by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n It recently came to light that University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill had slandered some of the 9\/11 victims as \u201cLittle Eichmanns,\u201d who may well have deserved punishment for their participation in what went on \u201cin the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers.\u201d<\/p>\n That led to cursory public examination of earlier, similarly insane tirades, and prompted calls for Churchill\u2019s resignation. The usual fiery counter-support \u2014 protests and news conferences \u2014 ensued, to the effect that the professor\u2019s right of expression and academic freedom were being imperiled. But like so many academic scandals these days, the original \u201clittle Eichmanns\u201d comment \u2014 that innocent victims murdered at work by fascistic killers were comparable to a Nazi mastermind of the Holocaust \u2014 was just the torn scab revealing a festering sore beneath.<\/p>\n Churchill, it turns out, has no Ph.D., although it is the terminal degree required under normal circumstances at all such major research universities. Few, other than poets, novelists, and artists, are ever hired for tenure-track positions without it. Churchill probably also lied in claiming American Indian ancestry, thereby gaining entr\u00e9e to favorable hiring and tenure considerations.<\/p>\n The disturbing story went on for days, as accounts of former Weather Underground ties, a past trip to Libya to cultivate dictator Muammar Qaddafi, and several prior arrests surfaced about Churchill. The public further learned that the $114,032-a-year Churchill may have distorted his Vietnam-era military service, and routinely misrepresented scholarly texts to fit his own particular revisionism.<\/p>\n What he was, is, and writes are little more than ostentatious castles of sand. Indeed, to read Churchill\u2019s essay \u201cSome People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens\u201d (e.g., Mohamed Atta & Co. were not terrorists, but \u201ccombat teams\u201d avenging America\u2019s killing of \u201c500,000 kids\u201d) is to experience a colloquial, Chomsky-like rant \u2014 the fabricated statistics and inflammatory rhetoric made worse because his drivel is actually inside rather than outside his supposed field of ethnic-studies expertise.<\/p>\n In other words, Ward Churchill\u2019s plight gives us a glimpse into the strange world of the contemporary postmodern university of tenured ideologues, where professed identity politics, ethnic or gender chauvinism, and a disbelief in empiricism allow a con man to bully his way to guaranteed lifetime employment, and a handsome salary, and the right to say anything at all, no matter how inflammatory.<\/p>\n Well,\u00a0almost<\/i>\u00a0anything at all \u2014 as we have learned in the almost simultaneous case of Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who, in some remarks, entertained the possibility that innate gender differences might in part explain why women are underrepresented in the hard sciences on university faculties. It was the sort of informal speculation that most Americans sometimes engage in and was not limited to genetics; his remarks wandered all over the larger context of socialization, child rearing, habit, custom, and gender discrimination. Qualifiers, backtracking, disclaimers, and cautious admissions characterized his speculations about innate difference.<\/p>\n Summers\u2019s comments before scholars were apparently meant to incite the sort of \u201cconversation\u201d that universities exist for, challenging orthodoxies, shaking up complacent thinking, and, yes, perhaps provoking hurtful emotions that galvanize further debate. In some sense, his was a highbrow version of the common popular inquiry about why white basketball players, for example, are underrepresented in the NBA: Is it that white adolescents don\u2019t grow up with the familiar culture of the court, that they don\u2019t have enough role models in the game, or,\u00a0terribile dictu<\/i>, that they simply don\u2019t jump as high or run as fast as African Americans \u2014 or all or some or none of the above?<\/p>\n At one time my university\u2019s classics faculty privately used to wonder why most of our best students in Greek and Latin were women, who almost alone went on to doctoral programs in philology. That disproportionate number of women classics majors prompted speculation behind closed doors that perhaps females just grasped languages more easily, or were more mature in their study habits at an early age, or did less partying. We also sometimes worried that working-class males thought that the classics were not muscular enough, or that they felt such a less lucrative career would impair their ability as breadwinners \u2014 or about anything other than the need to implement some sort of special program to address this statistical anomaly. After all, Homer wouldn\u2019t care if he were read by a woman or a man, and students seemed to worry not about their instructors\u2019 gender, but only about having exciting and competent professors.<\/p>\n But such unfettered inquiry about gender or racial imbalances is precisely what one doesn\u2019t do publicly on a university campus \u2014 unless perhaps one has the multifaceted exemptions of a Ward Churchill. So Summers touched the third rail of contemporary university life, by questioning one of the hallowed tenets of the victimization industry: Deliberate discrimination explains all inequality of result, precluding free discussion of other theories \u2014 and thus justifies compensatory collective benefaction.<\/p>\n The penalties of transgression are substantial even for a Harvard president, as we hear from the growing chorus demanding Summers\u2019s resignation. Veterans of the university culture wars all shuddered when a former Treasury secretary, who once adjudicated questions of the world\u2019s financial system affecting billions on the planet, was now reduced to asking forgiveness, not once but thrice, from self-appointed faculty watchdogs of gender. Conservatives were doubly confused by his attempts at reeducation, and didn\u2019t know quite whether to praise the honesty of this former Clintonite that got him into such a mess, or lament his subsequent apologies that may well get him out of it.<\/p>\n A certain Dr. Denice Denton attacked Summers, but also insisted that his peccadillo might be profitably exploited as a \u201cteachable moment.\u201d But it turns out that Denton, the newly appointed chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz, had had her own \u201cteachable moment\u201d \u2014 though one that was as quickly forgotten by the media as Summers\u2019s was lasting. Again, in the bizarre world of academia, the chance tearing of a scab reveals quite interesting things underneath. Even before Chancellor Denton arrived at her new $275,000 job, she had negotiated a special university position as well for her girlfriend, Gretchen Kalonji, described as her partner of seven years, for the princely annual sum of $192,000 \u2014 a billet that was specially created, unadvertised, and closed to all other job applicants. This novel variant of spousal accommodation was precisely the sort of old-boy networking in public hiring that transparent affirmative-action protocols were supposedly designed to stop. In contemporary university parlance: Was there not a worthy Latina or African-American woman who could have at least been interviewed for the job?