Fallout Shelter To Newsweek's Paul Tolme , University of Colorado outgoing President Elizabeth Hoffman's problems with Ward Churchil...
Fallout Shelter
To Newsweek's
Paul
Tolme, University of Colorado outgoing President Elizabeth Hoffman's
problems with Ward Churchill were all about preserving Free Speech in a nation
grown increasingly intolerant.
... earlier this year, ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill ignited a
fierce debate over academic freedom because of a 2001 essay in which he called
victims of the September 11 attacks "little Eichmanns." Hoffman and many
members of the faculty defended Churchill's right to his opinions while
outside of campus, and Colorado lawmakers called for his dismissal. ...
Hoffman seemed particularly concerned about the Churchill situation. ...
"We are so deeply divided as a country." This division, she says, threatens
the foundation of liberal higher education. "The modern research university is
a big and complex place," she says, "but it ultimately is about the generation
of new ideas and the transfer of those new ideas to students. ... What's
tricky is sheltering new ideas without alienating the legislatures that
control state budgets.
Two ideas are striving for primacy in Hoffman's construct. The first is her
idea of the academy as a conservator of every specimen of mental life,
the counterpart of a biological repository containing bacterial and viral
samples; some virulent and some extremely beneficial. The second is the idea of
the academy as a transmitter of ideas. In her words, "the modern research
university is a big and complex place, but it ultimately is about the generation
of new ideas and the transfer of those new ideas to students."
Logically, the chief problem inherent in this duality is less about
'sheltering new ideas' from a public reluctant to support them than about
reconciling conservatory and scholarly functions with the pedagogical ones. Just
as modern medicine trains physicians to distinguish between poisons and
therapeutic drugs, the difference often being simply the size of the dose, the
modern university must above all train its students to discerningly choose from
the garden of concepts it so carefully cultivates, not simply engage in "the
transfer of those new ideas to students" as if they were so many hotdogs in a
cafeteria line.
Ironically, the public glare focused upon Ward Churchill's ideas in the
aftermath of his "little Eichmanns" essay provided the scholarly scrutiny that
the University of Coloardo itself neglected to supply. Did the US government
actually specify a 'blood quantum' for Native Americans? Did US troops really
distribute smallpox-impregnated blankets to tribes and with what precautions to
themselves? Did Professor Churchill really provide the content of books on which
his name appears or did he swipe it from some other scholar? Those are questions
which have been dissected at length by persons "outside the campus" and even by
"Colorado lawmakers". That they were not raised or even contemplated by academic
departments at the University of Colorado constitutes a failure of its most
basic mission. Universities not in the business of asking these these questions
are arguably not institutions of higher learning at all. That neglect, not the
discussion which her University went so far out of its way to avoid, "threatens
the foundation of liberal higher education".
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