It was “show and tell” in Denver yesterday. The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado was convened to discuss the question of loose cannon professor Ward Churchill. As could only be expected, there was an assembly of the usual suspects. Faculty and student sympathizers filled the plaza in front of the building and then moved into the hearing room. It caused flashbacks to the ‘60s with only the “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho” chants missing. Signs demanding freedom of the Chicago Seven….ooops, I meant the oppressed professor. Signs accusing the Regents of McCarthyism, signs demanding academic free speech, shouts of fascist and nazi….oops again, wasn’t that Churchill’s original characterization of the workers, janitors, firemen, police, secretaries, bankers, lawyers, capitalists and entrepreneurs who died in the World Trade Center?
The question was how to spin the brouhaha to get the beleaguered Regents off the public hook while still preserving their avant garde professor’s big bucks job. But, the show was about what kind of education such a faculty provides for the students of CU/Boulder and the telling part was how pathetic the results displayed were. There was pushing, shoving, TV-posturing, arrests, and the usual array of guerilla theater. What there wasn’t, was reasoned argument weighing the facts and finding the truth.
This has never been a question of Free Speech, that chimera of America that all support but few of us really fully tolerate. It has been a question of how we teach the students of a university to seek the truth. Speaking freely in the public square is fine. Speaking as the representative of a university, tenured and chaired, without regard to truth, without evaluation of your assertions, without concern for fact, but only with your own, ill-founded emotions as your guide is not protected by the Constitution I swore to defend and protect.
University students have a right to unbiased argument. Faculty has an obligation to teach their students that what they want and what they feel may not be in agreement with the facts of the issue. Hating America is fine, but if the assertions that you use to bolster your argument are simply your own creation and opinion, then your hatred is unfounded. Students need to learn that what they think must be tempered by a search to find out what really is. The whole purpose of higher education is to prepare the student to function effectively in a world populated with conflicting, emotion-laden messages. The leader of tomorrow must be guided by reality that agrees with the dreams.
The display in Denver didn’t give much support to the premise that CU was doing that job. Students supporting their prof admitted to not having read his diatribe. They packed up in Boulder, cut their classes and came to follow their demagogue without consideration for what he wrote. While the man-in-the-street can be excused for taking the condensed version of Churchill’s screed, the students of the university can’t be excused for failure to spend ten minutes reading the cause celebre of the moment.
The faculty arrived shouting academic freedom, confusing the concept with free speech. The freedom they support involves discipline and rigor, along with the courteous and respectful consideration for other’s ideas. But, the faculty demonstrating in Denver hadn’t learned that part of the contract.
When the Regents convened, the students and faculty shouted them down. Ohh, freedom of speech for those I disagree with is dictatorial, isn’t it! When the meeting didn’t go the way they planned, the students rose in disagreement and in short order were being arrested for assaulting police officers. What fine reasoning skills we are teaching these students for $30k per year. When it was all over, the Regents appointed one of their members to investigate the writings and speeches of Prof. Churchill to determine if there is cause to dismiss him. He’ll report back in thirty days. They clearly hope that the scandal will be overcome by other events by then.
But, the questions arise. Why didn’t Churchill’s writing and speaking get investigated before he was hired, tenured or offered the department chair? Why isn’t there a program in place to vet the writings of faculty to insure that while they are not censored, they do receive the peer review that insures they meet the basic research criteria demanded of every freshman in a term paper? And, maybe the real question, what has the Board of Regents been doing for all these years while CU/Boulder has moved increasingly away from the mainstream of America?
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