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Battle Heats Up Over Academic Freedom

By DAN ELLIOTT
.c The Associated Press

DENVER (AP) - Academic freedom has never completely protected
professors who
make unpopular statements. One was fired in 1960 for suggesting that
premarital sex among students could be a good thing. Three decades
later, a department
chair was demoted for saying a Jewish conspiracy denigrated blacks in
the
movies.

Now experts say the Sept. 11 attacks have put new fire in the battle
over
just where academic freedom ends and misconduct - or even treason -
begins.

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill could be fired pending
an
investigation prompted by his 2001 essay suggesting some World Trade
Center
victims were toiling away like efficient Nazi bureaucrats.

There are no exact figures on attempts to fire or discipline professors
since
Sept. 11, but experts say they have probably increased. The fight is
especially fierce at state universities, where some question whether
taxpayers must
pay the salaries of professors they find unpatriotic or outrageous.

``We have never been free of the issue of professors coming under
intense
scrutiny or attack for having written something somebody finds utterly

loathsome,'' said Jonathan Knight of the American Association of
University Professors
in Washington.

Knight said firings are relatively rare, with 50 or 60 losing their
jobs each
year for a variety of reasons out of some 800,000 tenured and untenured

professors nationwide. Tenure, a protection normally granted after
several years of
probation, is designed to allow teaching and research without fear of
political reprisals.

Overall, challenges to American professors today are mild compared with
the
attacks academics suffered during the anti-communist investigations
spurred by
Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, said Robert O'Neil, director of the
Thomas
Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in
Charlottesville, Va.

But, Knight said, the intensity of attacks on academic freedom have
increased
since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Churchill's case has ignited furious debate with no shortage of
students and
teachers defending his right to speak, even though few have endorsed
his
comments.

His essay said some of the trade center victims were ``little
Eichmanns,'' a
suggestion that white-collar ``technocrats'' who died that day were no
better
than Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann because they are furthering
U.S.
policies harmful to Arabs and indigenous people worldwide.

It drew little attention until last month, when Churchill was invited
to
speak at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Relatives of the Trade
Center dead
and the governors of New York and Colorado denounced Churchill, and
Churchill's speech was canceled because of death threats against him.

Since then, other Churchill speeches around the nation have been
canceled and
the Hamilton professor who invited him to that campus has stepped down
as
program director, fed up with the ``political and media fight that the
current
climate requires.''

The University of Colorado has launched a 30-day review to determine
whether
Churchill can be fired. Media outlets are exploring his scholarship -
one
Denver radio show claims school documents prove he lied about being an
American
Indian to land his job - and state legislators are considering making
it easier
to get rid of tenured professors.

Churchill has refused to apologize and has threatened to sue if he is
let go
over the controversy.

O'Neil said universities have handled most post-Sept. 11 complaints
about
professors properly by submitting them to formal review, as Colorado is
doing
with Churchill and as the University of New Mexico did for Richard
Berthold, a
former history professor.

Berthold told students hours after the Sept. 11 attacks: ``Anyone who
can
blow up the Pentagon has my vote.'' The university resisted enormous
pressure to
fire him, instead conducting a review and eventually issuing a letter
of
reprimand after he apologized.

Berthold says the discipline system worked only because he caved in
under
pressure.

``I look back on it, and I just ate too much crow and apologized too
much.
I'm ashamed,'' he said. ``It wasn't, 'Let's applaud the killing of
innocent
people,' it was my expression of my revulsion for the leadership of
this
country.''

He retired two years later.

``Bitter? Oh yes, I'm bitter,'' he said. ``I thought I served the
institution
and my society very well for 30 years.''

On the Net:

American Association of University Professors: http://www.aaup.org

Thomas Jefferson Center: http://www.tjcenter.org


02/13/05 09:47 EST