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"Freedom of speech isn't conditional"
by Scott Cawelti
As I write, top-level University of Colorado administrators are reviewing one of their own tenured professors "conduct and speech" and will determine whether he should be dismissed. By the end of the month, this professor may be out on the street.
Professor Ward Churchill had been Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado, but has voluntarily resigned from that position, probably before they asked him to step down. However, he teaches full-time as professor of ethnic studies. For at least three more weeks, anyway.
What has Professor Churchill done? Basically, just after 9/11 he called the "technocrats" working in the World Trade Center on that infamous day "little Eichmanns," referring to Nazi Adolf Eichmann, that infamous war criminal who engineered the Nazis' final solution. Churchill asserted in his essay that they and other Americans are partly responsible for terrorist attacks as a form of "blowback" because of American policies abroad. And no one should have been surprised when they were attacked.
Churchill recently wrote this: "The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9/11 style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the "Good Germans" of the 1930s and '40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else."
These words and the extended justification for them, in his books and essays, as well as his speeches, have caused apoplexy among conservative ranters. Churchill received so many death threats that his appearance on a panel at Hamilton College in New York had to be cancelled.
No question, Churchill's comparison with Eichmann is odious. There's NO connection between those who work for banks and corporations in New York City and those who developed efficient means of committing genocide as Nazis.
That said, one could make a case that America's policies over the last century, if examined objectively, have created widespread resentment and misery, especially among those our government finds disagreeable or threatening.
Churchill has made this case, as have Howard Zinn, David Stannard, James Loewen, and Chalmers Johnson, among others. In fact, they have made that case better than Churchill, given what I have read.
It's a disagreeable case, but worth trying to understand. And few Americans would arrest and jail the Ward Churchills; we agree they have a right to their views. And only fanatics and nut cases would like to do violence to them, surely.
However, plenty of people would suggest punishing them by taking away their jobs, and certainly not giving them a platform for their views. In other words, don't jail them, but don't listen to them, either.
That's the problem with the "Fire Churchill" position. You can't fire people, especially people who are paid to do research and teach, for writing ideas with which we disagree, even if we think they're dead wrong.
You can't have freedom of speech without occasionally disagreeable speech. What good is freedom if it only allows agreeable ideas? Even Hitler and Stalin did that.
So I'd say let's try to understand Professor Churchill's perspective, then argue with it and refute it if we can. But speaking out cannot be a punishable offense.
It's his right, and as an academic, also his duty.