Posted on 02/02/2005 12:11:06 PM PST by neverdem
CLINTON, N.Y., Feb. 1 - Over the last five days, tiny Hamilton College in upstate New York has been barraged with more than 6,000 e-mail messages full of fury, some threatening violence. Some donors have canceled pledges to an ambitious capital campaign. And prospective students have withdrawn applications or refused to enroll.
Then, on Monday night, a caller to the college threatened to bring a gun to campus.
Stunned and frightened, Hamilton leaders sought to end the turmoil on Tuesday by canceling the event that set it off: a planned speech by a Colorado professor who was invited to talk about American Indian activism but whose earlier essay on the Sept. 11 attacks fueled the criticism and threats. The professor, Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote disparagingly of the victims inside the twin towers and referred to them at one point as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust.
The speech, scheduled for Thursday night, was canceled for security reasons, Hamilton officials said. Mr. Churchill said he and his wife had received more than 100 death threats, and other warnings of violence mentioned Hamilton officials, including the president, Joan Hinde Stewart. Yet the uproar also adds a twist to decades of battles over free speech on campus, showing the powerful emotional resonance of Sept. 11.
In a telephone interview on Tuesday night, Mr. Churchill called the threats against Hamilton College "American terrorism." He urged those making the threats to "take a look in the mirror."
Matt House, a freshman studying government, said, "We have controversial speakers on campus all the time, but I think everyone's so upset because it's only been three years since 9/11 and this is striking New York too close to home."
"In this case, 9/11 trumps free speech, I guess," added Brian J. Farnkoff, a senior majoring in public policy. "In the end, free speech couldn't happen at Hamilton."
In recent days, Gov. George E. Pataki said he was appalled at Mr. Churchill's remarks and at Hamilton for inviting him, and a Fox News host, Bill O'Reilly, repeatedly urged viewers to e-mail the college in protest. Ms. Stewart, the president, as well as the professors who invited Mr. Churchill, said they did not know about his essay before asking him to campus. She denounced his comments in December, but said rescinding the invitation would harm First Amendment principles.
"His remarks about the victims of 9/11 are repellent, but our reaction to 'repellent' is how we test the right to free speech," Ms. Stewart said in an interview on Tuesday shortly before addressing the turn of events with the Hamilton faculty, who gave her a standing ovation.
"We did our best to protect the principles and the values that we believe in - the right to speak, to study, to teach freely - but the point came that I simply felt that this threat was too large for us to handle," said Ms. Stewart, who was told by campus security that even additional police officers could not ensure safety.
Hamilton, a campus of 1,750 students, has always had a reputation for accepting divergent voices. In November, the same program that invited this speaker - the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture - hired Susan Rosenberg, a former member of the Weather Underground, after her release from prison on explosives charges. She later withdrew in the face of protest.
On another end of the political spectrum, the scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese equated abortion to murder during her talk to a packed, polite campus auditorium last Thursday. According to The Spectator, the weekly student newspaper, she also said that empowering humans to choose who lives and who dies "opens the road to the Holocaust."
Mr. Churchill - who had planned to give his remarks Thursday in a flak jacket with two bodyguards in tow - was originally scheduled to speak by himself, but Ms. Stewart and others added three people to the panel and changed its focus to free speech. One of those added was Mr. Churchill's wife, who is also a scholar. The Churchills were to be paid $3,500, but volunteered this week to forgo the money because of the complaints.
In his original essay, Mr. Churchill wrote that the thousands killed at the World Trade Center had played a role in American sanctions on Iraq that "translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants."
"If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it," he wrote.
The bulk of the outraged e-mail messages began arriving last weekend, after Mr. O'Reilly of Fox had urged viewers to contact Hamilton.
"If you allow this vile individual to speak you forever label yourself as the Auschwitz of American colleges," stated one e-mail message among nearly 400 that Hamilton posted on its Web site to show the reaction to Mr. Churchill.
"Would he feel the same way about his own wife or child if they worked in the W.T.C. and were lost because they went to work that day," wrote the spouse of a rescue-operations captain who was killed. "He should be banned on the grounds of slandering the victims of such a brutal terrorist attack."
Ms. Stewart said she alone received 6,000 messages, describing them as "ranging from angry to profane, obscene, violent," and asserted that Hamilton's actions had been mischaracterized by many of the writers, as well as by Mr. O'Reilly.
