| From the issue dated February 18, 2005 |
Hours after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Ward Churchill compared the victims to the Nazis. A professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he wrote in an essay that those killed in the World Trade Center were not innocent civilians but "little Eichmanns."
The analogy is so outrageous, one thinks, that surely he immediately got into trouble. Surely it prompted angry letters and calls for him to be fired. But it didn't.
Instead, for years the comparison just sat there quietly. Mr. Churchill, on the other hand, rarely stays still. He has spoken at more than 40 college campuses since the 2001 attacks.
He traveled to elite liberal-arts colleges like Williams and Swarthmore, to big public universities like Arizona State and Michigan State, and to prestigious private universities like Brown and Syracuse. He spoke at community colleges in New York and Utah. Generally, he spoke about genocide and American Indian issues, but some speeches focused on foreign policy. Yet other than a brief mention in The Burlington Free-Press during a December 2001 visit to the University of Vermont, the essay never made the news.
Then this winter, as he was about to speak at Hamilton College, the "little Eichmanns" time bomb went off, sparking hundreds of stories, denunciations of Mr. Churchill by governors and legislators, canceled speeches, and an investigation by Colorado administrators into his work that may threaten his tenured job.
So why now?
The answer lies in the power of Bill O'Reilly, Weblogs, and the families of September 11 victims. But before all that, the seeds of this controversy were sown not with Nazi references in an online essay but with a 1981 armored-car robbery that Mr. Churchill had nothing to do with.
Once Bitten, Twice Shy
On October 20, 1981, robbers connected with the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground struck a Brinks armored car while it sat outside a bank near Nyack, N.Y. One guard was killed, another wounded. Two police officers were later killed at a roadblock when robbers jumped from the back of a U-Haul truck, firing automatic rifles.
Susan Rosenberg, a 1970s leftist radical, was indicted as an accessory to the robbery, but remained free until she was arrested in New Jersey in 1984 on charges of possessing 740 pounds of explosives. She was sentenced to 58 years in prison, but the charges in the Brinks case were dropped.
Then in 2001, just before leaving office, President Bill Clinton granted her clemency, and she was released from prison. Now a prisoner-rights activist and writer, Ms. Rosenberg was hired in the fall by the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture to teach a one-month course on writing memoirs at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y.
That appointment created a public-relations mess for Hamilton, drawing protests from professors and negative editorials in newspapers. Ms. Rosenberg then backed out, citing "the atmosphere of such organized right-wing intimidation from a small group of students and faculty."
The Rosenberg debacle raised the antennae of Theodore Eismeier, a Hamilton government professor. So when the Kirkland Project sent a message on December 14 highlighting its spring schedule, which included a February 3 speech by Mr. Churchill on prison issues, he checked out the Colorado professor.
After a little Internet searching, Mr. Eismeier discovered "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," the essay in which Mr. Churchill made his now infamous "little Eichmanns" comment. Mr. Eismeier says he immediately sent the essay and "other troubling writings" to college administrators, urging them to cancel the event.
The storm clouds were gathering.
Three days later, on Friday, December 17, Joan Hinde Stewart, the college's president, met with Nancy S. Rabinowitz, director of the Kirkland Project, to discuss Mr. Churchill. Then on Monday, the president and David C. Paris, the vice president for academic affairs, met with Ms. Rabinowitz and members of the project's executive committee. "They were saying this is going to be as bad as Susan Rosenberg," Ms. Rabinowitz says. "And I said, Let's take a strong stand for freedom of speech." According to Ms. Rabinowitz, the president told her to fold Mr. Churchill's speech into a planned panel discussion and change the focus to his offensive positions.
Then in January, Mr. Eismeier and three other Hamilton professors wrote two opinion pieces about Ms. Rosenberg and Mr. Churchill. He sent them to the campus newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator, along with a copy of "Some People Push Back."
In the essay, Mr. Churchill argues that those killed in the World Trade Center, as part of corporate America, were not truly innocent. "Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break." He adds: "If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."
On January 21, the Hamilton newspaper reported that Mr. Churchill was coming to campus and highlighted some of his more controversial statements. Mr. Eismeier was quoted saying that the event would not create a useful discussion. "It seems akin to inviting a representative of the KKK to speak and then asking a member of the NAACP to respond," he said.
Five days later the news was picked up by The Post-Standard, a newspaper in nearby Syracuse. The pressure on Hamilton would only grow over the next seven days. Administrators had been wrong: It wasn't going to be as bad as Susan Rosenberg. It was going to be a lot worse.
