Well, little of note has passed in the sleepy hamlet of Denver lately, but here’s something interesting: big angry poseur Ward Churchill won his lawsuit against the University of Colorado at Boulder, in which he alleged that the state’s flagship school fired him not for being a fraud, but for being a dick.
To recap: The day after the September 11th terror attacks, Churchill wrote a reductive neo-Marxist tract called “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” wherein he asserted that the WTC victims had it coming all along, because they were agents of Pax Americana, foot soldiers in America’s brutal campaign to subjugate all the rest of the world under imperialist rule, “little Eichmanns” engineering global injustice from their posh entry-level jobs.
Ward Churchill: Revolutionary Badass?
Oddly, no one really picked up on Churchill’s inflammatory remarks until 2005, perhaps because at the time of their appearance we were all too busy duct-taping our window sills and spying on the Armenian family across the street. But once it was noticed, preceding a subsequently canceled Churchill appearance at Hamilton College in New York state, people more or less flipped out; Bill O’Reilly called him a traitor, local Punch-and-Judy Dan Caplis and Craig Silverman waged a veritable war against him, and adulterous Colorado Governor Bill Owens called for his head, pony-tail and sunglasses and all, and allegedly ordered CU President Betsy Hoffman to fire him.
Ward Churchill: Charlatan?
Ms. Hoffman could not easily do any such thing, but eventually someone else did, citing unacceptable amounts of bullshit discovered in his writings after a suspiciously timed academic review, and oh yeah he’s not really an Indian. And so Churchill, declaring that the University’s inquiry was little more than a pretense for his foregone, politically motivated termination, sued CU.
And won.
A dollar.
Yup, the jury found that CU had indeed illegally fired Churchill, and to compensate for the error ordered the school to pay Churchill one ragged green dollar. An article in today’s Denver Post relates that the award was insisted upon by one juror, the rest believeing that $110,000–for legal expenses and a year’s salary–seemed more adequate. Compromise be damned, the lone juror, who could not reconcile a reasonable amount with Churchill’s callous anti-Americanism, threatened to sink the trial with a hung jury rather than ben to his/her peers.
Of course, said article’s entire source is but one fellow juror, who sounds like a casting reject for The Hills, but hey, I’ll buy it.
Ward Churchill: Egghead Nerd?
In any case, it’s obvious to me that CU’s termination of Churchill was more or less political. Yes, Churchill is an ideolgue and an asshole and a dishonest intellect, but if that were the sole criteria for rejecting tenure, CU would have a sum of three remaining liberal arts professors. And regardless of the controversy and poor taste (and, in my mind, fallaciousness) of his opinions, there is a logic behind them, and it is at its heart a compassionate logic and one shared by a discernible minority of Americans. While comparing victims of mass murder to Nazis is repellent, it represents a view of America as brutish empire that is best encountered not with suppression but with honest intellectual engagement.
In light of the Churchill jury’s rightful rebuke of CU’s witch-hunt tactics–painting the school’s administration as a cabal of intolerant goons, at least in this instance–Churchill’s fringe leftist idiocy will only be strengthened in the eyes of its adherents and their sympathizers as a martyred germ of an idea that the establishment finds dangerous. But had the Churchill’s critics welcomed the opportunity to debate and expose the fragility of his opinions, a few minds might have been changed.