<\/p>\n The Denton-Kalonji household will have a combined income of at least $467,000 \u2014 plus up to another $50,000 granted to Kalonji for the expenses incurred in her \u201ctransition\u201d in moving to the area. This supplement comes on top of a previous $68,750 granted to Chancellor Denton to move to the rent-free, service-provided University President\u2019s House.<\/p>\n Giving a couple already making almost a half-million dollars a year nearly $120,000 to move to California prompted outrage: not from the tenured feminists on the Santa Cruz campus, but from the university\u2019s blue-collar employees, secretaries, and maintenance staff. At a time of record state budget deficits, workers had not received a raise in three years. Meanwhile student fees had recently increased by 10 percent and the Santa Cruz campus had just gone through $14 million in state budget cuts the prior year. Among the elite of the nation\u2019s professoriate, class considerations always bow to gender sensitivity.<\/p>\n What are we to make of all these recent university teachable moments? The usual exegeses suffice: The contemporary campus has devolved into an Orwellian world in which the ends usually justify the means. Diversity really means no diversity of ideas. Unfettered expression is a code word for groupspeak of the Left. Academic freedom and tenure ensure timidity and monotony of thought. The champions of the oppressed and discriminated are, in fact, the affluent and privileged, whose antics are excused only by the irrelevancy of academic culture and properly deplored solely through the accidental discovery of a forgotten rant or taped remark.<\/p>\n Underneath all this is the disturbing fact that progressive campuses are charging their students tuition whose annual increases exceed the rate of inflation, while vocal professors have plenty of idle time on their hands and live lives that most Americans \u2014 or their own college staff members \u2014 can only dream of.<\/p>\n The verdict is still out on whether the once-outspoken Summers will survive. But the interesting question is not how long he can stay on as president \u2014 but precisely how much public remorse, counseling, and scripted apologies are necessary for a former U.S. Treasury secretary to win a reprieve from the upscale tenured oppressed who apparently run Harvard.<\/p>\n \u00a92005 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" But who will teach the teachers? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Magazine It recently came to light that University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill had slandered some of the 9\/11 victims as \u201cLittle Eichmanns,\u201d who may well have deserved punishment for their participation in what went on \u201cin the sterile sanctuary of the twin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[791],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-19Y","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4452,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/little-eichmanns-and-digital-brownshirts\/","url_meta":{"origin":4462,"position":0},"title":"“Little Eichmanns” and “Digital Brownshirts”","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 18, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Deconstructing the Hitlerian slur by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The effort to remove fascists in the Middle East and jump-start democracy, for all its ups and downs, has been opposed not just by principled critics who bristled at tactics and strategy, but also by peculiarly vehement cynics here\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2005"","block_context":{"text":"March 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/march-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2343,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/on-dishing-it-out\/","url_meta":{"origin":4462,"position":1},"title":"On Dishing it Out . . .","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 20, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner What is weird about the liberal hysteria to the obstreperous (and occasionally rude) town meetings is the complete amnesia about what constitutes reckless public discourse. At one time not so long ago, those on the Left, and mainstream Democrats as well, apparently believed inflammatory\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "August 2009"","block_context":{"text":"August 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/august-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4402,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-happened-to-history\/","url_meta":{"origin":4462,"position":2},"title":"What Happened to History?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 10, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Our society suffers from the tyranny of the present. Presentism is the strange affliction of assuming that all our good things were created by ourselves \u2014 as if those without our technology who came before us lacked our superior knowledge and morality. We\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2005"","block_context":{"text":"May 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/may-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4448,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/americas-new-discontents\/","url_meta":{"origin":4462,"position":3},"title":"America’s New Discontents","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 22, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Sometime in the 1960s there arose a new home-grown distrust of the United States, followed by an erosion of faith in the values of the West. Perhaps the culprit was the fiasco in Vietnam or the rise of a trendy multiculturalism that followed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2005"","block_context":{"text":"March 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/march-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3538,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/lessons-in-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":4462,"position":4},"title":"Lessons in War","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 12, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Reflections on 9\/11, six years later. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online On that day, we watched tape of the doomed in suits diving head first from the burning floors, hoping to splatter on roofs rather than crush and kill incoming firefighters \u2014 as some tragically did. I remember\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2007"","block_context":{"text":"September 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/september-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":481,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-academic-establishment-goes-after-bruce-bawer\/","url_meta":{"origin":4462,"position":5},"title":"The Academic Establishment Goes After Bruce Bawer","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine Bruce Bawer, the intrepid international journalist and Freedom Center Shillman Fellow, has just published\u00a0The Victims\u2019 Revolution, an expose of \u201cIdentity Studies\u201d in American universities. 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