Faster Than a Speeding Blog
In the Internet age, that report in the Syracuse newspaper quickly reached far beyond upstate New York. A link to the article was posted on Little Green Footballs, a widely read conservative Weblog, at 9:40 a.m. Eastern time.
Eleven minutes later a reader posted a comment, saying Mr. Churchill deserved to be shot in the face. And then just before 10 a.m., a different reader provided the professor's e-mail address. Before 11 a.m., another reader announced she had just called the Colorado governor and had written letters to The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. She followed up a few minutes later with contact information for the newspapers so that others could do the same.
Linking to a simple article from Syracuse had unleashed the power of hundreds of individuals, all using Google to add little bits of information. Within hours, 500 comments about the matter had been posted on Little Green Footballs alone. Readers linked to old news releases regarding squabbles between Mr. Churchill and the American Indian Movement. They linked to Hamilton news releases about alumni who were killed in the attacks. Someone requested the name of a September 11 widow from Colorado who might have political clout.
The blogs reached beyond the water cooler. Many readers wanted to do something -- even if it was just sending a message of protest or making a phone call. Over the next week or so, Hamilton would receive 8,000 e-mail messages about Mr. Churchill.
Two days later, on January 28, as the story continued to gather momentum, readers of Freerepublic.com, another conservative Weblog, continued to talk about Mr. Churchill. One poster suggested calling Hamilton to tell officials that he would not contribute any money if they allowed Mr. Churchill to speak on the campus, to which, another poster replied: "Screw that! I say we cost them money. Their 1-800 admissions # should never stop ringing."
That night the Churchill saga became a prime-time event when Bill O'Reilly led his talk show on the Fox News Channel by calling Mr. Churchill "insane" and saying that Hamilton had no justification for giving him a public forum.
Mr. O'Reilly interviewed Matthew Coppo, a Hamilton sophomore whose father was killed in the World Trade Center attacks. Mr. Coppo's personal story, some now say, helped the Hamilton event get the publicity that the dozens of other speeches by Mr. Churchill never got.
The closest thing Mr. O'Reilly could find to a defender of Mr. Churchill was Philip A. Klinkner, an associate professor of government at Hamilton. Only one problem: Mr. Klinkner was one of the professors who had told the Kirkland Project that Mr. Churchill should not speak.
"Going on O'Reilly is a Kamikaze mission," Mr. Klinkner acknowledges. "I went on to defend a principle. Colleges, if they choose to be a marketplace of ideas, have to be willing to bring in people who say pretty repugnant things." Nevertheless, he adds, "If I want to have someone come to class to talk about problems with the Treaty of Versailles, I don't have to bring in a Nazi."
Mr. O'Reilly ended the segment about Mr. Churchill with advice for his viewers. "I don't want anybody doing anything crazy to Hamilton College," he said. "I don't want any threats going in there. I don't want any of that. Feel free to wire or e-mail the college with your complaints. And you alumni at Hamilton, do not give them a nickel if that man appears."
Vige Barrie, a spokeswoman for Hamilton, was in the president's office as the show aired. "When the segment stopped," she says, "the phone just started ringing."
Anywhere but Here
In the end, Hamilton canceled the event after receiving "credible threats of violence" against Mr. Churchill and college officials, including one call from a man who said he was going to bring a gun to the speech. Ms. Barrie says police are still actively investigating several of the threats.
But canceling the speech won't undo the weeks of negative publicity. At Hamilton, Ms. Barrie says some students are going to work with college officials on improving the image of the college. "We want to be known for more than just Ward Churchill," she says.
And other presidents and alumni offices must be asking, could this have happened elsewhere? Maybe at Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, where Mr. Churchill was supposed to speak in March. Or at Eastern Washington University, where he was scheduled to appear in April. Both events have been canceled.
The situation at Hamilton was ripe to explode into a bigger story, says Mr. Klinkner, pointing to the Rosenberg case, the college's New York location, and the student whose father perished in the attacks. And Ms. Rabinowitz, the Hamilton professor of comparative literature who invited Mr. Churchill, says the college was simply in the sights of conservative talk shows and Weblogs after the Susan Rosenberg affair.
The controversy certainly never came up at the dozens of other institutions where Mr. Churchill has appeared since first writing his essay.
Randall Fuller, an assistant professor of English at Drury University, in Springfield, Mo., said faculty members have been following the flap because Mr. Churchill spoke there in March 2004 without any incident. In fact, Mr. Fuller says, Mr. Churchill sparked the "most stimulating and engaged discussion" of the 18 speakers invited to the campus to commemorate the Lewis and Clark expedition.
