Free Speech for Me, Not for Thee

February 24, 2005
Free Speech for Me, Not for Thee
The limits of liberal love for freewheeling debate
by Bruce Thornton
Private Papers

The recent flap over University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who in an essay after 9/11 called the terrorist victims "little Eichmanns," generated a drama as stylized as a Japanese Noh play. Indignant conservatives railed against leftist professors and demanded that Churchill be fired; equally indignant liberals countered with rousing defenses of the academic freedom and free speech they accused conservatives of undermining. We had seen this same drama before, in the days after 9/11 when numerous academics made equally stupid remarks with precisely the same results. The outrage had little effect then, and this time around has merely resulted in turning an academic mediocrity into a poster-boy for academic freedom, not to mention giving him a media megaphone his tediously predictable ideas could never deliver. Link to rest here.