Friday, February 11, 2005

Academia: Ward Churchill, tenured jerk

I've been slow to post about the U of Colorado Ethnic Studies professor because I don't know how to balance condemning someone for saying very stupid things with their right to do so within a peer-reviewed academic context. But this passage from a Dahlia Lithwick piece seems tempered fairly in line with my feelings:

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.
The rest of the article ain't so bad either (subtitled: Why is Bill O'Reilly chairing our faculty meetings?). And the picture of the guy. What a douchebag.

2 comments:

pj and the phoenix spinmill said...

Heckler's veto on tenured professors? Hell haven't you seen what special interest has done to the public selected servants in the US ?
Huh ?

Garrett said...

Could you be a little more specific? That's a pretty vague statement.

And what does that have to do with tenured professorships? Academic tenure is designed to protect ideas from outside censorship, and while such a system protects douchebags like Ward Churchhill, it also protects people who do good work that could be sensored by outsiders who didn't agree. I think one Ward Churchhill every once in a while is worth protecting the integrity of the entire American academic system.