Late Night kuleness

So, has everyone heard about this whole Ward Churchill thing? Well, if not, there are some good summary articles out there. The best one we have seen was in the Washington Post and you can read it if you click here. [registration req'd). For an inferior summary article, with no registration required, see this link.

For the lazy or non-click-friendly readers: Ward Churchill is a professor at the University of Colorado [current home of the college football rape scandal]. He wrote an essay back in 2001 that, without mincing words, said that the bankers and stock brokers in the World Trade Center are complicit in horrible acts committed by the United States and thus, they could possibly have deserved to die. He compared them and the system they support to Nazism. All in all, he's on the controversial end of the spectrum. The University of Colorado may fire him and the Governor of Colorado has called his speech treasonous. [Again he wrote the speech in 2001, but it is only getting attention now.]

Here's what Ward looks like:


We here at littleboxes support free speech. However, we don't support it without question. For example, we don't think that putting a burning cross on someone's lawn is protected under the law. Yet, we feel that Mr. Churchill should be allowed to keep his job and that what he said qualifies under free speech. Although, it should be mentioned that there are members of the staff who do think what he said is horrible and some also believe that he should lose his job.

In any event, one thing that we can all agree on, is that this bit from the Washington Post article is some funny shit!!

Accordingly, board members were clearly eager to act when they gathered Thursday to consider the Ward Churchill affair. Once again, though, the trustees lost control. Having issued an agenda for a "public meeting," the regents informed the packed auditorium that no students would be allowed to speak on the issue of free speech. This prompted a raucous outcry.

Some of what Churchill wrote [in quotes]:
the trade center victims in New York were ignorant of the evil they did every day "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. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

And...the president of the University, Elizabeth Hoffman had some thoughts,

Afterward, a shaken Hoffman said the Churchill affair reminds her of a dark memory at the University of Colorado -- the treatment of former philosophy professor Morris Judd. At the height of the McCarthy era, in 1951, Judd was investigated and fired after anonymous students charged that his view of the Korean War sounded "communistic." More than 50 years later, the university held a lavish ceremony to apologize to Judd and create a scholarship in his name. "I hope we don't do anything now," the school president said Thursday, "that would cause future generations to have to apologize."

Hoffman is famous for this little pearl of wisdom in another U of C investigation, as described by the Washington Post:
A lawsuit by two undergraduates who say they were gang-raped by Barnett's football players and recruits is pending. After a student athlete was accused of referring to a female student by a four-letter slang term referring to part of the female anatomy, President Hoffman declared that this "c-word" can sometimes be a "term of endearment." Students and faculty denounced the president for "hate speech." The regents again took no action.