Are you suggesting that once a fellow has tenure he should never suffer any consequences for what he says, even if his scholarship is bogus, his teaching incompetent, or his tenure acquired fraudulently?
Sure, these things might never have been examined if Churchill had been a quiet and run-of-the-mill campus commie.
But he grandstanded (grandstood? ;) ) and was needlessly offensive.
And this suggests he's too stupid to be a competent teacher! If you get a cushy job with little or no responsibility and a decent income, why imperil it? Thinking for five minutes would have led him to see that if he attracted attention, sooner or later his bona fides would be examined.
But he craved the limelight, and now his record and career are being examined.
A guy like Chomsky probably shouldn't be fired. But Churchill, like DiLorenzo, invents his data and uses footnotes not to support but to obfuscate. SUch people are not scholars and consequently ought not to enjoy the protections afforded to scholars.
One result of the EEO programs that government and many corporations have adopted is that hiring managers have not applied the same level of scrutiny to work experience and education claimed on resumes for minorities that they would to non-minorities. I can almost guarantee that Churchill would not have been hired for the position at Colorado had he not claimed he was a "Native American". It is almost a certainty that no one did any kind of background check on him--and they didn't review his plagiarized art either.
BTW: The best way to say it would be, "He was grandstanding, and was needlessly offensive". I don't think that "grandstood" is a word. :)
How? Because humans are humans why come equipped individually and in ensemble with various emotional and intellectual drives all of which can be used for good or bad. By providing a protected place, a protected job -- you create a magnet, a attractor for those who seek to exploit it, to abuse the protections for the sake of indulging other drives that would otherwise be repressed, those that should be repressed and called to account.
We see the result in every sinecure -- tenured professors, closed-shop unions, civil servants. We see it in politicians -- although we have the vote to rebuke them with, the super protections we blanket our 537 US elected officals are so strong they overly immunize that group.
Tenure and protections like tenure are -- by clear and widespread evidence of examples -- a sure way to suppress novel ideas, to bring about a monolithic orthodoxy of ideas and ideals that fierecely act to erradicate ideas and ideals that weaken, compete with, or attack the prevalent orthodoxies.
Chomsky..total crap..you must be kidding
Chomsky could start his own school. Free Speech, Free Entreprise! Tenure -- by all experience -- has exactlty the anti-effect of what it once purported to benefit.