Boycott CU, TT & UCB

Recently, a few articles have surfaced, primarily in student newspapers, contending that Churchill vs. CU may have been the “test case” for right-wing organizations seeking to purge academia of professors and scholars they consider too “liberal” or “leftist.” According to these articles, members of these organizations often conceal their motives until they occupy positions of authority on college and university campuses. But when attorneys attempted to expose the machinations of these organizations during Churchill’s trial, Naves refused to allow it.

Yet the ease in which Churchill became a pariah in a world where Yoo and Gonzales are embraced certainly lends credibility to those who contend a “New McCarthyism” is now plaguing academia.

It appears that Naves believed his biased evidentiary rulings, coupled with the negative publicity directed against Churchill, would guarantee a victory for CU. But when that failed to happen, he disingenuously vacated the jury’s verdict, and in doing so set some very dangerous precedents: He destroyed academic freedom, including the freedom of speech; He created two separate and unequal standards of conduct—lofty ones that students and professors must obey, and meager ones for university administrators, board members, trustees and regents; He eviscerated tenure; and he gave universities the capacity to discriminate against anyone for any reason, including their race, religion or gender.

One does not have to agree with Churchill’s viewpoints to recognize that the precedents Naves may have established are contemptuous of the very rights and freedoms America was founded upon. The people of Colorado, and indeed people throughout the United States, should be outraged by his duplicity and demand that an investigative panel (not the Rick Perry kind) be convened to determine if Naves has, or had, any connections to anyone in power at CU and/or to any of the right-wing organizations seeking to implement the “New McCarthyism,” if these connections created his biases, and if these biases obligated Naves, in accordance with the Judicial Canon of Ethics, to recuse himself from presiding over Churchill’s trial.

Unfortunately, biased and unethical judges are in abundant supply. So the people must also boycott CU, TT, and UCB. Unlike Churchill, Yoo and Gonzales are not only professors, but attorneys as well, and as attorneys they took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Why should they now be permitted to teach about the very document they’ve shown nothing but contempt for and made every effort to destroy, while Churchill remains a pariah simply for exercising the very freedoms this Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, was created to protect?

There is no doubt these boycotts will be more symbolic than effective. After all, CU, TT and UCB are very entrenched and well funded, and will continue to be as long as they appease the New McCarthyites.

So why boycott if there is little hope for success?

Because boycotts are not always about success and failure. They are about doing the right thing, and not being complicit in the evils that men do and the evils that men allow them to do. They are often necessary because, as poet Edward Yashinsky so eloquently said, indifference permits “killers and betrayers to walk safely upon the earth.”

To that phrase I would also add “torturers, war criminals, corrupt judges, and New McCarthyites,” because they too have been protected by this indifference—and for far too long.

History demands that they be protected no longer.

David R. Hoffman
Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru