The New Criterion

[Revised 1/27] Poor Hamilton College. It used to be a small, distinguished liberal arts college. It is rapidly becoming a laughing stock.

Readers of the The New Criterion will remember our Note on Hamilton’s aborted attempt to hire Susan Rosenberg, the former member of the Weather Underground who was implicated in an armed robbery that left two policemen dead and who was eventually sentenced to fifty-eight years for possession of 740 pounds of high-explosives and automatic weapons. (I also wrote about the incident for The Wall Street Journal here.) She served sixteen years of that sentence before President Clinton commuted her sentence (and that of Mark Rich and other ornaments of American society) on his last day in office.

Nancy Rabinowitz, director of The Kirkland Project, a left-wing redoubt at Hamilton, invited Rosenberg to teach a month-long seminar at Hamilton as part of an "artist/activist-in-residence" program. (Actually, the program was originally called the "artist/scholar-in-residence" program, but Rabinowitz took it upon herself to change the tile.)

Voices protesting the appointment were loud. Eventually, Rosenberg withdrew.

Now Rabinowitz and the Kirkland Project are back. This time they have invited Ward Churchill, an "expert on indigenous issues" and chairman of the ethnic studies program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, to come to the college for a panel discussion on February 3. Churchill is the author of a document called "Some People Push Back," which argues that the 3,000 victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were not innocent people but culpable figures who knowingly worked for " ’the mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved."

To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in -- and in many cases excelling at -- it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants.

Charming, eh? Churchill then proceeds to describe the victims of the terrorist attacks as "little Eichmanns"--that’s Adolf Eichmann, mind you, the chap who made sure that the trains carrying Jews and other "undesirables" to their deaths in Nazi camps ran on time. One news story quoted a Hamilton student who lost his father in the terrorist attack. How do you suppose he feels having his father compared to Adolf Eichmann?

Naturally, Rabinowitz took refuge in the idea that colleges are supposed to foster "different points of view," etc., etc., ignoring the facts 1) that the Kirkland Project fosters one point of view and one only: the left-wing, anti-American, anti-capitalist point of view and 2) that cultivating intellectual diversity is not the same thing as surrendering to moral anarchy. As Steven Goldberg, an art history professor at Hamilton, noted, it would be "morally outrageous" to bring Churchill to Hamilton--a sentiment seconded by Robert Paquette, a professor of history, who described the offer as "an act of utter irresponsibility." Quite right. It is a repellent performance. Where are Hamilton’s Trustees?