Jan 31, 2005 07:22 PM
Another note on Hamilton College, academic freedom, and Ward Churchill
Unless something unexpected happens, Ward Churchill will be appearing at Hamilton College on Thursday evening. Churchill, readers of Armavirumque will know, is a self-declared expert on "indigenous issues" and head -- as of today, the former head -- of the department of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Unless you lurk about in the intellectual slums of the internet--all those anti-American repositories of paranoia and indignation--it is likely that you had never heard of Ward Churchill until a week or two ago. But Hamilton’s invitation made headlines, and rightly. I reported on it here and here; The Wall Street Journal ran an excellent piece in OpinionJournal.com; Hamilton’s invitation was the subject of a blistering segment on the O’Reilly Factor; the regents of the University of Colorado have opened up an investigation into Churchill’s activities -- an investigation that, I do not doubt, has had a lot to do with Churchill’s resignation today as head of the ethnic studies department (he remains -- for the moment, anyway -- a professor). The internet has been abuzz with commentary on the fellow. Why? Because of "Some People Push Back," Churchill’s reflections of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in which, inter alia, he claims that the thousands of people murdered in that attack, far from being innocent victims, were instead "little Eichmanns" who were complicit in all manner of nastiness supposedly perpetrated by the United States. (On the web page containing Churchill’s article is an advertisement inviting readers to "Visit the George W. Bush International Terrorist website.")
Churchill is scheduled to appear at Hamilton courtesy of the Kirkland Project -- or, to give it its full name "The Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture," an organization, as the campus website puts it "committed to social justice, focusing on issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, as well as other facets of human diversity." In other words, it is a left-wing, activist organization that has nothing to do with liberal arts education and everything to do with political agitation. It was the Kirkland Project, for example, that just last month invited the convicted felon (and former member of the Weather Underground) Susan Rosenberg to campus to teach; it was the Kirkland Project that, back in 2002, invited the former prostitute Annie Sprinkle to campus to instruct undergraduates in the joys of pornography and sex toys. Question for Hamilton’s Trustees: What legitimate academic role does the Kirkland Project play at Hamilton College? Why does it exist?
Please do not launch into a sermon about "free speech," "diversity," and "academic freedom." For one thing, The Kirkland Project is not about diversity, it is about promulgating a single, left-wing, anti-American, moral antinomian line. For another thing, Colleges and Universities do not exist to promote free speech. They exist to pursue and teach the truth.
This is not a novel idea. But it is one that Hamilton’s president, Joan Hinde Stewart, has difficulty in wrapping her mind around. In an open letter to the Hamilton community about the controversy, Stewart began with some clich�s about Hamilton’s belief that "open-ended and free inquiry is essential to educational growth." Well, fine. But surely a college president should understand that "open-ended and free inquiry" is one thing, political agitation and proselytizing is another. Our society provides many outlets for the expression of political opinions. Thank God for that. It has also taken care to provide for educational institutions whose purpose is learning, scholarship, and pedagogy. Pace President Stewart, academic freedom is not the same thing as free speech. It is a more limited freedom, designed to nurture intellectual integrity and to protect those engaged in intellectual inquiry from the intrusion of partisan passions. The very limitation of academic freedom is part of its strength. By excluding the political, it makes room for the pursuit of truth.
This is a point that was articulated well by the British philosopher Kenneth Minogue in his book The Concept of the University (1973; new edition, 2005).
Universities [Minogue notes] were based, like all social institutions, one something valued--one a "value judgment," to use the current jargon. They were based (if I may use an old formula) on "the disinterested pursuit of truth." It was this pursuit, as it were, that constituted the moral basis of their authority. They had no direct concern with justice, and no one was ever sent to a university to make him courageous. Their excellence was to be found in their limits. Academia dealt in the virtues of truth and exactitude.
What happened? In the 1960s, universities collapsed "in the face of a little juvenile swagger." They never recovered, most of them, and now Hamilton College (among many others) is reaping the fruit. Preposterous organizations like the Kirkland Project; repellent ideologues like Susan Rosenberg and Ward Churchill -- people whose intellectual accomplishments are nugatory when they are not risible -- are invited to campus to deliver political sermons; and at the highest levels of the college administration an abject confusion over the meaning and ends of a liberal education. It is a sorry spectacle, but one that the Trustees and almuni of Hamilton should heed.