Austin Bay links to an opinion piece written by Paul Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, describing his fellow facult...
Austin Bay
links to an opinion
piece written by Paul Campos, a professor of law at the University of
Colorado, describing his fellow faculty member Ward Churchill as "a
pathetic buffoon" peddling a fascist ideology. The most interesting part of
Professor Campos' article lies in his description of fascism, all the elements
of which, he argues, are present in Churchill's work.
As a political inclination and an aesthetic style, fascism is marked by,
among other things, the following characteristics:
- The worship of violence as a purifying social force.
- A hyper-nationalistic ideology, that casts history into a drama featuring
an inevitably violent struggle between Good and Evil, and that obsesses on
questions of racial and ethnic identity. - The dehumanization and scapegoating of opponents ... demands that the evil
in our midst be eradicated "by any means necessary," up to and
including the mass extermination of entire nations and peoples. - The treatment of moral responsibility as a fundamentally collective
matter.
Campos argues that these propositions would probably have been intolerable if
uttered by a white man but were possibly countenanced because they emanated from
an oppressed Native American who may happen to be -- oops -- a white man. But
despite its potential for comedy, Professor Campos finds nothing funny in the
matter. He asks how such a ridiculous situation could have arisen in the first
place.
The question of whether a serious research university ought to hire someone
like Churchill is laughable on its face. What's not so funny is the question
of exactly how someone like him got hired in the first place, and then tenured
and named the head of a department.
That, in the end, is a more important question than what will or ought to
happen to Churchill now. Churchill is a pathetic buffoon, but the University
of Colorado is far from alone in having allowed itself to toss intellectual
integrity and human decency overboard in the pursuit of worthy goals. ...
That through whatever combination of negligence, cowardice and complicity
we have allowed Ward Churchill to besmirch those ideals by invoking them in
the defense of his contemptible rantings is now our burden and our shame.
While the University of Colorado is casting the Churchill controversy as a freedom
of speech issue (that's simplifying it a little. See Eugene
Volokh for a real lawyer's take) some thought ought to be given to
University's obligation to provide a reasonable standard of instruction to
students. Students attend a university to receive a sound education and a credential.
There is an implicit contract between the student and university that a
reasonable education will be provided in exchange for the time, effort and money
spent studying. It is hard to see how the University's end of the bargain will
be kept if it allows it students to be instructed in ethnic studies by a fake
Indian teaching fascism. One might be forgiven for wondering whether the
students aren't being shortchanged.
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