will uphold the constitution of the United States and the constitution of the state of Colorado, and I will faithfully perform the duties of the position upon which I am about to enter."
Ward Churchill should be asked if, when he took that oath, he believed in the words, and if he would take it again today.
If he is as academically honest as his supporters say, he will resign rather than lie.
Yeah. Right.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to the U of Colorado Regents web page, a report on the fund raising effort for Dr. K.A. Paul and a wonderful photo from Kirkuk, Iraq.
--END --
Copyright © 2005 Richard A. Galen
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