Ward Churchill & Lawrence H. Summers: Two Very Different Men Reveal Academia At Its Worst

Well, well. Our dearly-beloved University of Hawaii has found enough academic libertarians to muster an invitation for Professor Ward Churchill, the noted Indian rights agitator who cannot tell the difference between Adolf Eichmann and a stock broker, to speak on campus this coming Tuesday, at 7 pm in the UH Art Auditorium. The invitation was extended by the American Studies Department and others not as yet named. The theme of Mr. Churchill's lecture will be, "Speaking Truth to Power: Academic Freedom in the Age of Terror."

I wonder who's tax dollars are being spent to fund and host this visit?
Update: Today's newspaper indicates that little, if any, tax money is involved and that Mr. Churchill will not receive a speaking fee. 1/19

Meanwhile, back at Eastern Washington University there are apparently some students and faculty who would like to re-invite Churchill to their campus. It's apparently a matter of "free speech" to pay him $x so he can talk.

Hmmmm. New thought: If "free" speech is free then why do colleges have to pay people to speak? Maybe the solution for all of this is to let Mr. Churchill pay his own way to say what he wants to say!

On the other hand we have poor President Lawrence H. Summers of Harvard University. Whereas Mr. Churchill has a BA and an MA from an experimental state college in Indiana that was later shut down because of its failure to succeed, Dr. Summers is a bona fide academic by any stretch of the imagination. His mini-biography in Wickopedia is worth reproducing here:

Lawrence H. Summers 1954, U.S. economist and government official, b. New Haven, Conn. Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard, he taught at MIT and in 1983 became the youngest tenured professor in Harvard's history. He served on the President's Council of Economic Advisors in 1982-83 during the Reagan administration, edited the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1984-90, and in 1991-93 was chief economist of the World Bank. He left Harvard in 1993 to become under secretary for international affairs in the Treasury Dept. He was deputy secretary under Robert Rubin from 1995 until 1999, when he succeeded Rubin as secretary (1999-2001). Summers became president of Harvard in 2001.

It seems that Dr. Summers provoked the ire of the political correctness secret police when, after being specifically requested to be provocative at an academic seminar, he challenged the participants with a number of research theories related to the differences between men and women and their respective natural abilities to excel in various academic disciplines. One question he raised was something along the lines of, Are women less able to rise to the highest positions of the sciences because of gender-related predispositions?

Well, ever since that discussion question was asked, students and faculty of various institutions have been out to cut him down to size. It is quite possible that he will even lose his position as President of Harvard because of this so-called controversy. (Note: The complete transcript of Dr. Summers' comments may be found here. Context is everything...particularly in this instance.)

How ironic that university faculty and students are demanding that Mr. Churchill be granted the right of free speech to spew forth his hateful, unscholarly and unresearched opinions at any time and any place of anyone's choosing; while, on the other hand, university faculty and students are demanding that Dr. Summers apologize, recant and not repeat his comments because they have been deemed offensive by some.

Am I missing some modicum of logic here? Has an informed attitude of respect for excellence been replaced by the gut-level emotion of subjectivism?

From what I have read, Mr. Churchill is not worthy to untie the shoes on Dr. Summers' feet. When American colleges and universities cheer the likes of Ward Churchill and boo a man like Lawrence Summers then it must be official: The world has turned upside-down and rational discourse and the exchange of ideas in academia are now officially dead on arrival.

Note: For an earlier posting on Ward Churchill see here.