The university faculty take the first hit; they (and in particular the Communications Department) supinely allowed adminstrators to railroad, with no review, a tenured appointment for a scholar of unproven merit. Those administrators, from department chair up the chain to the Univeristy CEO, take the same hit. They and the faculty were in hot pursuit of that well-known chimera, diversity. Of course, the hit damages faculty more; they are still here where we can see how their shame tarnishes their tenured glory. No one will fire the administrators either; they're safe in cozy jobs elsewhere.
Our governor and, with a few exceptions, our legislators haven't responded as they should have, either. Free speech is a gubernatorial and legislative concern, to be sure. But we rightly expect these dignitaries to defend free speech from government--not to use the power of government to try to stifle free speech. Defense of free speech is, after all, one of the things they are sworn to. And we expect those oaths to bind them not only in their public lives, but in their private lives as well; because that is the nature of oaths. We also hope, but evidently in vain, that these men and women have more faith in our way of governing ourselves than to think that Churchill's juvenile rantings are a threat.
Academic freedom is distinct from free speech. But that doesn't mean that government officials are free to do as they will in respect to academic freedom. This issue does not lie within their purview, but within that of the university. This principle, in fact, lies at the core of what it means for the university to be independent and self-governing.
The Rocky Mountain News has not done well, either. Its editorial board has quite clearly established itself as a vigilance committee whose plan is to give Churchill a fair trial before the hanging. (Or maybe just to skip the fair trial.) That board doesn't seem to see that the issue really revolves around the integrity of the university. And that it is the university itself that has put that integrity in doubt. From this perspective, Churchill's antics amount to a sideshow.
Churchill's scholarship has come under attack, in some instances by other scholars in appropriate fields. That attack may give his foes the key they want to open the door for his dismissal. The art incident, in which it appears that Churchill plagiarized a sketch, is likely irrelevant, because it took place in 1981--over a decade before the university granted him tenure. His alleged misrepresentation of that work would thus be relevant to the current situation only if he misrepresented it in official documents he submitted to the university in connection with his hiring, tenure, or some other circumstance requiring documentation of credentials. It might then become a question of submitting false credentials.
But the art incident does suggest some insight into the man's character--if we need more insight than we obtain from the observation that his advocacy of free speech extends only to himself and those who agree with him. This latter advocacy has been widely reported in incidents ranging from his participation in periodic Columbus Day travesties to his repeated suggestions that it would be appropriate for someone to perpetrate violence upon those he disagrees with.
So here it is. If he is to be fired, it will have to be on some academic ground or on the legal ground that he falsified his credentials. But let us make no mistake about it: Neither his scholarship nor his credentials would have come under scrutiny if he had not exercised his right to free speech by uttering something(s) that most of us find repulsive. Exercise of free speech is rightly unpunishable. The controlling condition for abridgement is well-established as "clear and present danger," and only a fool would argue that such circumstances attend Churchill's speech. If an academic or legal ground be found, it will amount really to no more than a convenient excuse. It will be, still and fundamentally, what he said that will get him fired.
It is far too late. The scrutiny should have come before he was awarded tenure. But it didn't.
If any among us did not believe that tenure decisions are amongst the most important we make, let that one take notice now. This is a sharp lesson better learned from someone else's mistake. No-one can correct the university's truly harmful mistake now, and firing Churchill won't punish the people who made the mistake.
Firing him for exercising his right of free speech would be poetic--but it wouldn't be poetic justice.
It would be poetic not merely because he has sought to infringe the free-speech rights of others. He is, it seems, one of those eternally adolescent radicals from the 60's and 70's who wanted to politicize the academy under the slogan "All is politics!" They were not entirely unsuccessful, though many of us thought, and think, their campaign grievously mistaken--whether we agreed with their particular brand of politics or not.
How ironic that one of those radicals may become a highly visible victim of their own partial success, as politics outside the university marshals its inevitable response to politics within the university.
Some principles ought to transcend ordinary considerations; the principle that scholarly inquiry is apolitical is one of them.
Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, one of the few to comment on this controversy in the public media without tainting himself, addressed this latter issue from a somewhat different point of view in an Op-Ed piece in the Rocky Mountain News on Saturday, Feb. 26, 2005. I saw his article after I had written the bulk of this note, and I urge you all to read it if you haven't done so already. It can be found at http://ww2.scripps.com/cgi-bin/archives/denver.pl?DBLIST=rp05&DOCNUM=2981.
Louis A. Talman, Ph.D.
Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Metropolitan State College of Denver