Subject: Ward Churchill/Whitewater/John Nichols' take Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:12:37 -0600 Message-ID: <B14120EE5C432443B21102F7925DAD020235F293@COKE.uwec.edu> From: "Hale, C. Kate" <HALECL@uwec.edu>
Colleagues,
Like many of you, I've been following the Ward Churchill saga; here's
quite a fine piece from our own John Nichols.
Best regards,
Kate
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0215-26.htm
Published on Tuesday, February 15, 2005 by The Nation
Free Speech on (One) Campus
by John Nichols
As a joke some years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Ward Churchill's
1998 book Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed
Struggle in North America. In it, the University of Colorado professor,
who is rapidly being turned into the nation's greatest outlaw
intellectual by his right-wing critics, argued that nonviolent political
activism -- in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. -- should not be seen as a force for positive social
change. Rather, Churchill suggested, pacifism is a counterrevolutionary
movement that unintentionally reinforces the very status quo its
proponents claim to be dismantling.
As a Quaker, I was not about to buy into Churchill's worldview, which
the friend who presented the book with a wink and a nod well understood.
And as a journalist who has covered social justice struggles in the
United States and abroad for the better part of a quarter century, I
knew enough about how political change occurs to find Churchill's thesis
wanting.
But I read the book with interest, and found it to be an engaging enough
statement of a controversial point of view. It made me think. It forced
me to reconsider some of my own presumptions -- although, instead of
changing my thinking, Churchill's critique ultimately reinforced my
faith that Thoreau, Gandhi, King and their followers are the real change
agents. And, while I don't appreciate its premise any more than I do
George Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war making, Churchill's book
remains on the shelf of serious books to which I return for information
and insight.
In other words, while I probably disagree with Ward Churchill more than
most of his right-wing critics, I recognize him as a challenging public
intellectual who has prodded and provoked my thinking in ways that I
have to respect.
So, as a native Wisconsinite, I was pleased when University of
Wisconsin-Whitewater Chancellor Jack Miller became the first campus
administrator in the country to resist the right-wing crusaders who have
been campaigning to deny Churchill a right to speak at institutions of
higher learning.
The thought police at Fox News, led by Bill O'Reilly, have sought to
silence Churchill ever since conservative students at Hamilton College
in Clinton, NY, stirred up a firestorm regarding an essay, Some People
Push Back, in which the professor asserted that the hijackers who
crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11,
2001, had been provoked to action by vile US foreign policies.
"The most that can honestly be said of those involved on Sept. 11 is
that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has
dispensed to their people as a matter of course," wrote Churchill, who
went on to argue, "As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really,
let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a
sort. But innocent? Gimme a break."
Churchill's argument is a troubling one, as it takes a legitimate point
of view -- that wrong-minded US policies increase the likelihood that
this country and its citizens will become terrorist targets -- and turns
it into an argument that reads like a justification for what most people
in the United States and abroad see as indefensible violence.
But, while Churchill's views are radical, and to some offensive, the
movement to prevent him from expressing those views on campuses is even
more troubling. Ideas that provoke debate are the lifeblood of higher
education. Bad arguments get dismissed soon enough. But in the process
of discarding the bad, good ideas are invariably made stronger. That is
the point of the principle that, for more than a century, has guided
intellectual inquiry within the University of Wisconsin system:
"Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we
believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever
encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which
alone the truth can be found."
Campuses in other states, where there is less of a tradition of academic
freedom and respect for the First Amendment, have caved in to the
pressure from right-wing media to cancel Churchill's talks. But
Wisconsin has a long history of setting a higher standard -- and the
decision of the UW-Whitewater chancellor to allow Churchill to speak
honors that tradition.
John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, has covered
progressive politics and activism in the United States and abroad for
more than a decade. He is currently the editor of the editorial page of
Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times.
(c) 2005 The Nation
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