The New Criterion

Ward Churchill maintains his right to act like an idiot

A postscript of postscripts on Ward Churchill. First, from Indian Country Today:

Far from suffering for his views, Churchill appears to have been sought out by many in the universities as a representative of American Indian thinking. But to many Native intellectuals, he is traveling under false pretenses, both in his ideology and his personal identity.

Hat tip to View from the Height and Glenn Reynolds for this (and check out this report from Brown. Not to say I told you so, but, well, you know).

Meanwhile, The Belmont Club is offering its own Ward Churchill Reader, with this commentary:

The fascination may not be with Ward Churchill himself but with the Leftist demimonde glimpsed briefly through him.

Yes, news of this loser is overblown. Maybe it has served a purpose, but in roasting a little man have we lost perspective on why we came upon him in the first place, on the Kirkland Project at Hamilton College, which we first reported here, and more? The story goes beyond Churchill, and even Bill O’Reilly is questioning Churchill’s possible dismissal

I even said the man shouldn’t be fired from his job because a country as strong as we are can tolerate even him.

(While he’s resigned his post in the Ethnic Studies department, Churchill remains at $96,000-a-year professor in Colorado).

Churchill is an issue, Kirkland is an issue, but the real issue is the normativeness (can I use that word here?) of deadening rhetoric on college campuses. Why is it that it takes a public outcry and national media coverage to challenge tenured ideas? The process of academic review and administrative oversight should be analyzed more than anything. Not until colleges and universities begin to question their assumed role as political re-educators (rather than educators) will we begin to see the end of the Ward Churchills, the Kirkland Projects, and the spectacles that substitute for real learning. There will always be radicals and ideologues out there, but it doesn’t mean that shrill thinkers deserve tenure-track jobs. I should think that freedom of speech still translates into a freedom from employing troglodytes.