Citing what it called “credible threats of violence,” Hamilton College canceled a speech planned for last week by a professor who has called those who died in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns.”
A storm of controversy has centered on the Clinton, N.Y., college in recent days as many people, including families of September 11 victims, protested the planned speech by Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Shortly after the attacks, he wrote that those killed were not innocent civilians but a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.” He went on to compare them to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of sending millions of Jews to concentration camps.
Mr. Churchill was originally invited to speak at Hamilton by the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture. Nancy Rabinowitz, a professor of comparative literature and the project director, had invited him to speak on American Indian issues, but after other professors and relatives of September 11 victims complained, she says, administrators asked her to change the topic. The event, retitled “Limits of Dissent,” became about the controversy itself.
As calls to cancel the event increased, Joan Hinde Stewart, Hamilton’s president, at first said the college would defend free speech by allowing it to take place. But two days before the scheduled event, which had been expanded to a panel discussion, she announced that it would be too dangerous.
“We have done our best to protect what we hold most dear, the right to speak, think, and study freely,” she said in a written statement. “But there is a higher responsibility that this institution carries, and that is the safety and security of our students, faculty, staff, and the community in which we live.”
Before the cancellation, the college had taken the unusual step of posting on its Web site hundreds of the negative e-mail messages it had received about inviting Mr. Churchill to speak. Critics included prospective students who said they now would not attend Hamilton, parents disturbed by what they called “hate speech,” and many television viewers who heard about the controversy on The O’Reilly Factor. One wrote: “I am sure the KKK and Nazi promoters would not be invited to speak at Hamilton. ... This is not a question of free speech. Mr. Churchill can say whatever he wants. ... It is a question of decency and respect. Obviously Hamilton has neither.”
Why this particular event created such a firestorm remains unclear. Mr. Churchill is a regular speaker on issues of indigenous cultures on campuses across the country. He spoke last month at Miami University, in Ohio, and about a year ago he spoke not far from Hamilton at Syracuse University. Those appearances did not generate such reaction.
Ms. Rabinowitz suggested the Hamilton event may have grabbed media attention because the victims’ families got involved and because the college had just recently been in the news for hiring Susan Rosenberg, a former radical leftist who spent 16 years in federal prison.
Ms. Rabinowitz said she was saddened by the president’s decision to cancel the event. “I don’t sit in her shoes,” she said. “I wasn’t in the room when they were talking about it.” But the decision will chill free speech, she said: “Not just that it’s canceled because of the threats, but it will make you rethink other events.”
‘Grossly Inaccurate’
In Colorado, meanwhile, Gov. Bill Owens called for Mr. Churchill to resign from the faculty. The professor had already announced that he was stepping down as chairman of the University of Colorado’s ethnic-studies department but that he would remain as a faculty member. In addition, the Board of Regents planned to hold a special meeting last week to discuss Mr. Churchill.
Attempts to reach Mr. Churchill were unsuccessful. Ms. Rabinowitz said the professor was disappointed by the Hamilton event’s cancellation and that he and Natsu Saito, his wife, also a professor at Colorado who was scheduled to speak, had been prepared to attend the discussion despite receiving death threats.
In a written statement, Mr. Churchill said the analysis of his comments had been “grossly inaccurate.” He said he was not defending the September 11 attacks, “but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned.”
He also said that the best way to avoid another such attack is for American citizens to force the U.S. government to comply with the rule of law. “The lesson of Nuremburg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation,” he said. “To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the ‘good Germans’ of the 1930s and 40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 51, Issue 23, Page A17
