April 6, 2007
Ward Churchill and Hamilton College Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:30 AM EST I have been reading with interest Josh Zeitz and John Steele Gordon’s discussion of speech rights. I have a couple of thoughts on one of the issues that seems to have kicked off this exchange, the case of Ward Churchill and Hamilton College. In 2005 Hamilton invited Ward Churchill to speak on American Indian rights, an invitation subsequently withdrawn after a death threat to Churchill, with Hamilton asserting that it could not guarantee Churchill’s safety. Churchill, however, was more than willing to speak, despite the death threat. Should Hamilton have let him speak? Josh Zeitz quite correctly observes that allegations about Churchill’s mendacity, fraud, scholarly misconduct, and plagiarism have nothing to do with this question. For one thing, these allegations surfaced after the Hamilton controversy, not before it, so they cannot retrospectively justify Hamilton’s decision, even if they have all proved to be true. Josh noted that “Churchill is a bête noire of the political right for his comments linking the September 11 attacks to American global imperialism.” It is possible that Hamilton withdrew the invitation to avoid offending the political right, but I think it is more likely that they withdrew the invitation to avoid offending a different constituency, and one closer to home. Churchill’s particular manner of “linking the September 11 attacks to American global imperialism” was to call some of those murdered at the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns,” and as it happened, one of Hamilton’s undergraduates present on campus at the time was the son of a man murdered on 9/11. To quote Churchill more extensively: “As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire, the ‘mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved, and they did so both willingly and knowingly”. The people who invited Churchill to speak were unaware of these remarks at the time they had extended the invitation, and I am pretty sure they would not have extended the invitation had they know of the remarks. You could argue that while no organ of American government has the right to suppress this speech, neither does Hamilton College have an obligation to offer a platform, and a substantial speaking fee, to a man who has so described the recent murder of the father of one of its undergraduates. To call a man a “little Eichmann” seems to suggest that his actions were comparable to genocide and his killing just. Churchill has on various occasions sought to blur the issue, for example by refusing to condone the killing of Eichmann. But the offensiveness of his remarks remains startling. The ability to take offense being very widely distributed, any policy of banning all speakers who excite rage and disgust would doom intellectual life on any campus in the country. But the Hamilton case seems to me to make for a hard decision. Should Hamilton have withdrawn the invitation out of fear of offending the political right? Of course not. Should Hamilton have withdrawn an invitation to a vicious crank who might publicly gloat over that recent murder in the presence of the victim’s child? Maybe not, but had it invoked Churchill’s want of minimal human decency as its justification, rather than public safety, I would have trouble mourning its actions as an unforgivable blow to academic freedom. I can also imagine taking the other view. A little earlier, in November of 2002, the president of Harvard insisted on maintaining an invitation to the British poet Tom Paulin after it was discovered that Paulin had recently called for the murder of all Brooklyn Jews living in Israeli settlements (his decision to give a pass to Jews from the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island remains mysterious). Then Harvard President Lawrence Summers seems to have thought that you should not back down from an admittedly bad decision about a speaker under political pressure. I know what he meant, and I rather admire Summers for having taken that position. On balance, I would have let both Churchill and Paulin speak and pocket their fees, and it may be relevant that that both institutions could have afforded the additional security costs. But I have trouble feeling true outrage at Hamilton having made the opposite decision.
|
