Students For Academic Freedom

Churchill Matter Exposes Inequity That Activist Is Trying to Correct · 16 February 2005

By William J. Becker Jr.--Forum Column--02/15/05

Lamenting his failure as First Lord of the Admiralty in the infamous Gallipoli campaign of World War I, Sir Winston Churchill mused that it is perhaps better to be irresponsible and right than responsible and wrong.

This grudging bit of soul-searching was meant to rationalize Churchill's decision to mount a failed naval expedition through the interstice of the Dardanelles strait, which, however noble the strategy, took massive British casualties and cost Churchill political capital, indeed forcing him into early semi-retirement.

Ward Churchill's namesake, unlike Ward Churchill himself, at least had the capacity for rational thought. The embattled University of Colorado professor's incontinent style of expression has all the grace of a bull charging through a china shop, and additionally lacks, apart from syllogistic reason, the essential quality of what a more redoubtable contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, describes as wit: a native intelligence or savvy.

But if, albeit irresponsible, Ward Churchill is right, then perhaps his fifth-column, socialist rants might, at minimum, expose a moral clarity his detractors have simply missed. That last part appears to be the message championed by certain of his students, who have rallied to his defense in recent weeks.
In other words (and other words are ineludible here), condemnation of Churchill may appropriately target his maladroit choice of words, such as referring to the victims of 9-11 as "little Eichmans," but not his message. That, it has been suggested, is protected speech. Indeed, it is axiomatic that one can't slander the dead, an advantage Ward Churchill exploits with all the diffidence of the feral vulture he resembles.

A commentator recently remarked that the only thing Churchill is guilty of is exceeding his 15 minutes of fame. I would add: wasting Colorado taxpayers' money and drawing shame to the Boulder campus.
Whether Churchill is guilty of treason, as conservative talk show hosts have ideated, or whether use of rhetorical tropes to advance a Marxist agenda on college campuses somehow offends the Constitution, are questions that distract from the larger, in fact, cardinal, issue raised by Churchill's celebrity.
After all, here is someone who says what many on the left feel, yet hesitate to express. When, for instance, Churchill gleefully points out that the Pentagon victims of 9-11 were legitimate "military targets," he is tickling the nerve-endings of those who oppose military institutions, a form of misdirection omitting the premise that the terrorists of 9-11 were not military combatants but criminals. His audience? College students.

However digression may encumber the debate, it is the menacing effect of reckless speech passed off as scholarship by crazy professors competing for the hearts and minds of impressionable kids that cries for reform.

As an academic, whose role it is to engage the minds of youth, and, as declared by the American Association of University Professors, to advance the common good, the feckless Ward Churchill has met his Gallipoli.

For years, the struggle to call attention to the characteristically ignored, misunderstood and underestimated problem of campus speech has been led by David Horowitz, the one-time leftist turned apologist for conservative causes. (Full disclosure: Horowitz is my client in a lawsuit challenging Los Angeles County's removal of the Christian cross from the official county seal, and I am a member of his Center for the Study of Popular Culture and a contributor to his Web site, frontpagemag.com.)

As the author of the Academic Bill of Rights, Horowitz has led the charge against the left's monopoly of discourse on college campuses, and, with Students for Academic Freedom, has sought to balance the lopsided political climate frequently found there.

In the process of promoting what Ward Churchill would call "social justice" if Churchill had an honest respect for the term's meaning, Horowitz has been vilified, and like Churchill has now, occasionally been banned from speaking on college campuses. Ironically, Horowitz himself was once accused of "treason" and being motivated by "nihilism and hate," particularly hatred of his country.

In his book "Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey," Horowitz recounts an episode in the early 1990s in which he was heckled by members of the militant AIDS organization ACT UP while delivering a speech at Portland State University opposing an anti-homosexual ballot initiative. Horowitz attempted to reason with them:

"What's the matter with you?" he said. "I'm a conservative and I've come all the way to Portland to defend your rights to be who you are. Why are you trying to prevent me from speaking? This is a university. If we can't have reasoned and civil discourse here, where could such a dialogue take place?"
Horowitz concluded that the aggressors' agenda was to obstruct his message and "to stigmatize me as a moral outcast, as someone who should not be heard at all."

