Free Republic

The University of Colorado announced last week that it is expanding its apparently endless inquiry into misconduct by faux Indian Prof. Ward Churchill after a recent series by the Rocky Mountain News demonstrated: That Churchill has no Indian blood, as he claimed to obtain tenure. CU acted with far greater dispatch in the case of Prof. Phil Mitchell, canned in March after 20 years when his department chief discovered that he was a conservative and a Christian. The grounds for firing Mitchell, 1998 Teacher of the Year at CU, were that he quoted black conservative Thomas Sowell in a discussion...

Stacks of papers sit on a sun-drenched table in the home of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, some full of praise and others full of dark threats and unprintable insults. In one message, liberal scholar Noam Chomsky calls Churchill's achievements of inestimable value, while an e-mail in another pile warns: "If you ever come to Florida, I will personally bash your (expletive) brains in." This is Churchill's new life: Since January, he has been at the center of a firestorm over free speech for likening some Sept. 11 victims to Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi architect of the Holocaust. The...

Should a serious research university consider hiring a fascist? This question doesn't have an easy answer. After all, prior to World War II Europe produced several brilliant political theorists and philosophers who could be characterized as fascists, or proto-fascists, including Joseph de Maistre, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. Whether, post-Auschwitz, it's possible even in theory to advocate similar views in intellectually plausible ways is an interesting question. It is not, however, a question that has any relevance to the case of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, despite the obvious fascistic streak in Churchill's writings and public performances. As a...