Academia and Free Speech

Last week, a jury in Denver, awarded controversial and often outrageous Ward Churchill $1 and a hope that he will be reinstated to his tenured faculty position in the Ethnic Studies program at the University of Colorado.  

Several years ago, Churchill gave a speech and authored a short essay on the September 11 attacks, where he called many of the victims, particularly in the World Trade Towers, "little Eichmanns."  Churchill for years had been on the "angry at the US" speaking tour, well under the radar because not that many people, frankly, as angry as Ward Churchill.  But suddenly, his post-September 11 comments were picked up by Fox News, and Bill O'Reilly in particular, and off to races went every one.

The governor of Colorado, Brad Owens, demanded Churchill's head.  And the University, reliant on state funding, called for an inquest into Churchill's research, since the only way to fire a tenured faculty member is to question the validity of his work.

Churchill, who does not have a PhD, has a large body of written material.   Most of it focused on colonization and extermination by Anglo-Europeans of Native Americans.  In some of his writings he made assertions concerning the distribution of small-pox infested blankets by the US Army to Natives, as well as other "historical" theories.

The academic inquest obviously found academic fraud and sought Churchill's firing, which the university trustees complied.  Churchill sued, and other than the $1 damages, won reinstatement.

I don't particularly like Ward Churchill.  Even before his outrageous September 11 comments, his anger got in the way of anything meaningful he could accomplish as an student of Native American issues.  But I also don't like the method the university used to fire him.

The debates around research methodologies and statements, particularly among social science students, is profound, deep, and often polarized.  There are those quantitative people who believe the only good research is that which can become a number.  Among the qualitative folks there are many debates about hypothesis versus ground theory driven research.  Much less, in doing historical based research, finding primary sources is of course, problematic itself.  This is to say, just as important as methodology is who gets to set the bar itself.

Frankly, I am also not a big fan of tenure, believing it does the opposite of what is intended, rather than liberating academics, it frequently makes them old and stale.  Why bother, they have tenure?!  

But in Churchill's case, the obvious causation between outrageous comments and firing led the jury to seek this reinstatement.  Now, it is up to the faculty and students of the University of Colorado to hold Mr. Churchill to some academic and humanity standards.  The system he hates so much has proven him wrong.  There is justice in America.