The New Criterion

The case of Ward Churchill at Hamilton College is not going away. I reported on it a few days ago here. And today OpinionJournal.Com weighs in. Churchill, an "ethnic studies" expert at the University of Colorado-Boulder, compared the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to "little Eichmanns" because of their loyalty to capitalist America. He has been invited by the Kirkland Project, a left-wing organization at Hamilton College, to share his wisdom with the college community on February 3.

According to OpinionJournal.com, Hamilton’s President, Joan Hinde Stewart, said "she wasn’t aware of Mr. Churchill’s odious remarks about 9/11 until recently." But the issue, President Stewart continued, was academic freedom. Stuart Scott, the chairman of Hamilton’s board of trustees, was unhappy about the invitation to Churchill, but Scott, too, noted that "many who despise him feel he must be allowed to speak as a matter of principle."

Maybe. Scott suggested that someone who opposed Churchill be "empanelled" to debate him. Why? The author of the OpinionJournal.com commented with appropriate sarcasm:

Now that sounds like an edifying debate: 9/11 was good vs. 9/11 was bad. In a way, it’s almost pathetic to see little Hamilton, with its at least 77% Caucasian student body, pretend to teach students about "diversity" and the real world by carting in rent-a-radicals to indoctrinate them in the theater of outrage. Except that it goes on all the time, at campuses everywhere, and the perpetrators are counting on normal people not to have the energy to constantly push back.

But the case of Ward Churchill, like the previous case of Susan Rosenberg, the former member of the Weather Underground whom the Kirkland project wanted to hire, raises troubling questions about the way "free speech" is trotted out as an excuse for political irresponsibility at colleges and universities today. Note that President Stewart, like Chairman Scott, instantly retreats to what they assume is the moral high ground: "academic freedom," "diversity," "all points of view represented," etc., etc.

But the truth is that freedom of speech, like all human freedoms, thrives only when it is limited. The law recognizes this by limiting free speech--shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater is one proverbial instance.

In the context of university life, academic freedom is limited in other ways as well. As the sociologist Edward Shils once noted, academic freedom is "the freedom to seek and transmit the truth." It does not, Shils insisted, "extend to the conduct of political propaganda in teaching."

I think Shils was right. Colleges and universities are institutions dedicated to the pursuit and transmission of the truth. Because the truth is often hard to establish and only imperfectly grasped, encouraging real intellectual diversity on important issues is a salutary part of the business of liberal education. But that does not mean that anyone can say anything he likes and have it accepted as a legitimate point of view. The case of Ward Churchill dramatizes the issue. It is, I believe, analogous to the case of the Holocaust deniers.

Back in 1993, the historian Deborah Lipstadt published Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which showed how those who challenged the historical fact of the Nazi extermination of the Jews used and abused the idea of free speech in order to further their ideological agenda.

As Lipstadt shows (and I draw here on what I wrote about her book at the time), what is particularly troubling is the way in which such trifling with the historical record is proliferating. It is not simply that there are more and more crackpots declaring that the Holocaust was (in David Duke’s phrase) a "historical hoax." Even more worrisome is the legitimacy conferred upon such declarations by the actions of the media and the academy. This is not to say that the media or the academy grant the idea credence; denying the Holocaust has not--not yet--won respectability. But it has managed to win an audience. That itself is extraordinary. Instead of being instantly dismissed as pernicious nonsense, denying the Holocaust is increasingly accorded the status of a "different perspective," a "dissenting point of view," "another opinion"--just like Ward Churchill’s comments about the victims of 9/11.

Here’s how it works. You find a Susan Rosenberg, a Ward Churchill, or a denier of the Holocaust. Then you say, "I certainly don’t agree with them, but don’t you think we should expose our students to the other side?" It sounds like good liberal doctrine: free speech, everyone entitled to his own opinion, and so on.

But denying the Holocaust is not simply the expression of "another opinion," a "different point of view," any more than comparing the victims of 9/11 to Nazi bureaucrats is. On the contrary, it is to engage in the kind of ideological warfare that corrupts the very nature of opinion in order to promulgate historical falsehood.

It is a telling fact that this point meets widespread resistance today. Invoking the principle of free speech, many people of good will see nothing wrong--everything right--with providing a platform for those who (for example) deny the Holocaust. But this liberal sentiment plays directly into the hands of the Holocaust deniers. As Professor Lipstadt observes, "Unable to make the distinction between genuine historiography and the deniers’ purely ideological exercise, those who see the issue in this light are important assets in the deniers’ attempt to confuse the matter." As has so often been the case, the well-intentioned efforts of liberal apologists help create an atmosphere of legitimacy and tolerance for movements whose goal is to destroy those institutions and attitudes that guarantee liberal tolerance in the first place.

In this context, it is important to understand that denying the Holocaust is only one of many efforts to undermine the authority of historical truth. The phenomenon of Afrocentricism (which, incidentally, often indulges in a bit of Holocaust denial as a sideline) belongs here, as do many varieties of academic literary "theory" that now reign in the academy: deconstruction, extreme examples of "reader-response" theory, new historicism, etc. For all of them, facts are fluid and historical truth is a species of fiction: what actually happened in the past, or what a given text actually means, are for them ridiculous questions. Nor are these attitudes confined to the cloistered purlieus of the academy: in watered-down versions they have become standard-issue liberal sentiment: Rather than risk having to make an unpleasant judgment about the facts, deny that there are any such things as facts.

When we ask how this state of affairs came about, the first answer is the widespread acceptance of cultural relativism. As Professor Lipstadt points out, part of the success of the Holocaust deniers "can be traced to an intellectual climate that has made its mark in the scholarly world during the past two decades. The deniers are plying their trade at a time when much of history seems up for grabs and attacks on the Western rationalist tradition have become commonplace." This tendency, she notes, can in turn be traced to intellectual currents that have their origin in the emancipationist ideology of the late Sixties.

Professor Lipstadt tells the story of a teacher at a large Midwestern university who, in a class on the Napoleonic Wars, informed his students that the Holocaust was a myth propagated to vilify the Germans and that "the worst thing about Hitler is that without him there would not be an Israel." The teacher was eventually dismissed. But many students defended him, arguing that he had a right to present his "alternative" views. Professor Lipstadt comments: "These students seemed not to grasp that a teacher has a responsibility to maintain some fidelity to the notion of truth." This gets to the nub of the problem. Without an allegiance to the ideal of truth, teaching degenerates into a form of ideological indoctrination.

And this brings us to one of the gravest legacies of relativism. What we are witnessing is the transformation of facts into opinion. This process is not only destructive of facts--when facts are downgraded to opinions they no longer have the authority of facts--but, curiously, it is also destructive of opinion. As Hannah Arendt observed in an essay called "Truth and Politics," opinion remains opinion only so long as it is grounded in, and can be corrected by, fact. "Facts," she wrote, "inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute." What is at stake, Arendt concluded, is nothing less than the common world of factual reality and historical truth.

It will be pointed out that truth is very often difficult to achieve, that facts are often hard to establish, that the historical record is incomplete, contradictory, inaccessible. Yes. Precisely. But the recalcitrance of truth is all the more reason we need to remain faithful to the procedures for achieving it: without them we are blind. This is one reason that it is irresponsible to offer ideologues like Ward Churchill a platform at an institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth. That fact that Joan Stewart is apparently incapable of understanding these distinctions is another reason to question her fitness to lead a college supposedly devoted to the cultivation of liberal learning.