Churchillian Speech

Ward Churchill was fired by the University of Colorado yesterday because he said that the maintenance workers and secretaries who were burned and buried alive in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were a bunch of Nazis who had it coming. The official reason for the firing was academic misconduct, which has the ACLU in a snit. Churchill's speech, they said was "protected by the First Amendment and cannot serve as a legal basis for any adverse employment action."

I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU and close to a free speech absolutist, but in this case I don't buy it.

For various reasons including limited resources and the need to maintain an atmosphere of collegiality and trust, universities can't go around conducting in-depth investigations into the scholarly conduct of every professor on campus. But they certainly have the right to do so on a case-by-base basis, and it seems more than fair to assume that a person so deranged that he can't see the distinction between the perpetrators and victims of monstrous crimes against humanity might also be a less-than-scrupulous scholar. Sure enough, that's what they found.

The ACLU seems to be saying that liars and plagiarists can innoculate themselves against the consequences of their actions if they can manage to offend enough people to bring scorn and infamy upon themselves and the university that employs them. Plus, who thinks that if Churchill had, for example, been publicly espousing the principles of Nazism--rather than simply ascribing them to innocent victims of terrorism--he'd still have a job? Of course not, because he never would have gotten his job in the first place. Nobody is saying Ward Churchill should be arrested for saying what he said, just that no decent institution of higher education should pay him to do so.