By David R. Hoffman
There is a popular adage that states: “Only two things are certain—death and taxes.”
Now there is a third: “It is certain that the constitutional rights of the individual will always be sacrificed to appease a governmental and/or economically powerful entity.”
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| Ward Churchill and Death of Academic Freedom |
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 BREAKING NEWS |
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In a recent Pravda.Ru article entitled “A tale of two academics”, I analyzed the diametrical situations faced by two tenured university professors: Ward Churchill and John Yoo.
Churchill was fired from his position at the University of Colorado (hereinafter CU) after writing a controversial essay shortly after the 9/11 attacks, comparing some of those killed in the World Trade Center to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann.
To avoid the appearance that Churchill was terminated for exercising his first amendment right to freedom of speech, CU instead accused Churchill of engaging in plagiarism and other forms of “research misconduct.”
Yoo, by contrast, remains a tenured law professor at another university even though, while serving in the “Justice” Department during the dictatorship of George W. Bush, he authored controversial memoranda that endorsed the use of torture, extraordinary rendition, and the denial of due process of law, while also claiming that Bush, as president, had the authority to void the Constitution and Bill of Rights, deny Americans their fundamental freedoms, and detain them without charge or trial.
In “A tale of two academics”, I argued that even though Churchill’s actions seemed to cause more outrage in America than Yoo’s, there are three reasons why Yoo is more deserving of condemnation: 1). Yoo’s memoranda possessed the power to influence governmental policy. Churchill’s essay did not; 2). Churchill expressed his views openly, while Yoo hid behind a wall of government secrecy and bureaucracy; 3). Yoo was surreptitiously working to murder the Constitution and Bill of Rights, while Churchill was breathing life into them by exercising the very rights these documents were created to protect.
Shortly before I finished writing “A tale of two academics”, a Colorado jury concluded that Churchill had been fired from CU for expressing his political views, and not because of any alleged “research misconduct.” In San Francisco, around the same time, federal district court judge Jeffrey White ruled that Yoo could be sued by Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was victimized by Yoo’s policies of torture and detention without charge or trial.
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