Controversial speakers are nothing new to academic institutions: For years, Leonard Jeffries of the City University of New York would create a stir on campus and elsewhere with provocative remarks, and a Columbia University faculty panel is now investigating remarks by some pro-Palestinian professors that offended some Jewish students.
In 2002, hundreds of Harvard students protested when a graduating senior was chosen to deliver a commencement speech entitled, "The American Jihad." The student, Zayed Yasin, who received a death threat, said his speech was a defense of the meaning of jihad as a nonviolent struggle to do right. After negotiations with a representative of Harvard's Jewish community, Mr. Yasin changed the title to "Of Faith and Citizenship," and delivered his remarks under tight security.
Later in 2002, Harvard College's English Department canceled a campus reading by a poet who had once referred in verse to the Israeli Army as a "Zionist SS." and had criticized American-born Jewish settlers. As at Hamilton, professors at Harvard said they had not known about the remarks of the poet, Tom Paulin, before inviting him.
As Hamilton was trying to contain the outrage on Tuesday, political and university officials in Colorado were criticizing Mr. Churchill.
Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, called on him to resign from the university, while Representative Mark Udall, a Democrat, said in a statement that the professor was "factually inaccurate" about the terrorist attacks and owed the families of victims an apology. Mr. Churchill gave up his chairmanship of the ethnic studies department this week, and a spokeswoman said that the university's governing body, the nine-member Board of Regents, would meet Thursday to discuss his future.
Kirk Johnson and Michelle York contributed reporting for this article.
I knew VB when I lived up there - not well, but enough that I'd take his word over WC's.
Clinton has been known to claim Cherokee ancestry. That is about as reliable as most things he says.
The one concept which seems to elude President Stewart and the Hamilton faculty is decency--that inviting this piece of pondscum to the campus offends a sense of decency.
Hamilton, like any institution committed to the free exchange of ideas, invites to its campus people of diverse opinions, often controversial.... We expect that many of those who strongly disagree with Mr. Churchill's comments will attend his talk and make their views known. This is the process of both academic freedom and freedom of speech.Today, we get:
We have done our best to protect what we hold most dear, the right to speak, think and study freely. 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 .... I have made the decision to cancel this event in the interest of protecting those at risk.Hmmm... the First amendment must be upheld above all, except, oops, fear. So much for principle.
What a disgusting spectacle coming in and around the world-shaking vote in Iraq, where where husbands and wives went to the polls separately so that should one be killed their children would still have a parent. People risked death and some got it in expressing their democratic rights. And Hamilton College is afraid.
Heh, Hamilton, you who so love the First amendment (except that nasty bit about free assembly when it comes to fraternities): try out the Second amendment for a change if you really mean to defend your free speech. Or is it not so free, after all?
Dear Hamilton College:
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Franklin
Looks like "big eichmann's" nonsense didn't pay off.
I like the direction the country's moving in.
Someone reposted one of those threads yesterday, and I bookmarked it.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1333438/posts
Doncha love how the Times manages to portray the anti-abortion speaker as the offensiveness equivalent of Ward Churchill?
In life and in art, the left celebrates dysfunction and ugliness. That's the problem.
Typical America hating liberal. I really wish these folks would learn about what they are talking about. I've seen reports that Saddam would not allow the kids to receive the medicines sent. He wanted them to die in a ploy to have the sanctions removed. I wish I could find that thread.
I also wish the libs would stop referring to UN sanctions as "US" sanctions.
UN sanctions vs. US sanctions - good point.
Honest mistake? I don't think so.
Great letter. And thanks for kicking in their teeth in the prior post for seizing the fraternity houses. They will never see another cent of my money because of that farce.
Best regards.
Helms, that's one scary photo. Scary.
Tobin was my freshman year advisor. We hated each other. So, I didn't take any history classes that year. Moving to another advisor sophomore year, I got up the courage to take a history course. Ended up in Esther Kanipe's class on the French Revolution.
Really, it had nothing to do with the fact that Kanipe taught the French Revolution through the eyes of a feminist communist -- nothing to do with it. But, as it was, and unrelated to Kanipe's inane politics, I was late to almost every class, which was taught in that little red building along Campus Dr. -- can't remember the name. Her classroom had a peculiar feature in that the blackboard was built across the doorway. Whenever I'd barge into class, late, I'd barge through her blackboard. One day, I smacked her as she was chalking up the board.
She HATED me. I never worked harder for a C-minus.
These fools are all smug over this episode. Nobody is fooled, but by themselves. Thank God for the open society that this internet thing has brought about. This story wouldn't have happened with but the MSM.
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