Ward Churchill Will Speak at New School University

A professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Ward Churchill — who ignited a national furor with his description of some of the World Trade Center employees killed on September 11, 2001, as “little Eichmanns” — is scheduled to speak Monday in New York at the New School.At the invitation of the New School’s Women of Color student group, which is funding the event from the university’s student fees, Mr. Churchill will give a talk titled “Sterilizing History: The Fabrication of ‘Innocent Americans,'” in which he will discuss what he says are ongoing efforts to erase the history of native cultures. Mr. Churchill is a self-described American Indian — though his ancestry has recently been called into question — and his academic work has largely focused on America’s treatment of indigenous peoples and political dissidents.Mr. Churchill’s own political views have prompted condemnation from prominent public figures, including Governor Pataki, who has referred to Mr. Churchill as a “bigoted terrorist supporter,” and Governor Owens of Colorado, who has said some of Mr. Churchill’s statements are “treasonous.”The event’s planners say they are not afraid of the criticism and are touting Mr. Churchill’s speech as “a rare and historic appearance.”“Those of us students organizing this historic evening are not afraid of controversy as we stand firm in our support of academic freedom and Mr. Churchill’s outstanding contributions and analyses,” New School student Jeremy Syrop, 20, told The New York Sun in an e-mail.The New School’s president, Robert Kerrey, is a former senator from Nebraska who served on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Mr. Kerrey said he was initially unaware of the scheduled speech until he received a request to be interviewed for this article. He then had to look into it himself before he responded, he said.“I have a fundamental disagreement with this individual,” Mr. Kerrey told the Sun, but he added that the Women of Color group is “a legitimate student organization, and they’ve invited him, and I’m not going to prevent that.”Mr. Kerrey said he hoped that his decision to allow Mr. Churchill to speak would send a signal to students — many of whom lean to the left of the political spectrum — that they should be tolerant of the more conservative speakers he plans to invite to the university in the future.“I hope to impress upon them that they should not protest if John McCain comes here,” he said. Mr. McCain was heckled in May when he spoke at the New School commencement.Mr. Syrop said that when some campus groups asked Mr. Kerrey in March 2005 to write a letter supporting Mr. Churchill’s academic freedom after the University of Colorado began efforts to dismiss him based on his political statements, the New School’s president declined, saying the professor’s academic freedom defense was “a perversion of the idea of freedom.”Consequently, “the administration has nothing to do with organizing this event,” Mr. Syrop said.Mr. Churchill is listed in David Horowitz’s recent book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.”“What makes Churchill dangerous is that he represents tens of thousands of professors who think the university is a political platform to teach anti-American, racist, sectarian creeds,” Mr. Horowitz told the Sun by telephone. They teach that “their country is the enemy and that terrorists are freedom fighters,” he said.Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., cancelled an appearance by Mr. Churchill last year after receiving widespread criticism and threats of violence as a result of Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly publicizing the professor’s views on September 11 weeks earlier.In a 2001 article titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” Mr. Churchill had argued that the September 11 attacks were an inevitable response to American foreign policy in the Middle East. It was in that essay that he called some World Trade Center employees “little Eichmanns” — in a reference to the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, whose job it was to coordinate trains to concentration camps. The article title’s reference to “roosting chickens” alludes to a statement by Malcolm X suggesting that the assassination of President Kennedy was a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”In the essay, Mr. Churchill wrote: “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. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire, the ‘mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved and they did so both willingly and knowingly.”Mr. Churchill has called for America to go “out of existence altogether” and said “it may be that more 9/11s are necessary” to atone for the nation’s misdeeds.Following widespread discussion of his political views in press and broadcast outlets, the University of Colorado began attempts to fire Mr. Churchill, who is a tenured faculty member in the ethnic studies department, but the institution found that it would be unable to dismiss Mr. Churchill for exercising his constitutionally protected freedom of speech.However, a probe was subsequently begun into allegations that he had committed academic fraud and plagiarism.In May, the investigating committee released its report finding Mr. Churchill responsible for committing several acts of research misconduct, but the panel expressed “concern regarding the timing and perhaps the motives for the University’s decision to forward charges” against Mr. Churchill “in the wake of the public outcry concerning some highly controversial essays by Professor Churchill.”Because Mr. Churchill is an employee of a public university, some have also expressed concern that the public is therefore subsidizing his political views. Mr. Churchill has filed an appeal against the proposed revocation of his tenure.

Ward Churchill Will Speak at New School University

Ward Churchill Will Speak at New School University

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