"We knew that he was a provocateur and that's what we liked about him," he says.
Sharon L. Dobkin, a psychology professor at Monroe Community College, in Rochester, N.Y., invited Mr. Churchill to speak about genocide in November 2002. The college's New York location did not prompt a stir back then. She says she had not heard of the "Some People Push Back" essay at the time, but she was not surprised by it. "I think he's deliberately inflammatory," she says. "Either you love Ward Churchill or you hate him."
Politicians Want Him Fired
Mr. Churchill's speaking engagements may dry up now, as other colleges back away from his fiery rhetoric. His wife, Natsu Saito, acknowledged that some speaking engagements have been canceled, but said other colleges have contacted the couple since the controversy. She declined to name them, saying "I don't want them to come under fire prematurely."
For now, though, Mr. Churchill has other things to worry about -- most immediately, his job. Politicians in Colorado are pushing for his firing, and the interim chancellor of his campus has announced an investigation into his work to determine whether he "may have overstepped his bounds." That investigation could be the first step toward dismissing him. Vandals have spray-painted swastikas on his pickup truck, and he has received more than 100 death threats. And now a Lamar University sociologist is charging that some of Mr. Churchill's research is fraudulent.
In a speech last week in Boulder, Mr. Churchill said that he would not retract his statements and that he would fight to keep his job. His essay was sparked, he said, by hearing someone call the attack "senseless." He added: "How can they positively know that? Do they really believe this operation had no purpose?"
He also told the crowd that he did not mean that everyone in the World Trade Center was a "little Eichmann." The janitors and passers-by were not the people at the heart of the "mighty engine of profit" that he derided.
Back at Hamilton, the issue has moved beyond simply Mr. Churchill's words. Mr. Klinkner says the controversy proves that academe cannot think of itself as separate from the rest of society. "You can forget about the notion of the ivory tower and that we can keep all these things in-house," he says. "Any piece of information that exists will get out. I don't think that's a bad thing. This was not good for Hamilton, but we need to acknowledge that we can no longer say, No, we're going to play by our own rules."
For Ms. Rabinowitz, the director of the Kirkland Project, the question is whether this incident will make colleges reluctant to bring in controversial speakers: "How many people can stomach what we've been through?"
HOW THE CHICKENS CAME HOME TO ROOST
Fall 2001 Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, writes an essay he titles "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." In it he says those who died in the recent attacks on the World Trade Center were not innocent civilians but rather "little Eichmanns." The essay appears on several Web sites and is later included in his 2003 book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (AK Press).
Spring 2004 The Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture at Hamilton College invites Mr. Churchill to speak at Hamilton the next academic year about political prisoners and prison issues. The professor had spoken at Hamilton several years earlier, and he is a regular speaker on college campuses, where he often talks about American Indian issues.
December 2004 The Kirkland Project sends an e-mail message to Hamilton professors about planned events for the spring semester, mentioning Mr. Churchill's speech. A political-science professor reads Mr. Churchill's writings regarding the terrorist attacks and tells Hamilton officials that the event should be canceled. After meeting with the college president, the Kirkland Project scraps the speech and changes a planned panel discussion so it focuses on free speech and dissent.
January 21 An article in The Hamilton Spectator, the campus newspaper, highlights Mr. Churchill's controversial comments.
January 26 An article in The Post-Standard, a Syracuse newspaper, reports on the controversy, including comments from Hamilton professors who called the event "morally outrageous" and "an act of utter irresponsibility." The article is posted on several Weblogs, prompting readers to complain in e-mail messages to Hamilton.
January 28 Bill O'Reilly discusses Mr. Churchill on his Fox television show, suggesting that the professor should be arrested for sedition.
January 31 Mr. Churchill resigns as chairman of Boulder's ethnic-studies department, cutting his $115,000 salary by about $20,000. He says that "the present political climate has rendered me a liability in terms of representing either my department, the college, or the university in this or any other administrative capacity."
February 1 Hamilton cancels the event, citing "credible threats of violence." Meanwhile, Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado calls on Mr. Churchill to resign.
February 3 The Colorado Board of Regents holds a special meeting to discuss Mr. Churchill. Philip P. DiStefano, interim chancellor of the Boulder campus, announces that he and two deans will review Mr. Churchill's writings and speeches to determine whether the professor "may have overstepped his bounds." The American Association of University Professors says that any question about Mr. Churchill's fitness should be judged not by administrators but by other faculty members.
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