Demagogue

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has a good article on the Ward Churchill controversy. Some excerpts:

File Ward Churchill under "Annoying Blowhards Who Have Come To Embody Important Policy Questions." One couldn't unearth a less attractive poster boy for free-speech rights in academia.

Churchill may be fired from his faculty position at the University of Colorado for having written and spoken some of the most moronic nonsense ever to emanate from the mouth of an alleged academic. But he shouldn't be punished for being a hack. The folks who hired him should.

Shortly after Sept. 11, Churchill authored an essay ... suggest[ing] that everyone who died in the Twin Towers that day were "little Eichmanns" — mindless capitalist functionaries somehow deserving of their fate ... The essay is pretty much a sophomoric rant ... indistinguishable in kind and in tone from some of his earlier "scholarship," including this nonsense on the Jewish plot to claim "exclusive rights" to the Holocaust ...

... the [University of Colorado] board of regents ... have opened an emergency 30-day review period in which to determine whether he can legally be fired. But fired for what, exactly?

For making Bill O'Reilly mad? For irking the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers? For embarrassing the governor of Colorado?

If academic tenure means anything at all, it means professors must be allowed to say and write what they choose without fearing removal by popular referendum. That's why the decision to grant someone tenure must be taken so seriously in the first place.

One hundred percent of the blame for the Churchill debacle rests with the University of Colorado's board of regents that hired, granted tenure to, and promoted an individual whose scholarship and personal qualifications are now, and must always have been, in serious question.

... Firing [Churchill] only now suggests that Bill O'Reilly, as opposed to his faculty peers, gets the deciding vote on who is allowed to teach our young people.