CU Chancellor in Hot Water?: More on Churchill
Caplis and Silverman, who have gone through a good number of Churchill’s remarks, have concluded:
Churchill has made things up to put himself in a position to incite and actively advocate violence against the U.S. and its citizens.The newly discovered quotes uncovered by Caplis and Silverman include Churchill asking in 2003, “Why, by the way, did it take Arabs to do what people here should have done a long time ago?”; his contending that terrorists “must” deliver the United States a"dose of medicine" through a chemical, biological, or nuclear strike; his asserting, in reference to the illegal “colonization” of the United States,"Killing the colonizer is a figurative proposition, it is a literal proposition, but either way, and by all available means, the proposition has to be fulfilled”; and finally, when asked by a white man in a Q+A session in Seattle during 2003 about how to most effectively carry out a terrorist attack against the nation’s financial centers, his responding,"You carry the weapon. That's how they don't see it coming. You're the one. They talk about 'color blind or blind to your color.' You said it yourself. You don't send the Black Liberation Army into Wall Street to conduct an action. You don't send the American Indian Movement into downtown Seattle to conduct an action. Who do you send? You! With your beard shaved, your hair cut close and wearing a banker's suit."Churchill stands credibly accused of ethnic fraud, grade retribution, falsification of the nature of his military service, academic fraud, plagiarism, selling other artists' creations as his own and falsely accusing Denver Post columnist Diane Carman of inventing incendiary quotations.
All this provides ample justification for termination pursuant to accusations of incompetence and lack of integrity. But it is Churchill's instructions on violence that demand immediate suspension followed by termination. Due process must be provided, but unless this accused can somehow suppress his own statements, he should ultimately lose his job.
“The ongoing employment of Churchill,” the attorneys conclude, “is a catastrophe for CU,” since, while “some issues are a matter of left vs. right,” the “Churchill controversy is a matter of right vs. wrong.”
I continue to believe that dismissing Churchill would do more harm than good (assigning him to teach classes is another matter), and feel that the CU administration should use the affair to investigate the university’s personnel policies to determine exactly what criteria the relevant faculty committees have been using. Along these lines, Colorado chancellor Betsy Hoffman probably sealed her fate with awkward public comments Thursday (I bet she wishes she had waited until the Caplis/Silverman article came out) comparing Churchill’s critics to McCarthyites, remarks that have the state’s GOP legislative leadership demanding her dismissal and which the Rocky Mountain News strongly and properly censured in an editorial today.
The most troubling aspect of the Churchill case—and the related (and far more serious) MEALAC crisis at Columbia—involves the response of the faculty on campus. This Monday, 199 professors at Colorado signed a public statement denouncing the inquiry into Churchill’s conduct, suggesting, in effect, that because figures from outside the university have condemned Churchill, the university itself has no right to even inquire into serious allegations of academic fraud and (if the Caplis/Silverman story is correct) possible legal liability to CU for inciting violence. At Columbia, by my count, only three professors on the entire arts and sciences faculty have publicly condemned the conduct of the MEALAC professors, creating the (hopefully false) impression that personnel bias and in-class intimidation are standard fare at Morningside Heights.
The faculties of Columbia and Colorado have justified their positions by citing academic freedom. Yet the doctrine arose, as Scott Jaschik’s recent piece in Inside Higher Ed reminded us, in a period when professors were regularly fired for their political views—but also in which professors were expected not to bring their political views into the classroom. (The 1915 AAUP statement on academic freedom and the since-repudiated University of California academic freedom policy, drafted in the 1930s, were explicit on this point.) Therefore, it was correctly reasoned, professors shouldn’t be fired for saying controversial things in public (even if their remarks were intellectually dubious), because these comments had nothing to do with their academic qualifications or how they taught their classes.
Of course, the line between political and classroom speech was never as clearcut as the California or AAUP resolutions implied. But the defenders of Churchill and MEALAC have argued that there should be no line—that political speech is perfectly appropriate in the classroom, if this is how a professor wants to teach his or her class. I don’t agree with that proposition, and I think that many in the academy don’t agree with it. But, having taken this approach, there seems to me a tension between arguing that professors are free to bring their political views into the classroom and contending that academic freedom protects a professor’s out-of-class utterances on the grounds that a fundamental distinction exists between such remarks and what the professor does in the classroom.
Perhaps the positions of the Colorado faculty who have condemned the inquiry into Churchill and the Columbia faculty who have defended MEALAC would be more defensible if they attempted to resolve this tension.