Free Speech at Risk, Professor Tells Cal Crowd

[chlamor]

Posted on Tue, Mar. 29, 2005

Free speech at risk, professor tells Cal crowd

By Matt Krupnick

CONTRA COSTA TIMES

BERKELEY - A Colorado professor who compared some World Trade Center terrorism victims to Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann told a UC Berkeley crowd Monday that the outcry over his remarks signals a dangerous trend that could erode academic freedom.

Ward Churchill, an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado, told a mostly supportive crowd of 600 that college instructors are increasingly being told what to teach by off-campus groups.

Churchill has been criticized by legislators and others for writing an essay that called some Sept. 11 victims "little Eichmanns." He explained Monday that the term was not meant to refer to the victims as Nazis, but rather as "nameless bureaucratic functionaries."

Several political leaders have called for Churchill's removal from the Colorado faculty. University officials are considering it, but have said they will not remove him simply because of the essay.

Free-speech rights used to protect professors who offered personal opinions in class, but that day has passed, Churchill said Monday at an academic-freedom forum on the campus where the Free Speech Movement began in 1964.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/living/education/11256339.htm

[ixion]

1. I don't agree with what churchill said, but I do agree that

free speech is in dire straits in this country.

[Trillo]

2. Where is the text of his essay?

Perhaps I need to read his essay in more context than the news seems to be reporting it.

[struggle4progress]

3. Read the book which the essay became, rather than the essay.

[chlamor]

4. If you want a link to original essay

I'll post one and an additional article from Rentaria which was brilliant and relates exactly to Churchill's point. All in all S4Progress has the best suggestion, read the book to really get an understanding . Even those on "The Left" who defend the free speech but don't address the accuracy of what Ward says have rarely read any more than an essay of his if that.

[Trillo]

5. Thanks--I do want to read the essay.

From the news articles I've read, including this one, I don't understand the connection between the victims and the original, then later revised and restated, phrase, that everyone is objecting to.

Perhaps the professor is being run on a rail out of town, but on its face it seems like a really unfair comment he made. This news article addresses some of the points I've thought of myself, but I still don't 'get it.' That's why I'd like to see the phrase, in context, as the professor used it.

Feel free to PM me the links if you don't want to post them publicly.

[chlamor]

6. Here's the original and opening paragraphs

"Some People Push Back"
On the Justice of Roosting Chickens 

By Ward Churchill

 When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously – and quite charitably, all things considered – replied that it was merely a case of "chickens coming home to roost."

 On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable – in fact, widely predicted – result of the 1991 US "surgical" bombing of their country's water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other "infrastructural" targets upon which Iraq's civilian population depends for its very survival.

 If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough – and it should be noted that this sort of "aerial warfare" constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of "civilized" behavior – the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims' ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.

All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered – are still suffering – a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.

http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html

[chlamor]

7. And this from Rafael Renteria-Look in the Mirror with Me

Look in the Mirror

Ward Churchill and White America

By RAFAEL RENTERIA

"It is not enough for us to merely dumbly intone that Churchill has a right to write what he does. No. We must do more. We must insist that Churchill is right, and no one, not some rabid talk show parrot, nor a political whore like Governor Bill Owens, has a right to demand what is wrong Churchill is right. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal."


I am no one in particular, no one famous whose name you would recognize. But I have been on the frontline of the culture wars, and this is my dispatch.I want to speak to you in your isolation, I want you to be in touch with your despair as I speak. I want you to remember what you already know -- the Earth is dying; oil is running out; Iraq is only the first in what will be a series of resource wars, as the impacts of global warming and peak oil cause the infrastructure we call globalization to collapse.


<snip>

I want you to remember that America kills everyone who could lead it ­ who threatens to lead it - out of its bloodlust, the sleepless remembrances of its genocides and Columbines, its My Lais and Sand Creeks, its Wounded Knees, Fallujahs and Alamos.

I want you to remember that for Europe, fascism, colonization and conquest are not the exception, they are the rule. They only appear to be an exception to white America, just as the death camps appeared to be an exception to good Germans. It was not the way they lived. It only affected others.

<snip>

Look in the mirror. The fascism that so many fear from Bush is nothing foreign. It is your own. The ecological horror that awaits us is nothing foreign. It is your own. The weapons of mass destruction, the nuclear tipped missiles, the hydrogen bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, your own. Look in the mirror with me.

<snip>

And it's that "nothing more" that is killing the Earth, that allows the US, which is not yet a fascist state, to have the highest incarceration rate in the world ­ America incarcerates its enemies, Red and Black, just as Hitler incarcerated his enemies, the Jews. It persecutes its writers who speak with the voice of the subjugated peoples ­ the enemies ­ within.

http://www.counterpunch.org/renteria02262005.html

[Must_B_Free]

8. little Eichmanns?

he must watch too much South Park...

[sendero]

9. We have politicians..

... and religious leaders who lie with impunity, but a college professor expresses an opinion and people want him out of a job.

As far as I am concerned, any college professor should be free to state any opnion he or she wishes to, period, end of story.

The only reason there is an outcry about this particular opinion is that it makes people very uncomfortable becuase it is pretty much true.

[BeFree]

10. Comfortable?

Then you don't know what's going down.

Don't we all suspend reality whilst we tender to our desires? Maybe the insane people have a point...

Reality IS a pain in the ass. Is that the reason sane people just want some comfort and any reality that makes them uncomfortable is to be suspended for as long as possible? Don't we all do it to some degree?

I dunno, just musing around. The problem comes when it all gets out of hand - like it did with Hitler, one would imagine.