The Justice of Roosting Chickens: Ward Churchill Speaks

We take a look at a controversy at the University of Colorado that has captured national headlines and has sparked a debate about academic freedom and free speech on college campuses nationwide. At the center of the controversy is Ward Churchill, a professor in the Ethnic Studies department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Churchill is a well-known activist with the American Indian Movement and author of a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government’s COINTELPRO program.

The current controversy began in February with an article published on the front page of the Hamilton College newspaper, The Spectator. The College, which is located in upstate New York, had invited Professor Churchill to speak at the school in the beginning of February. The article highlighted statements Churchill made in an essay about the September 11th attacks. The essay was called “Some People Push Back; on the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” Among other things, the article said that many of the people killed in the Pentagon and the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 were not innocent civilians.

The passage that received the most attention was Churchill’s labeling of the people described as a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire” as “little Eichmanns.”

After the article in the school newspaper was published, some Hamilton professors began to call for the college to rescind professor Churchill’s invitation. Others defended his right to free speech. The controversy quickly spread outside of Hamilton, with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News repeatedly attacking Churchill on his television program. On Feb. 1st, Colorado Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university calling for Churchill’s resignation. Owens also made the same call on The O’Reilly Factor.

* Excerpt from The O’Reilly Factor with Gov. Bill Owens, February 7, 2005.

That same week, The University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to review all of Churchill’s speeches and writings in order to determine whether there is cause for his dismissal. And two days before Churchill was scheduled to speak, Hamilton College withdrew the invitation citing security concerns. Interestingly, the panel that Hamilton had originally asked Professor Churchill to be on, was titled The Limits of Dissent. On February 8, Churchill spoke about the controversy to a packed crowd at the University of Colorado. Ward Churchill joins us on the phone from Colorado.

* Ward Churchill, on the line from Boulder.

LISTEN ONLINE
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/18/157211