Inside Higher Ed: Should Academic Left Defend Churchill?
The debate might be summed up in an analogy offered by one of the faculty panels that reviewed Churchill and found that he committed, intentionally, all kinds of research misconduct. Committee members said that they were uncomfortable with the fact that Colorado ignored serious allegations against Churchill for years, and took them seriously only when his politics attracted attention. The panel compared the situation to one in which a motorist is stopped for speeding because a police officer doesn’t like the bumper sticker on her car. If she was speeding, she was speeding — regardless of the officer’s motives, the panel said.
A group of professors — many of them brought together somewhat ironically by David Horowitz — have joined forces to say that the officer’s motives do matter, and may matter more than the speeding. And they are organizing a petition drive</a., drawing support from some big-name academics, against Churchill’s dismissal. The group is called Teachers for a Democratic Society and its original members were all among those included in Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.
Follow
