Professor fired for voicing opinions on 9/11 victims
Robert Zaller
Issue date: 4/17/09 Section: Ed-Op
The way scholars deal with professional malfeasance by a member of their fraternity is through criticism and, in extreme cases, ostracism. This is normally quite effective. An academic who egregiously violates the canons of scholarship and is called to account for it by his peers is a dead man walking.
Whether Churchill did violate the scholarly standards of his field is not something I am able to judge, having only general accounts in the media to go by. There was testimony to that effect at his trial, which he vigorously rebutted. A jury of his peers - his citizen peers - adjudged that he had been wrongly dismissed, and has ordered him reinstated.
This doesn't mean that any of the jurors agreed with his remark about "little Eichmanns." It means they applied the relevant contract law, and decided that what he had to say about 9/11 was not relevant to that law but an exercise in free speech.
The New York Times, in its April 3 report about Churchill's vindication, said that it had revived "the longstanding debate about whether hate speech deserves protection by the First Amendment." That's about as wrong as you can get it. Free speech can, indeed, be hateful to some, but that doesn't make it hate speech. That's simply a phony category invented by the thought police to deprive people of their right to offend, which is a necessary and legitimate part of the right to speak at all.
You can think Ward Churchill is a jerk. You can be profoundly offended by him. That doesn't give you the right to fire him, and shouldn't give anyone the right to fire anyone whose exercise of his constitutional rights ticks other people off. The remedy for free speech that you don't like, is free speech of your own. Period.
A quite different case is presented by Professor John C. Yoo, who returned to his position as a law professor at Berkeley after a stint in George W. Bush's Justice Department, where he was the author of the so-called "torture memos" - the secret memorandums crafted after 9/11 to justify Bush's assumption of unilateral authority to dispense with habeas corpus, abrogate legally binding international treaties in dealing with so-called "enemy combatants," among them American citizens, and violate everyone's Fourth Amendment rights by instituting an illegal and unconstitutional surveillance regime.
Whether Churchill did violate the scholarly standards of his field is not something I am able to judge, having only general accounts in the media to go by. There was testimony to that effect at his trial, which he vigorously rebutted. A jury of his peers - his citizen peers - adjudged that he had been wrongly dismissed, and has ordered him reinstated.
This doesn't mean that any of the jurors agreed with his remark about "little Eichmanns." It means they applied the relevant contract law, and decided that what he had to say about 9/11 was not relevant to that law but an exercise in free speech.
The New York Times, in its April 3 report about Churchill's vindication, said that it had revived "the longstanding debate about whether hate speech deserves protection by the First Amendment." That's about as wrong as you can get it. Free speech can, indeed, be hateful to some, but that doesn't make it hate speech. That's simply a phony category invented by the thought police to deprive people of their right to offend, which is a necessary and legitimate part of the right to speak at all.
You can think Ward Churchill is a jerk. You can be profoundly offended by him. That doesn't give you the right to fire him, and shouldn't give anyone the right to fire anyone whose exercise of his constitutional rights ticks other people off. The remedy for free speech that you don't like, is free speech of your own. Period.
A quite different case is presented by Professor John C. Yoo, who returned to his position as a law professor at Berkeley after a stint in George W. Bush's Justice Department, where he was the author of the so-called "torture memos" - the secret memorandums crafted after 9/11 to justify Bush's assumption of unilateral authority to dispense with habeas corpus, abrogate legally binding international treaties in dealing with so-called "enemy combatants," among them American citizens, and violate everyone's Fourth Amendment rights by instituting an illegal and unconstitutional surveillance regime.
Viewing Comments 1 - 3 of 3
Z
posted 4/20/09 @ 8:34 AM EST
Zaller. He was fired for having horrid taste in commentary after a national tragedy; it was more of an inter-organization political play more than anything. (Continued…)
michael burke
posted 4/20/09 @ 2:14 PM EST
You can't fire Ward Churchill for being a jerk or being personally offensive? Why not? How does that in any way intefere with his freedom of speech? Churchill has a right to talk like an idiot; he does not have a right to employment - by the U. (Continued…)
ryan sawyers
posted 2/11/10 @ 2:43 PM EST
i agree freedom of speech
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