University of Colorado, Boulder
Ward Churchill was critical of trade center victims.
Posted on 02/02/2005 12:11:06 PM PST by neverdem
CLINTON, N.Y., Feb. 1 - Over the last five days, tiny Hamilton College in upstate New York has been barraged with more than 6,000 e-mail messages full of fury, some threatening violence. Some donors have canceled pledges to an ambitious capital campaign. And prospective students have withdrawn applications or refused to enroll.
Then, on Monday night, a caller to the college threatened to bring a gun to campus.
Stunned and frightened, Hamilton leaders sought to end the turmoil on Tuesday by canceling the event that set it off: a planned speech by a Colorado professor who was invited to talk about American Indian activism but whose earlier essay on the Sept. 11 attacks fueled the criticism and threats. The professor, Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote disparagingly of the victims inside the twin towers and referred to them at one point as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust.
The speech, scheduled for Thursday night, was canceled for security reasons, Hamilton officials said. Mr. Churchill said he and his wife had received more than 100 death threats, and other warnings of violence mentioned Hamilton officials, including the president, Joan Hinde Stewart. Yet the uproar also adds a twist to decades of battles over free speech on campus, showing the powerful emotional resonance of Sept. 11.
In a telephone interview on Tuesday night, Mr. Churchill called the threats against Hamilton College "American terrorism." He urged those making the threats to "take a look in the mirror."
Matt House, a freshman studying government, said, "We have controversial speakers on campus all the time, but I think everyone's so upset because it's only been three years since 9/11 and this is striking New York too close to home."
"In this case, 9/11 trumps free speech, I guess," added Brian J. Farnkoff, a senior majoring in public policy. "In the end, free speech couldn't happen at Hamilton."
In recent days, Gov. George E. Pataki said he was appalled at Mr. Churchill's remarks and at Hamilton for inviting him, and a Fox News host, Bill O'Reilly, repeatedly urged viewers to e-mail the college in protest. Ms. Stewart, the president, as well as the professors who invited Mr. Churchill, said they did not know about his essay before asking him to campus. She denounced his comments in December, but said rescinding the invitation would harm First Amendment principles.
"His remarks about the victims of 9/11 are repellent, but our reaction to 'repellent' is how we test the right to free speech," Ms. Stewart said in an interview on Tuesday shortly before addressing the turn of events with the Hamilton faculty, who gave her a standing ovation.
"We did our best to protect the principles and the values that we believe in - the right to speak, to study, to teach freely - but the point came that I simply felt that this threat was too large for us to handle," said Ms. Stewart, who was told by campus security that even additional police officers could not ensure safety.
Hamilton, a campus of 1,750 students, has always had a reputation for accepting divergent voices. In November, the same program that invited this speaker - the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture - hired Susan Rosenberg, a former member of the Weather Underground, after her release from prison on explosives charges. She later withdrew in the face of protest.
On another end of the political spectrum, the scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese equated abortion to murder during her talk to a packed, polite campus auditorium last Thursday. According to The Spectator, the weekly student newspaper, she also said that empowering humans to choose who lives and who dies "opens the road to the Holocaust."
Mr. Churchill - who had planned to give his remarks Thursday in a flak jacket with two bodyguards in tow - was originally scheduled to speak by himself, but Ms. Stewart and others added three people to the panel and changed its focus to free speech. One of those added was Mr. Churchill's wife, who is also a scholar. The Churchills were to be paid $3,500, but volunteered this week to forgo the money because of the complaints.
In his original essay, Mr. Churchill wrote that the thousands killed at the World Trade Center had played a role in American sanctions on Iraq that "translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants."
"If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it," he wrote.
The bulk of the outraged e-mail messages began arriving last weekend, after Mr. O'Reilly of Fox had urged viewers to contact Hamilton.
"If you allow this vile individual to speak you forever label yourself as the Auschwitz of American colleges," stated one e-mail message among nearly 400 that Hamilton posted on its Web site to show the reaction to Mr. Churchill.
"Would he feel the same way about his own wife or child if they worked in the W.T.C. and were lost because they went to work that day," wrote the spouse of a rescue-operations captain who was killed. "He should be banned on the grounds of slandering the victims of such a brutal terrorist attack."
