The Last Word on Ward Churchill

Goes to Dalia Lithwick, who I think has it just about right:

If academic tenure means anything at all, it means professors must be allowed to say and write what they choose without fearing removal by popular referendum. That's why the decision to grant someone tenure must be taken so seriously in the first place. One hundred percent of the blame for the Churchill debacle rests with the University of Colorado's board of regents that hired, granted tenure to, and promoted an individual whose scholarship and personal qualifications are now, and must always have been, in serious question. Churchill's silly notions have been in the public domain for years. Firing him only now suggests that Bill O'Reilly, as opposed to his faculty peers, gets the deciding vote on who is allowed to teach our young people.

Churchill's 9/11 comments were patently offensive. But they were not hate speech, they were not treason, and they were not in any sense a call to imminent violence on the part of his listeners. Read in context, his words are the purest form of political speech. Does that mean students have to take his classes? No. Does it mean any university needs to invite him to speak or even hire him in the first place? No. But does it mean that the governor or the board of regents are entitled to remove him now, simply because some "taxpayer money" goes to pay his salary? No. That would make virtually every professorship in the land subject to a heckler's veto.

A few years ago I wrote a piece about the kinds of violent protest witnessed at Hamilton last week—suggesting that when students or community members block an unpopular speaker through riots or death threats, it is they, rather than the speaker, who have crossed the line from protected speech to assault. We've become so persuaded that college students' fragile political sensibilities trump both academic rigor and open discourse that when they silence unpopular ideas through protest or threats of violence, we treat it as their sacred right.

Virtually everyone who has called for Churchill's removal makes the same argument: "What if it was your son/husband/mother killed in the towers?" But that is not an argument for suppressing speech—particularly on college campuses and particularly at a forum ostensibly testing the "limits of dissent." It's an argument for making all political discourse conform to the sensibilities of the most fragile victim. It's an argument for banning any discussions of the American Revolution in history classes because some student may have burnt her tongue on a mug of tea once.