Have you ever heard of Google?

http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/

It is a real cool thing. Works with something called the Web, tied to something called the Internet.

However, people do still have to read the text involved (only 1% multimedia), so it usually helps to actually think, in wide-band terms. Dang — so much work, darn it.

Jojo, at 8:47 am EDT on September 8, 2005

Jeff Rogers’ view of free speech is flawed

Protection of free speech is most needed when speech is insensitive. After all, who would block the free speech of someone who is being sensitive to their own views? The concept of free speech means that you must strive to protect the freedom of everyone to express exactly the views that you personally find insensitive. Otherwise the concept of free speech would be meaningless.

Ward Churchill is not being charged with any improper behavior inside the classroom. All of the charges he is facing are for activity outside the classroom. I agree that unbalanced indoctrination and advancement of political agendas don’t have any place in the classroom. But I don’t see any factual basis for your implication that Ward Churchill has been guilty of this.

Paul Nixon, at 8:46 pm EDT on September 8, 2005

“Partisan catch-phrases” are being used in the pro and con of the disputes centering on Ward Churchill.

But there are valid issues at hand and the left/right perspectives both employ such phrases.

Interestingly, it was the “left” that first made an issue of his provocative and crude commentary re September 11, 2001, as when a Vermont peace group voiced its concerns and criticisms of Churchill’s phrasings. And this occured around December 2001.

Churchill is not a “leftist” and his crypto-rightist comments are a matter of his own record.

The issues that have now been prominent re Churchill’s political, personal, and academic bona fides are NOT new issues, but issues of long-standing.

In spite of the shallow and shrill analysis of rightwing commentary and their focus to which Churchill has been subjected [and which attempts to hang him like an albatross around the neck of the “left"], the attention in the mainstream media to very intriguing aspects of Mr. Churchill’s careers has belatedly started to shed light on real issues that need to be addressed.

Churchill is no innocent victim of the right, nor is he an exemplar of the left.

Who and what Churchill is remains to be determined.

Questions and accusations about Mr. Churchill may now be getting the attention that is long merited.

By the way, since Ward brays about “genocide,” interested readers may want to examine his silence about US policy in Central America in the 1980s [when he attacked the American liberal left for supporting the Sandinistas while his own critique of the Sandinistas ran parallel to Reagan and the CIA’s propaganda], yet Mr. Churchill belatedly wrote of “genocide” in El Salvador [while being silent when it was going on], and a close examination of his “facts” and figures in “A Little Matter of Genocide” again call into question his problems with accuracy, political expediency, and distortion.

Churchill, like the rest of us, should enjoy no exemption from critical scrutiny.

The issues now at hand would have been addressed much sooner had said critical scrutiny earlier on.

Ernesto Vigil

PS: I was once a research associate at CU Boulder in the Center for the Studies of Race and Ethnicity, and was subsequently published by the University of Wisconsin Press in a book concerned with certain themes upon which Churchill has himself written. Ward’s “expertise” indeed is worthy of closer examination.

Ernesto Vigil, at 7:06 pm EDT on September 10, 2005

Jeff Nixon should use google too!

Churchill is not being charged with things that happened in theclassroom because the administration at CU refuses to address it when it does occur. Jeff Nixon should google Churchill’s name and find out exactly what has happend and I know all this for a fact for I was one the students who experienced his beligerent behavior and refused to back down and I was there when it happened to others as well.

Respects Nothing, at 7:30 pm EDT on September 14, 2005