Ward Churchill gives me a headache. Nobody else has ever, just by popping into mind, caused me to weigh such long lists of upsides and downsides.
I’ll start by saying I’m a fan of Churchill’s writing. In a nation lying to itself about the history of its natives, I credit him for trying to revise revisionism.
What’s more, I have no heartburn over the “little Eichmanns” phrase the ethnic-studies professor used to describe some of the World Trade Center victims in his notorious essay on the 9/11 attacks. Those words made him a pariah, prompting the University of Colorado to apologize to the nation in embarrassment.
No matter what say Bill Owens, Hank Brown, Bruce Benson or their minions of investment-banking, gas-drilling, self-proclaimed patriots, Churchill didn’t endorse terrorism. However edgy or artless, he was offering foreign-policy views, as scholars are apt to do.
The right to make those points should outweigh any umbrage taken with his wording. What’s more, the howls against his essay undermined the role of CU as a sanctuary of free speech.
That said, Churchill still gnarls me out big time.
This has something to do with the little plagiarism problem that CU dug up in its witch hunt. He has offered scant explanation for why he filched other people’s words. And he has shone even less light on why he played so fast and loose with a history tragic enough without making stuff up.
“You can’t take the First Amendment and use it to justify fraud,” said CU’s attorney.
Churchill has been a lefty folk hero and a cult figure to students. But he long has suffered PR problems.
Partly because journalists don’t dig plagiarists. And partly because the martyred prof who claims he was scalped by reporters has treated even those seeking to tell his story fairly like dirt bags. I’ve met heads of state who are more accessible and murderers who are far more polite. Despite my wanting to root for him, his rage leaves me ambivalent and flat.
Jurors must decide not if they like Churchill or whether he merited firing, but whether he was canned even in part for his 2001 essay.
Most of us who have worked in offices or bureaucracies have dreaded the shadow of employers building a file on us. Given the public venom with which the state, CU and their rabid technocrats went after Churchill, his litigiousness is understandable.
(On First Amendment grounds, I’ll admit to having fantasized about a Churchill victory in which CU’s Leeds School of Business is forced to take the name Colorado Institute for Little Eichmanns.)
But it’s a sign of his ineffectiveness that he used the courtroom rather than the classroom to make his mark.
As the lawyers wrapped up their cases, it occurred to me that Churchill’s greatest accomplishment may not be the books he has published, the gobs of cash he may squeeze from the state or the restoration of his soiled reputation as a scholar. His trial has achieved what should be the goal of any professor or university, for that matter: to make people think.
Far more than a political convention, legislative debate or even Churchill’s own 2001 diatribe, his trial has prodded us for three weeks to contemplate free speech, American Indian history, terrorism, plagiarism, academic standards, university politics and mob mentality.
For that, he deserves some credit. And for the rest of us, we could use a few Tylenol Extra Strengths.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
