I believe it is about the essay

I am just adding my voice to the chorus on this one - Ward Churchill may not be someone I agree with, or can even support, but the academy has joined the rest of the country in walking the knife's edge.

On Monday, the interim chancellor of the University of Colorado, Phil DiStefano, recommended the termination of Churchill's position at the University of Colorado. Consequently all his teaching and research duties have been ended, though he is still being paid until the Board of Regents makes its final decision. (For more in-depth coverage, you may check The New York Times , The Rocky Mountain News, and, on a different note, Inside Higher Ed.)

What is interesting to me is that the faculty investigating this noted themselves that Churchill was hired and promoted by a university who knew he was an activist and that he has not been traditionally credentialed with either a Ph.D. or J.D. For years, allegations of research misconduct had flown around Churchill's work. Yet it is when his opinions draw national attention and disdain for being "unpatriotic" that an investigation is convened (though DiStefano pleads that one has nothing to do with the other). The faculty on the committee were themselves divided on how Churchill should be punished with only one of the five members recommending all out dismissal and termination of tenure (you can see the faculty's own reports on the University of Colorado's website).


DiStefano's call for Churchill's dismissal is now a sad academic mirror of the criticisms of free speech plaguing the country. Just this week, President Bush himself joined a chorus of conservatives condemning The New York Times for actually reporting news to the U.S. public (check out the Canadian perspective here). Not unlike Churchill, The New York Times has made some serious mistakes before, but actually reporting real news isn't one of them. Of course what do you expect in a country where press freedom is lower than that of the bulk of the Western world (including my favorite countries in the Western hemisphere, Costa Rica and Canada - see here for more information on the USA's low ranking)?

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The image of Ward Churchill on the left is taken from the Washington Post article. The image on the right is from Satya.

Sometimes you just need a little Nietzsche

"Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein."

(Translation: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process s/he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.)

Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future), Aphorism 146.

Sayonara Amendment One

"Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

On Tuesday, the Roberts (with Alito bonus player) Supreme Court made another landmark decision. Landmark that is if you are on the side of government being protected from whistleblowers. They decided that Richard Ceballos, once deputy district attorney of Los Angeles, had no right to query the affairs of his office in his official capacity as deputy district attorney. Rather, somehow, he can only do this if he holds a public press conference as a private citizen, not in his position as an advocate of justice advocating, well, justice.

This decision is, as The New York Times argued, a break with previous precedents, one of which was even set under the Rehnquist court of 1979. It is also, of course, a decision that likely would have been different had one of the presiding justices been Sandra Day O'Connor and not Samuel Alito. (As a sidenote, I thoroughly enjoyed the brief commentary on this to be found at The Right Honorable Samuel A. Alito, Jr. Blog.)

This decision of this Supreme Court just underlines the Bush administration's control over the Judicial branch. It is an administration who has already violated the Fourth Amendment in its NSA search through the phone records of countless private citizens. Now, its Supreme Court, which will long outlast the Bush administration itself, is in the process of taking apart basic First Amendment protections that would allow an individual to pursue justice through official capacities.

The irony is that this comes just after a time when many immigrants to the USA were joined by allies, many of whom are also of immigrant background, as they actually exercised their First Amendment rights to peaceably assemble and petition this government for a redress of grievances.

While I think the pro-immigration protests were a great thing, I would really like to know what is wrong with us that immigrants can turn out in droves and liberals can turn out in droves for immigrants, but we can't turn out in huge numbers when the most fundamental freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution are being taken away from us.

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The photograph of Samuel Alito when he was a justice with U.S. Court of Appeals Third Circuit is from Wikipedia.

The image of the First Amendment to the USA Constitution is from The National Archives "Charters of Freedom".

The transcript of the First Amendment is taken from The National Archives as well.