By the same token, however, academic freedom is like other First Amendment rights in that its true test is extending it to views we find repugnant. The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects the right to burn an American flag because the majority of that Court saw thet action as a form of political speech, a particularly visceral communication of dissenting political views, not because they felt any sympathy for those who do so.

I do not hold the slightest brief for Ward Churchill and most of what I have read of his writings. But I look warily at attempts to expel him from his position and from academia based on such views. He is the academic equivalent of the flag burner, person who is as deliberatively provocative as he can be. That makes him an easy target, since he invites most of the attacks on himself. But for the rest of us, it poses the difficult problem of explaining why academic freedom, like freedom of expression more generally, must protect the offensive if it is to have real meaning.

Jenny D. addresses the real crucial point here, from the point of view of the integrity of educational institutions. How was a Ward Churchill hired? How was he given tenure? How was he promoted in the university? At the very least, his academic credentials and resume seem rather thin, and one has a hard time conceiving of him contributing much to the education of his students. An educational institution which cherishes academic freedom needs to pay very close attention to the qualifications of those with whom it would entrust that freedom.

I thought Ginsburg had the best approach to Roberts’s question, at least as reported by the Times: there’s a difference between buying a specific service and specifying mandated and prohibited speech, on the one hand, and employing an individual, on the other.

Leo Casey wonders if we can read anything into Roberts comment in court today and says that ”Roberts seems to be supporting” a position limiting free speech for employees. Wouldn’t be surprising considering the culture of the country.

But I’m not so sure we can tell anything at all about Roberts from his comment to the LA lawyer. In fact, just from what I’m reading in Casey’s post, it seems he could just as easily be showing us that he’s not buying his arguments against free speech at all.

Look at the conversation from a different angle.

LA County is arguing for curtails on job-related speech (in which case, everyone on this blog is probably in danger of dismissal). Maybe Roberts thinks that’s a little extreme, especially since in this particular case it seems LA County is trying to silence a whistle blower.

So, Roberts says, “Well, how about professors at public universities? Can they have speech curtailed?” (implying that if we take LA’s logic forward, then even a university professor can be fired for preferring Keats, let’s say, to Shelly).

To which LA replies, “Absolutely! Fire him! And the burden of proof is on the professor to prove he shouldn’t be fired.”

So, Roberts leans back in his little judge chair there, and he smirks. And says, to paraphrase the quote above, “Boy, with a ridiculously extreme attitude like yours I’m surprised you’re not just saying that as a professor in a public university he’s a government employee, and therefor has no First Amendment Rights at all!!!”

This is how deconstructionists make a living.

I think if a professor stood up in a lecture and said blacks were second class citiznes, so inferior they belonged in the fields not in a college classroom, that professor would be fired.

Is that a wrong thing, to fire that professor? I don’t know. Is it academic freedom to express something that is both unacceptable in society and probably outright wrong intellectually? I don’t know.

Maybe a better question is: why would a university hire such a person to begin with?

There’s part of me that wants to let every person talk his fool head off and let the bright light of public scrutiny bring these people and their ideas into context. There’s another part that doesn’t want to listen to hateful ideas at all. But I don’t know if I can legislate it.

Ward Churchill, whose surname should imply honor,a few months ago flashed his newsworthiness in the only fashion possible for a latter-day academic: he made the civilized mind recoil.

Seizing the moment in the immediate wake of the World Trade Center murders, this professor of so-called “ethnic studies” at the University of Colorado likened the moms and dads who leapt into vapor from the hellfire of the Towers to “little Eichmanns.” Eichmann was the Nazi logistical genius of genocide.

Once word of his ravings escaped the campus and a public relations nightmare loomed, his university had no choice but to express outrage and called for Churchill’s resignation.

Shielded by tenure he reportedly said, “I’m not backing up an inch. I owe no one an apology.”

As this was coming to light, Mr. Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College in New York on American Indian activism, a field in which he professes expertise because he is allegedly a natural-born tribal member. Even that qualification, if it ever is one, has been called into question by the American Indian Movement, which claims that Churchill is an imposter. It claims that Churchill “waves around an honorary membership card that at one time was issued to anyone by the Keetowah Tribe of Oklahoma…He has deceitfully and treacherously fooled …many people worldwide.” AIM’s Governing Council is furthermore “vehemently and emphatically repudiating and condemning the outrageous statements made by academic, literary, and Indian fraud Ward Churchill in relationship to the 9/11 tragedy…”

Even if Churchill were, in fact, on the level, the fruits of his specialized scholarship would be rotten anyway. Consider his assertion that in 1837, the United States Army deliberately afflicted the Mandan Indians with smallpox. The alleged hoax of his identity, transparent to those who would know best, probably helped him avoid earning his position the old-fashioned way by a doctoral degree in a related and genuine field from a university of some note.

Hamilton College had no problem with Churchill’s appearance until it received threats of violence. It cancelled his guaranteed diatribe until a day later when Hamilton reversed itself again. Its decision to allow the rant after all coincided with Churchill’s submitting a federal lawsuit the same day. With candor as plausible as Churchill’s credentials, scholarship and actual identity, Hamilton said it was finally giving the green light because the college had received “additional information about the structure of the event.” We know better than to expect a bastion of free speech to be up front about its own motives.

Even if vileness of thought were objective reality and not a judgment call, it would be no basis for the abridgement of free speech. Was Churchill quoted out of context? His words are so obscene that, having been spilled, they are stuck in the present tense forever. So what are they?

Churchill refers to the World Trade Center terrorists as “combat teams” and calls the crashing of planes “retaliation.” He asks, “Why do they hate us? and instantly adds “How could they not?”

Churchill traces the blood splashed on the wounded tablets of world history to the huge weapon called America. Since our founding, in every generation and on all continents, America is to blame for every atrocity. He cites, for example, “a whole bunch of dead people” in Latin America, the Palestinian children of the intifada, and the “basically butchered” Indians who resisted the sale of Manhattan.

In the spirit of collective responsibility, Churchill concludes, “All those chickens came home to roost on 9/11.” He notes wistfully “there had never been a response in-kind in all that grisly history.”

When asked by the Boulder Weekly whether those who died on 9/11 deserved their fate, he replied, “I’m not a judge…” The hijackers “were sending a message that you’re not going to do this stuff with impunity any more.”

In his original broadside of 2001, Churchill identified the “technocratic corps” at the World Trade Center, who “were too busy braying incessantly and self-importantly into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated…into the starved and rotting flesh of infants.”

Ward Churchill has been around the radical block for a long time. He is known for the company he keeps, even in abstentia. He was the national spokesman the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. Peltier is the convicted murderer of two federal agents.

Churchill should be allowed to continue shooting off his mouth, spinning his wheels, and chasing his tail. This poster boy for hate speech should be denied the flattery of martyrdom. Let his cry be heard. It is nothing more than a lonely gasp from the toilet bowl.

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT EDWIZE Should academic freedom in American public universities and public schools be a constitutionally protected right under the First Amendment? This question has been posed in a case which was just heard by the Supreme Court, Gar…