Canceling Ward Churchill

Hamilton College's decision to cancel the panel on which University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill was to serve is testimony to the power of the public's sense of decency and outrage. Some will charge that Churchill, about whom I posted here and here, is being censored, but in fact he's free to speak and write as he pleases, which is only right. Universities should be forums for wide-ranging debate, and Churchill wrote his apologia for the 9/11 terrorists while in the employ of Colorado's flagship university. But neither Hamilton College nor any other institution is obligated to give Churchill a platform from which he may spew his hate-filled venom.

Hamilton released a statement from president Joan Hinde Stewart citing fears for public safety as the reason for canceling the panel:

This attempt at CYA is almost as pathetic as the initial decision to invite Churchill in the first place. Although he expressed "astonishment" at the reaction to his essay (see my post just below), what we really have here is an example of the power of the Internet to move information quickly. In this case, the blogosphere didn't uncover the story; that was left to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which editorialized on the matter on Friday's Taste page.

But the blogosphere, coupled with talk radio, carried the story far beyond the audience that even the Journal could muster alone. Hamilton's administrators were caught red-handed doing the type of thing too many college presidents have done for decades: providing a platform for convoluted, anti-intellectual crackpots whose notoriety rests on nothing more than their shock value.

In this case, little Hamilton -- which is situated in the state in which the worst attacks of 9/11 occurred -- discovered that some standards still exist on the American campus. Churchill can (and no doubt, will) continue to spew his hate, because he doesn't have the ability to perform useful scholarship. At least he won't be doing so at one college in New York.