Churchill redux

Wow! Joe Scarborough is really going overboard on this one. A few minutes ago on MSNBC he said [paraphrasing] that academic freedom is no protection, "it won't stop us." If the politicians won't go after these radical professors, "we'll elect ones who will." He showed tape of the board of regents meeting that was disrupted by lefty protestors and denounced them as being against freedom of speech.

OK Scarborough is outta line here, but so are the protestors. Their shenanigans are not helpful. They simply stoke the fires of resentment within the electorate. Remember, the antiwar protests of the 1960's helped to elect Richard Nixon.

Scarborough is going nowhere with this. He's too far out of the mainstream. But curtailments on academic freedoms are almost inevitable at this point. There are a lot of ideas being floated; like academic malpractice suits or restructuring and weakening tenure, or oversight committees of non-academics, eliminating or modifying peer review, etc. The academic milieu that emerged in the mid-twentieth century and in which I and many of my readers were trained is slowly, but surely, passing from the scene.

UPDATE:

Wretchard over at Belmont Club has two long posts on the Churchill affair. Follow the links to get a fuller picture of the professor and of the radical circles in which he moved.

UPDATE:

Steven Bainbridge invokes historical personages, from Voltaire and Burke to Milton and Colin Powell to argue that Professor Churchill should not be fired or stripped of his tenure on the grounds that speech should be protected.

Eugene Volokh agrees that the professor is protected by freedom of speech, but argues [citing Joseph Ellis' suspension at Mount Holyoke for lying about his personal background] that Churchill's misrepresentation of his ethnic origins [pretending to be an American Indian] constitutes fraud and could be grounds for dismissal.

Volokh's argument disturbs me, because it would seem to support the extremely problematic principle -- one that has afflicted many areas of academic enterprise -- that no one who is not a member of a defined group can legitimately study it. In the marketplace of ideas a person's credentials or ethnic origins should be irrelevant. What counts is what he or she has to say and how well those utterances are supported. To argue otherwise, I would think, would be to impose an unreasonable infringement on freedom of expression. All too often in recent decades we have seen activists on both the left and right use assertions of identity and outrage as a means of shutting down discussion. That's not intellectual discourse; that's intellectual bullying! On the other hand it is sweetly ironic to note that this radical professor might be undone by identity issues.

UPDATE:

Paul Campos, who teaches law at CU, denounces Prof. Churchill and his supporters as "facists." Read it here. It's interesting how terms that have real historical meaning can be so flexibly applied in contemporary political discourse.