If you have not been following the travails of Ward Churchill (not be confused with Ward Cleaver), he's a U of Colorado professor who has become public enemy number one of late, thanks to an essay he wrote a while back in which he suggested that the WTC victims had it coming because, according to Ward, they were just a bunch of "little Eichmanns" anyway. Now politicians want to crucify the prof, and his school is thinking of firing him.
This is a tough one: Ward is obviously a major A-hole, and you'd have to search pretty hard to find anyone who agrees with his position that 9/11 victims deserve no sympathy (his twisted logic is something like: they worked in the financial industry, see, and therefore they were aiding and abetting the evil U.S. machine that has committed atrocities in the Mid-East, and therefore these Wall Street workers were owed some payback.) On the other hand, do we really want to start firing every wild-eyed ticked-off radical professor out there? I'm of the belief that college is a place where all kinds of crazy viewpoints should be tolerated, because it prepares you for the craziness you will encounter in the real world. On the third hand, universities do tend to fire people for spreading around "hate speech" against particular groups. Wouldn't it be "hate speech" to suggest that Wall Street folks deserve to be blown up? I don't know the answer, I'm just wondering out loud.
[posted by Warren]
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