Stop the Firing of Ward Churchill!

April 9th, 2007

Colleagues and friends,

Stop the Firing of Ward Churchill!
Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking

What we do in the coming days and weeks will be decisive in the effort to stop the firing of Ward Churchill, and to awaken faculty, students and the broader public to the overall attack on critical thinking and dissent that it has come to concentrate. Here we want to present as clearly as we can what the situation is, and what we need to do to have the greatest impact on its outcome.

The CU faculty committee hearing Ward Churchill’s appeal is about to issue its report. We understand Professor Churchill and the administration will have 10 working days to respond, and then it will go before President Brown for a decision. We have only a small window to mobilize faculty, students and progressive forces within the Boulder community, throughout Colorado, and nationwide to raise national and international attention to this case; to galvanize opposition; and to send a message to the CU administration that a decision to fire Professor Churchill is unacceptable and will not go down unopposed.

We have two very significant vehicles to build on to accomplish this:

*** The Emergency National Conference in Boulder on April 28th to Stop the Firing of Ward Churchill and Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking. This Emergency Conference takes on even more importance with the announcement that the matter will soon go to CU President Brown for his decision. By bringing to Boulder prominent scholars from around the country, together with Boulder faculty, students and the surrounding progressive community ?the Emergency Conference has the potential to signal a major outcry coming from “ground zero?that will generate national and international attention. It can be pivotal to putting the kind of pressure on the CU administration that could influence the outcome of the case. And it can mark a leap in galvanizing opposition to the witch-hunt aimed at Ward, and to attempts going on all across the country to stifle dissent and critical thinking in academia.

We are calling on scholars and students to adjust your plans and schedule if necessary to come to Boulder April 28th to participate in this Emergency National Conference. Already the core of speakers for the Conference include distinguished and renowned law professor Derrick Bell; anthropology professor and faculty senate president Dean Saitta from the University of Denver; and Alan Jones, Dean of Faculty at Pitzer College in Southern California. For this event to have the national impact called for, many more need to join these scholars and make the commitment to be there and speak. And student contingents from all over Colorado and beyond need to plan to make their way to Boulder as well. Imagine the impact this kind of high profile event can have on academia and society at this time – and make the commitment to be there.

*** The Open Letter Calling on the University of Colorado to Reverse Its Recommendation to Dismiss Ward Churchill. This letter was initiated by 11 of this country’s most distinguished scholars and public intellectuals ?Derrick Bell; Noam Chomsky; Drucilla Cornell; Juan Cole; Richard Delgado; Richard Falk; Irene Gendzier; Rashid Khalidi; Mahmood Mamdani; Immanuel Wallerstein; and Howard Zinn. It should now be signed and circulated by faculty across the country and beyond. The letter, which appears in the April 12th edition of the New York Review of Books (p. 65), is reaching and informing the broad community of intellectuals nationally and internationally about the tremendous injustice – and danger to academia – concentrated in this attack on Professor Churchill, and their responsibility to speak out against it.

News of the Open Letter is already reaching Boulder (“Debate Over Churchill Case Persists,?Silver and Gold Record, 3/29/07) and sparking debate at www.insidehighered.com (April 3rd). A Boston weekly has invited us to publish it in their newspaper. The challenge before us is to get this Open Letter into the media and before the broad university community around the country right away.

We’re calling on faculty and students on campuses around the country to take responsibility to publish the Open Letter in your campus and/or community papers now ?adding local signatures to the list of initiators. The impact of the letter appearing simultaneously in campus papers across the country in the next week ?with local faculty and student groups added to the list of initiators, can inspire those who already know about this case to step forward, and spark the kind of broad discussion and debate that is essential to awakening the academic community to the need to join the battle to stop this firing, and the chill it is causing within the universities. And by including with the publication of the letter an announcement of the April 28th Boulder Conference, these two vehicles can work in synergy to accelerate the awakening of resistance.

Through the National Conference and publishing the Open Letter we need to aim to stop this firing and at the same time be organizing an emergency response when CU President Brown announces his decision. What should faculty and students do; what should happen on your campus; in response to the decision Brown makes? Develop your plans (and share them with us) as you spread word of the Open Letter and the call for the National Emergency Conference to colleagues and friends.

Many have heard in recent days of the decision of the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at DePaul Univesity to oppose the decision of two faculty committees that recommended that Professor Norman Finkelstein be granted tenure. His reason had nothing to do with Professor Finkelstein’s scholarship, or his teaching. This further highlights the way in which dissent and critical thinking is under attack nationwide, and what is at stake to be lost, or gained in the battle to stop the firing of Professor Churchill.

Professor Thomas Mayer at Boulder wrote these compelling words after examining the findings of the committee that investigated Churchill’s scholarship:

“If any of the sanctions recommended by the investigating committee are put into effect, it will constitute a stunning blow to academic freedom. Such punishment will show that a prolific, provocative, and highly influential thinker can be singled out for entirely political reasons; subjected to an arduous interrogation virtually guaranteed to find problems; and then severed from academic employment. It will indicate that public controversy is dangerous and that genuine intellectual heresy could easily be lethal to an academic career. It will demonstrate that tenured professors serve at the pleasure of governors, political columnists, media moguls, and talk show hosts?The permanent or temporary expulsion of Ward Churchill would be an immense loss for CU. In one fell swoop we would become a more tepid, more timid, and more servile institution. His expulsion would deprive students of contact with a potent challenger of accepted cognitive frameworks. The social sciences desperately need the kind of challenge presented by Ward Churchill.

Faculty, students, and friends everywhere: there are times when perils and possibilities come together in a moment, where the focused efforts and actions of committed, progressive people can dramatically change the course of events and shift the momentum of society in a positive direction. Let’s meet the challenge of this moment!

Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking initiative