New School Students Cheer Ward Churchill Speech
An ethnic studies professor from the University of Colorado, Ward Churchill, received a standing ovation last night from a crowd of more than 200 New School students after blaming the 2001 World Trade Center attacks on America's support of Israel and its sanctions against Iraq in 1996.
Heuichul Kim
Ward Churchill at the New School with his security personnel after he delivered his speech yesterday.
In a two-hour speech at the New School titled "Sterilizing History: The Fabrication of Innocent Americans," delivered without notes, Mr. Churchill traced what he called a pattern of mass murder as American foreign policy from the time of the country's inception to the events of September 11, 2001, which he said the country was essentially asking for.
Mr. Churchill also called the president of the New School, Robert Kerrey, a former senator of Nebraska, a "mass murder and serial killer to boot" for having served in Thanh Phong, Vietnam. Mr. Churchill also served in Vietnam, an act for which he said he has spent the rest of his life apologizing.
Mr. Churchill received cheers from the audience for comparing Mr. Kerrey to the serial killer Charles Manson. "That's who you've got moral equivalency in the president's chair at this institution," Mr. Churchill said. "How about a cage rather than a president's suite?"
Mr. Churchill was invited to the New School by a student group, the Women of Color. The university was not involved in the invitation.
"We brought him here because he offers a framework in which we can conceptualize the struggles our community is dealing with," a junior at the New School, Jamila Thompson, said. "A person's work should be engaged critically, and his work allows us to build broad-based networks with Native Americans, Latinos, and anti-racist whites."
Mr. Churchill arrived on the national stage after September 11, 2001, when he wrote that many victims of the World Trade Center attacks were "little Eichmanns," comparing them to the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann because they worked as technocrats of an evil empire.
While students yesterday jumped to his defense, arguing that his "little Eichmann" statement was taken out of context when it was publicized on Fox News, Mr. Churchill yesterday seemed happier to cultivate his image as a provocative figure than to defend himself.
"The only people who consider me controversial are little Eichmanns themselves," he said, again inciting peels of laughter from the audience of New School students.
While campus police were out in force and metal detectors were set up outside the auditorium for Mr. Churchill's appearance due to fear of a possible attack against the professor, the talk drew little protest from the student body.
Only one student group, the Free Thought Coalition, posted fliers on campus yesterday objecting to Mr. Churchill's appearance on campus.
Mr. Churchill's critics call him a symbol of academic free speech gone wrong and an ethnic fraud. His Native American ancestry has been called into question by some who think he is not of Native American descent, but is exploiting a culture that is not his own to propagate his politics.
"He exploits their culture and has never done anything for their groups," a documentary filmmaker, Grant Crowell, who is making a film on Mr. Churchill titled "Hate U: The Politics of Teaching Hate," said. "Someone like Ward Churchill totally manipulates academic freedom and identity politics."
The University of Colorado has tried to fire Mr. Churchill, but has been unable to take such recourse against a tenured faculty member for exercising his freedom of speech. Mr. Churchill has also been accused of research misconduct.
