Ethics Newsline®

BOULDER, Colorado
A firebrand professor who likened victims of September 11 to “little Eichmanns” last week refused to back down, sparking a fierce debate over free speech, personal responsibility, and U.S. foreign policy.

Ward Churchill, a tenured professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, came under fire last month after a New York college cancelled a speaking engagement after his 2001 paper “Some People Push Back” was brought to light.

In the paper, Churchill said that World Trade Center workers were at “the very heart of America’s global financial empire,” helping to fund oppressive U.S. foreign policy goals that create frustrated enemies like the terrorists who struck in 2001.

Colorado’s governor quickly called for Churchill’s firing and the university’s board of regents launched a 30-day review of his “writings, speeches, tape recordings, and other works” to see if there might be cause for dismissal, reported the New York Times.

For his part, Churchill last week refused to quiet down, rallying supporters and reiterating his belief that the Twin Towers financial workers were “technicians of empire” that had helped create the enmity that breeds terrorism.

“Every Palestinian child shot in the head by an Israeli for throwing a rock is killed with a rifle made in the U.S. There are millions of darker-skinned people piled up in heaps ultimately for the strategic interests of the U.S.,” Churchill said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The controversy inflamed both critics and supporters, who tangled last week over issues of free speech, academic liberty, and the bounds of good taste, with some saying that while they support Churchill’s right to speak freely, they found his choice of words offensive and obnoxious.

Though criticizing Churchill’s Eichmann allusions as “patently offensive,” Slate senior editor and legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick last week said his right to pronounce his views was important to challenging both fixed notions and fragile sensibilities.

“If academic tenure means anything at all, it means professors must be allowed to say and write what they choose without fearing removal by popular referendum,” Lithwick wrote. “That’s why the decision to grant someone tenure must be taken so seriously in the first place.”

“One hundred percent of the blame for the Churchill debacle rests with the University of Colorado’s board of regents that hired, granted tenure to, and promoted an individual whose scholarship and personal qualifications are now, and must always have been, in serious question,” Lithwick added.