Somehow I got on the American Association University Professors email list. The president of this organization that feels the need to spam anyone with an .edu email address is Cary Nelson -- an English professor.
In this essay, Prof. Nelson addresses invitations to campuses. He seems to be writing exclusively to defend Ward Churchill and William Ayers by, ironically, comparing them to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the former head of the American Nazi Party.
Regarding the visit of the Nazi leader to campus:
Although Antioch may not be anyone's image of a disciplined campus, the 500 students and faculty in the auditorium that day in 1964 were well disciplined indeed. They sat in absolute silence throughout the talk. When the question period came, no one raised a hand. Instead, everyone rose and exited, again in silence. So Rockwell began to curse us all. Still no one reacted. Eventually he gave up and left.
Interestingly, there are plenty of modern examples of speakers being shouted down. Here's one I found in a Google search in which the behavior was defended by an academic. Most of the repressed speakers are conservatives and very few engage in the academic buffoonery or intellectual parlor tricks of Ayers or Churchill. It's not Ayers' or Churchill's scholarship for which they are being invited to campus.
College audiences have special reason to see such people [as the Nazi leader] in the flesh, so as to try to understand how they might draw people to their cause.
Then why invite (and give honoraria to) "distinguished" college professors when the students have access to people with exactly the same views throughout their faculty? It isn't like Ayers and Churchill have an obscure constituency hard to find on college campuses.
What I learned in 1964 was to value the power of silent, nonviolent witness;
His silence, apparently, doesn't extend to my email inbox.
Many faculty and students across the country expect Churchill to be a relentless ideologue. If you spend time with him, as I have, you meet a rather low-key, affable fellow, who wears his trials surprisingly lightly.
Ah, yes, having no earned Ph.D., a high salary at a top university and plagiarized scholarship must have been a trial. As to not being a relentless ideologue around Prof. Nelson, I suppose Churchill drops the clown act around his like-minded fellows.
Ayers, billed as an unrepentant radical...
Billed? Billed by himself. Although he has said (in the eloquence one can expect from the top rungs of Education scholarship), “I wish I had done more, but it doesn’t mean I wish we’d bombed more shit.” He has not said that he actually wishes they had bombed less shit. Or even, not at all.
...is an accomplished education professor...
Damning with faint praise.
But then efforts to get an invited speaker disinvited are not necessarily really based on anger at giving the person a platform, especially since real monsters often acquit themselves poorly on stage.
Does Prof. Nelson actually think about what he writes? Of course they acquit themselves well. Hitler, just to pick the Godwin example, was a mesmerizing speaker. Although Nelson earlier in the letter ridicules Columbia's president Bollinger for distancing himself from Ahmedinejad, the only reason that the Iranian president was made to look foolish was that the speech got national exposure and his statement about no homosexuals in Iran was blasted all over the media. In fact, if he were the usual "activist" campus speaker, his words would go unscrutinized.
They are as much as anything else efforts to housebreak American higher education, to establish external forces and constituencies as campus powers.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Get a university to cancel Churchill or Ayers and anyone on the political or cultural spectrum whose views you oppose can be your next target.
What is more disturbing are the people who are never invited at all.
Then state legislators could pressure the University of Oklahoma to cancel a talk by biologist Richard Dawkins. Why? Because the man treats evolution as an established fact.
Really? So there's no one at UO that treats evolution as an established fact? Could it be that Dawkins is a provocateur who is not being invited to give a dry talk on whatever aspect of biology in which he's an expert (I'm sure Dawkins himself doesn't remember anymore.) but to give an anti-religious screed. Well, an anti-Christian screed, anyway.
The new weapon of choice is the anonymous threat of violence delivered by a phone call from a public booth. Then the president or his spokesperson can cancel a speech in a voice filled with regret, ceremoniously invoking "security" concerns, as Boston College did in canceling an Ayers talk.
Am I the only one who sees the irony here? What? Did somebody threaten to set off a bomb? Did they call their group the Weather Overground?
I suppose Prof. Nelson, who sees his university position as an attempt to push an ideological agenda, is suddenly stung by the notion that his ox is being gored. "Security concerns" have kept speakers off campus for a long time. The most common is to cite a concern for security and then to charge the inviting student group with the costs of bringing the speaker to campus.
Thus we all benefited when Pennsylvania's Millersville University resisted legislative pressure and held an Ayers lecture as planned.
Except the Millersville students. They would have been better educated by watching a few Three Stooges shorts. When pseudointellectual tripe is on the menu, no one is filled.
That is the price of retaining academic freedom for a free society.
He uses the word "free" but this is really about money. Ward Churchill and William Ayers have the right to speak freely. But freedom of speech does not entitle them to a salary for their speech.
Nor does it entitle them to a large share of mandatory student fees.
