Battle Heats Up Over Academic Freedom
I read this and wonder, why fire someone for exercising their freedom of speach? I think it was Jefferson that said that the things that we didn't agree with were what needed protection because the things we agree with need no protection. Or something to that effect.Personally, I find censorship more disturbing than anything someone can say. A friend of mine pointed out that I should let people talk as much as they wanted since the world would see them for what they are.
I have no idea what this guy said or wrote other than it made a lot of people very angry.
iWon News
Feb 12, 4:09 PM (ET)
By DAN ELLIOTT
DENVER (AP) - Academic freedom has never completely protected professors who make unpopular statements. One was fired in 1960 for suggesting that premarital sex among students could be a good thing. Three decades later, a department chair was demoted for saying a Jewish conspiracy denigrated blacks in the movies. Now experts say the Sept. 11 attacks have put new fire in the battle over just where academic freedom ends and misconduct - or even treason - begins.
University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill could be fired pending an investigation prompted by his 2001 essay suggesting some World Trade Center victims were toiling away like efficient Nazi bureaucrats.
There are no exact figures on attempts to fire or discipline professors since Sept. 11, but experts say they have probably increased. The fight is especially fierce at state universities, where some question whether taxpayers must pay the salaries of professors they find unpatriotic or outrageous.
"We have never been free of the issue of professors coming under intense scrutiny or attack for having written something somebody finds utterly loathsome," said Jonathan Knight of the American Association of University Professors in Washington.
Knight said firings are relatively rare, with 50 or 60 losing their jobs each year for a variety of reasons out of some 800,000 tenured and untenured professors nationwide. Tenure, a protection normally granted after several years of probation, is designed to allow teaching and research without fear of political reprisals.
Overall, challenges to American professors today are mild compared with the attacks academics suffered during the anti-communist investigations spurred by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, said Robert O'Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in Charlottesville, Va.
But he said the intensity of attacks on academic freedom have increased since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Churchill's case has ignited furious debate with no shortage of students and teachers defending his right to speak, even though few have endorsed his comments.
His essay said some of the trade center victims were "little Eichmanns," a suggestion that white-collar "technocrats" who died that day were no better than Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann because they are furthering U.S. policies harmful to Arabs and indigenous people worldwide.
It drew little attention until last month, when Churchill was invited to speak at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Relatives of the Trade Center dead and the governors of New York and Colorado denounced Churchill, and Churchill's speech was canceled because of death threats against him.
Since then, other Churchill speeches around the nation have been canceled and the Hamilton professor who invited him to that campus has stepped down as program director, fed up with the "political and media fight that the current climate requires."
The University of Colorado has launched a 30-day review to determine whether Churchill can be fired. Media outlets are exploring his scholarship - one Denver radio show claims school documents prove he lied about being an American Indian to land his job - and state legislators are considering making it easier to get rid of tenured professors.
Churchill has refused to apologize and has threatened to sue if he is let go over the controversy.
O'Neil said universities have handled most post-Sept. 11 complaints about professors properly by submitting them to formal review, as Colorado is doing with Churchill and as the University of New Mexico did for Richard Berthold, a former history professor.
Berthold told students hours after the Sept. 11 attacks: "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote." The university resisted enormous pressure to fire him, instead conducting a review and eventually issuing a letter of reprimand after he apologized.
Berthold says the discipline system worked only because he caved in under pressure.
"I look back on it, and I just ate too much crow and apologized too much. I'm ashamed," he said. "It wasn't, 'Let's applaud the killing of innocent people,' it was my expression of my revulsion for the leadership of this country."
He retired two years later.
"Bitter? Oh yes, I'm bitter," he said. "I thought I served the institution and my society very well for 30 years."
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On the Net:
American Association of University Professors: http://www.aaup.org
Thomas Jefferson Center: http://www.tjcenter.org
posted by Brian @ 5:53 PM
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