The eerie parallels between Horowitz's experiences and Churchill's circumstance have not been lost on Horowitz, who has exempted himself from pushing for Churchill to resign or be terminated.

"The remedy for the Churchill problem is first of all to embrace the idea of intellectual diversity as a primary university value," he says on his Web site. "The American public will accept the presence of an extremist like Churchill on a university faculty if they are convinced that the university is a true marketplace of ideas and that Churchill's perverse views will be answered by his peers."
Is academic freedom present in California's college environment?

Student Ben Shapiro exposed the doctrinally retentive condition of UCLA's liberal academia in the recent book "Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth."

A Kuwaiti student at Foothill College was told by his political science professor that he needed to seek psychological counseling after turning in an essay praising America's founding fathers and Constitution.
An English professor at CSU-Long Beach told his students that they must avoid writing on "topics on which there is, in my opinion, no other side apart from chauvinistic, religious or bigoted opinions and pseudo-science" including prayer in public schools, same-sex marriage and abortion.
At San Diego State University, an international student was formally disciplined by school officials for challenging four Arabic students who were praising the 9-11 terrorists.

Muzzling Churchill may not be the answer, but where Churchill's ideological orientation is the only one to which students are exposed, all other voices are de facto muzzled.

Statistically, conservatives are substantially underrepresented among faculties nationwide. State Sen. Bill Morrow, R-Oceanside, has introduced SB5, a Students Bill of Rights designed to promote diversity of expression on campus. Among its goals is to restrict faculty from using "their courses or their positions for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or anti-religious indoctrination."

Horowitz's model for creating a "marketplace of ideas" would correct this inequity. Rather than restrict free expression, it favors conditions that invite conservative and other alternative viewpoints to campus dialogue.

Just as alternative media (bloggers, Fox News, talk radio) have exposed the breach between competing ideologies in America's political debates in a way that the conventional media could not, Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights would broaden the marketplace of ideas in academia, and, contrary to the cynical view, not amount to a conservative putsch.

In the 1980s, Christopher Hitchens and Horowitz were bitter ideological enemies. Horowitz was no longer editing the liberal Ramparts magazine but had made his Augustinian conversion to the right. Hitchens, who had written a magazine article rationalizing Shiite terrorism against the West, "was a soldier in the radical army [I] had targeted," Horowitz recalls in his autobiography, "Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey."

At a recent lunch event, Hitchens and Horowitz, now ideological cousins, sat one table over. Two erstwhile radicals now embracing mostly conservative principles in an Algonquin Room for the new century. The times, they did indeed change.

When Winston Churchill, as a member of the Liberal Party, recovered from his political fall, he returned to political life as a conservative. A major element of his character is the patriotism that carried him through his failures toward political greatness. Ward Churchill is simply anarchy driven, a boorish socialist on the stump, a threat to comity, a disagreeable agitator whose books are agitprops of dead ideas.

To make his ideas relevant, Ward Churchill must undergo a metamorphosis. His relevance as an academic has found itself, namely, to expose the nihilism that hides within the cloistered walls of campus life, where a vacancy of competing political thought is rooted.

The same light that exposes the privation of thought on campus pours on Horowitz's great idea and should serve to accelerate the acceptance and adoption of his Academic Bill of Rights.

Borrowing a line from Bob Dylan, and exhibiting his agile wit, Hitchens autographed my copy of his current collection of essays, adding the epigraph, "Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters." It means, think for yourself, but ignore the rules at your peril.

Ward Churchill's meter expired. His imagination, fertile as it is, has aroused a popular response he could expect but is unwilling to pay for. An organic society that respects its freedoms can grow not by suppressing ideas, however unsavory, but by encouraging their diversity. Even Ward Churchill's odious ideas can fertilize positive change.

William J. Becker Jr., is a Los Angeles attorney whose practice includes constitutional matters. © 2005 Daily Journal Corporation. All rights reserved.

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