Jewish World Review March 1, 2005 / 20 Adar I, 5765

Free Speech failing on campus

By Jack Kelly

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The saga of Ward Churchill illustrates why there is no greater consumer fraud in America today than "higher" education.

Churchill was until recently the chairman of the department of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. He resigned the post after it came to light that he had likened those killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11 to Nazi war criminals.

Churchill's sentiments are not rare on college faculties these days, but most such anti-American drivel passes below the public's radar. Churchill had the misfortune of having his remarks come to the attention of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, who took umbrage, as did his audience.

The uproar has brought to light other facts about Churchill that are embarrassing to the University of Colorado.

Churchill's academic credentials are poor. He has BA and MA degrees from Sangamon State University, a diploma mill in Springfield, Ill., but not the PhD normally considered de rigueur for a full professor.

CU bypassed normal procedures to grant Churchill tenure. It wasn't because of his scholarship. Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar University, said Churchill made up "facts" in a paper he wrote asserting the Army intentionally created a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan tribe in 1837, and then attributed these "facts" to sources which said nothing of the kind. University of New Mexico law professor John Lavelle said Churchill made up stuff in an article on federal law concerning Indian lands.

Lavelle also accused Churchill of plagiarism, and the CBS affiliate in Denver reported that Churchill has sold mirror images of Indian art work created by others as his own.

Churchill was hired and promoted because he claimed to be a Cherokee Indian. The Cherokees say he isn't, and researchers for the Rocky Mountain News have been unable to find a drop of Indian blood among his ancestors.

Churchill is still a professor at CU, but Colorado Gov. Bill Owens wants him fired, and the regents are considering it.

Churchill says his First Amendment right to free speech is being violated.

But this claim is as phony as Churchill's Indian heritage and his scholarship. The First Amendment says the government can't put you in jail for what you say. But nothing in the constitution guarantees you the right to a $96,000 job at taxpayer expense. If I were to write in this column that the editor of the newspaper where I work is an idiot, the government wouldn't put me in jail. But I'd soon be unemployed.

Some 200 professors at CU have bought a newspaper ad demanding that the inquiry into Churchill be dropped. "It's going to be extremely difficult, if academic freedom is on the block, for us to hire and keep good faculty members," said Margaret LeCompte, an education professor.

But Churchill's defenders are highly selective in defending free speech, as the controversy over Lawrence Summers at Harvard illustrates.

At a conference in January, Summers noted that despite vigorous efforts to recruit women for vacancies, the faculty in the hard sciences and higher mathematics remained overwhelmingly male. Summers speculated that this might in part be due to a difference in cognitive skills between men and women. Men, he said, are more likely to be either math geniuses or math dunces, while mathematical reasoning skills are more evenly distributed among women.

MIT Biology professor Nancy Hopkins said she was made ill by the remarks, providing a real life example of the misogynist stereotype of the little woman with the vapors. Andrea Peyser, an idiot who writes for the New York Post, said Summers had said men were more intelligent than women. That was not at all what he said, but Peyser's inability to follow Summers' argument lends support to the thesis as she stated it.

As it happens, researchers at the University of New Mexico and the University of California-Irvine have demonstrated through a study of brain scans that men and women do process information differently.

Churchill is lionized for saying vile and untrue things about his country and countrymen. Summers is hounded for saying something non-pejorative that is demonstrably true. This is the status of free speech on campuses today.