Inside Higher Ed: The culture wars of 2005
The conservative journal The New Criterion is the last place you’d expect to find any gratitude for Ward Churchill. But writing there this summer, Roger Kimball found a “bright side” to the controversial University of Colorado professor: He brought more scrutiny to higher education.
In an essay called “Retaking the University: A Battle Plan,” Kimball writes that “one of the chief tasks for critics of what has happened to academic life in this country is to show the extent to which Ward Churchill” is not unusual, but is “the predictable result of institutions that have gradually abandoned their commitment to education for the sake of radical posturing.”
The public revulsion to Churchill’s statements — especially his comparison of those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 to “little Eichmanns” — is “good news,” Kimball writes, in that it suggests that higher education “may be about to change.”
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