I hear people, including academics, make comparisons of all sorts of current and historical figures to Hitler, Eichmann, etc., quite often. It’s overdone and not always exactly accurate. But Churchill was singled out and this was not a scholarly essay, it was an opinion piece. And this country *is* responsible in more than one case of genocide.

I think it had to do with the way we were all *supposed* to feel about 9/11. We were *supposed* to be terrified, and horrified that this could happen *in the U.S.* It was supposed to be worse that this had happened here than elsewhere. If *Americans* died, it was more serious than if anyone else did.

My reaction was the wrong one. I would have been just as sorry if the bombing had happened elsewhere, and I did not think that American dead were worth more than other dead. I still think this is the more mature attitude but I knew at the time that it was sacrilege, and I did not speak up because it did not feel safe to do so.

Boulder is a town that pays lip service to every progressive opinion in the book. But it’s also – what’s the term I’m after here? – whiter than all the bread at all the church picnics in Alabama and Mississippi combined. I have often noted that it’s a city with the most high-minded liberal ideologies of any city of rich white people in America.

Up the hill at CU they have a problem – strong belief in diversity but a hell of a time attracting minority faculty. I was on a search committee and we had to issue special invitations to black candidates and nearly beg them to apply. When we brought one guy in – GREAT candidate – we loved him but no way in hell were we going to get him to take the job. He had no interest in being the only black guy in town.

This wasn’t the only issue in play, of course – I exaggerate for effect, maybe – but the truth is that a school that has a hard time attracting and retaining minority faculty is perhaps not going to be as aggressively rigorous about vetting the records of a guy like Churchill as they would about a group where they have people lined up around the block trying to get in.

This is not an opinion I can back with hard data, so I may be completely off base here. It’s one that has made a lot of sense to CU folks I’ve talked with about it, if that counts for anything.

But here’s the bad part – what I just said makes it sound like minorities get a free pass, and that then translates into the suggestion that the minority profs there are less qualified. And THIS is a proposition that I can’t support. The minority faculty I knew and worked with at CU were simply exceptional. I cannot look back and point to a single minority prof or instructor that I thought was substandard (although I’m sure there were less capable blacks and Latinos there, just like there were less capable whites – inept comes in all colors).

So maybe this largely comes down to an issue where reality and perception are at odds. I don’t know. I try to ask good questions and sift the best answers I can from the info I can get my hands on.

I do want to add my thanks here – you’d done a great job launching a worthy discussion of an important issue.

This is exactly why, though loathesome the Churchill case is in many respects, it must be treated like any other academic freedom/free speech case. The Right is always looking to create a “slippery slope” effect for its own purposes – mainly the restructuring of American democracy to suit their own narrow minded agendae.

If Churchill’s tenure is now considered a “mistake,” the next question is “who gave it to him?” The fault would lie on both the college and the entire university.

There is a bigger picture than some wanker who said some off the wall stuff. I would like to think the American Association of University Professors 1940 Statement still has meaning when it comes to tenure and academic freedom and how it contributes to the common good through the search for truth and its free expression.

This spirit of academic freedom within the university has a value which goes beyond protecting the individual’s broad scope of thought and inquiry. . . . If a university is alive and productive, it is a place where colleagues are in constant dispute; defending their latest intellectual enthusiasm, attacking the contrary views of others. From this trial by combat emerges a sharper insight, later to be blunted by other, sharper minds. It is vital that this contest be uninhibited by fear of reprisal. . . . ["On Tenure," AAUP Bulletin," Winter 1972, (Vol. 58, No. 4) pp. 382-3.]

I would hate to see my father on some blacklist because some conservative disagreed with his point of view.

So even if Ward is a bad case, as Denny and I both believe, the deeper issue of academic freedom and the attempt to undermine it by the Right remains critical. In fact, the problem with the Churchills of the world is that they make is easier for the Right to erode the foundation of academic freedom because they’re so hard to defend. And in the hands of a Karl Rove type, ALL progressive academics get painted with the same brush.

I’d personally like to see all university oversight unhitched from partisan politics. I don’t want elected GOP or Dem officials having any say in tenure approvals and I guess I’d have to go a step further and say I don’t want anybody appointed BY a political partisan in that role, either. I guess this points to non-partisan elections of regents or something – I’m sure my solution wouldn’t be perfect, but anything is better than allowing the Colorado Springs/Focus on the Family crowd any say-so at ALL in the process.

But I appreciate the read and the time you spent on this. It’s illuminating in many ways. Thanks.

However, the Churchill piece that got it all cranked up was a far cry from “scholarship.” I own a PhD from CU and have a damned good feel for what does and does not count as scholarship, even on the neo-marxian “social theory” wing of things. There are certain requirements not only for intellectual and research rigor, but also for tone and tenor.

Churchill’s piece wasn’t intended as scholarship, I don’t believe. It was intended as inflammatory polemic, and was way out past all the buoys even by that standard. The actual points about the relationship between state and economic/industrial complex that underpinned what Churchill was saying are arguably valid. There are ways in which that system helped fuel the context that has produced Islamic extremism, although there are certainly plenty of valid arguments that somebody on the “pro-American” side of that debate could offer in rebuttal.

But Churchill didn’t write a piece of scholarship that made the argument. He wrote a flamethrower that inserted phrases like “little Eichmanns” where a measured, substantive point might have been made instead.

All of which makes this a complex case – far more complex than apologists on either side will acknowledge. Even if he did intend to incite a rhetorical riot, I’m still not sure that justifies whacking him – academic freedom shouldn’t only apply to what is written for and published in prominent academic journals.

At the same time, those of us who are duly suspicious about political oversight of the intellectual mission at CU (and let me be clear that there are and have been substantive issues here, as well as at other campuses around the country) would probably have hoped for a little cleaner test case.

Even if Churchill deserves to be retained, let’s not pretend for a second that he’s a choirboy. There are other valid questions about his vita, according to the last report I read, and as much as I treasure intellectual and academic freedom, I loathe the prospect of having to go battle for somebody like Churchill.

So yeah, the Right is wrong. But there are no hosts of angels gathering around Churchill, either.