Ms. Stewart said she alone received 6,000 messages, describing them as "ranging from angry to profane, obscene, violent," and asserted that Hamilton's actions had been mischaracterized by many of the writers, as well as by Mr. O'Reilly.
Controversial speakers are nothing new to academic institutions: For years, Leonard Jeffries of the City University of New York would create a stir on campus and elsewhere with provocative remarks, and a Columbia University faculty panel is now investigating remarks by some pro-Palestinian professors that offended some Jewish students.
In 2002, hundreds of Harvard students protested when a graduating senior was chosen to deliver a commencement speech entitled, "The American Jihad." The student, Zayed Yasin, who received a death threat, said his speech was a defense of the meaning of jihad as a nonviolent struggle to do right. After negotiations with a representative of Harvard's Jewish community, Mr. Yasin changed the title to "Of Faith and Citizenship," and delivered his remarks under tight security.
Later in 2002, Harvard College's English Department canceled a campus reading by a poet who had once referred in verse to the Israeli Army as a "Zionist SS." and had criticized American-born Jewish settlers. As at Hamilton, professors at Harvard said they had not known about the remarks of the poet, Tom Paulin, before inviting him.
As Hamilton was trying to contain the outrage on Tuesday, political and university officials in Colorado were criticizing Mr. Churchill.
Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, called on him to resign from the university, while Representative Mark Udall, a Democrat, said in a statement that the professor was "factually inaccurate" about the terrorist attacks and owed the families of victims an apology. Mr. Churchill gave up his chairmanship of the ethnic studies department this week, and a spokeswoman said that the university's governing body, the nine-member Board of Regents, would meet Thursday to discuss his future.
Kirk Johnson and Michelle York contributed reporting for this article.
University of Colorado, Boulder
Ward Churchill was critical of trade center victims.
Bit of a jerk, that fellow.
This one?
It sure took them long enough to pull the plug on this jerk. Of course a picture is worth a thousand words. As the saying goes "Once a hippy always a hippy".
Actually, the reaction of being repelled by 'repellent' is how we test the decency and morality of a people...
Never Forget!!!!
Deciding to not provide your podium to a total jerk is NOT a matter of free speech.
When the speaker is someone from the American Nazi Party, they seem to understand the issue correctly. They only stumble over themselves when the offended person is a leftist.
The real telling part of this whole episode is that Churchill had been the Chair of the Department of Ethics at CU!!
Not only a jerk....He's a fraud and a phoney.
He tries to portay himself as native American.
Native American leaders have challenged him, and he's unable to prove his supposed Cherokee heritage.
He has subsequently been denounced by native Americans.
His days as a professor in Colorado are numbered.
GOOD! Get him where it will hurt the most -- his pocketbook! BTW -- If he truly believed the tripe he spews, he would not be on the lecture circuit earning extra money. Isn't that capitalistic and doesn't he eschew everything that capitalistic America stands for?? Hypocrite!
Oh, he can speak alright. No one except the college has the power to deny him that.
They just have to be prepared to accept the consequences of the free speech of others in response.
"We did our best to protect the principles and the values that we believe in - the right to speak, to study, to teach freely - but the point came that I simply felt that this threat was too large for us to handle," said Ms. Stewart, who was told by campus security that even additional police officers could not ensure safety.
Lies plain and simple. This guy is not Solomon Rushdie - it wasn't security that was the deciding factor, it was damage control on their own reputation. How about honesty for a change Ms. Stewart? We've had enough spin lately.
He isn't going for the "hippie" look.
He's trying to look native American. Which he's not.
When they let a prolife,progun,procaptilist,anticommunist speak then they can bitch.
Nutjob with a degree.
"The real telling part of this whole episode is that Churchill had been the Chair of the Department of Ethics at CU!!"
Yes, a man who has called for breaking people's kneecaps.
"She denounced his comments in December, but said rescinding the invitation would harm First Amendment principles."
Where in the First Amendment does it protect the promotion of terrorism, and mass murder?
Don't you mean Ethnic Studies??
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