Back in the early 1960s, Barry Goldwater was invited to speak at the University of Colorado. As the Arizona senator began to speak, a group of student leftists (forerunners of the Students for a Democratic Society?) unfurled banners and drowned out Goldwater with organized chants. Ultimately, the president of the university — former Denver mayor Quigg Newton — was forced to resign over the insult to Senator Goldwater. Now, another storm has broken out in Boulder. This time, a Native American professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado has called the white collar victims in the World Trade Center on 9/11 "a bunch of little Eichmanns." Ward Churchill is making reference to the global economy activities that were centered in the WTC towers. Professor Churchill is commiserating with the victims of the global economy: sweatshop and child laborers. The dealmakers in the WTC at the time of the terrorist attacks were dealing in human misery, albeit at a great distance. Ward Churchill has spoken truth to power and now the kneejerk Right is screaming for Churchill's scalp. As an undergraduate at the University of Denver, another of my history profs — Alfred Crofts — encouraged his students (read me) to attend talks by Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society, Pete Seeger (left-wing folk singer), Billy James Hargis (anti-Communist crusader), a meeting of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and so on. If Ward Churchill had been around more than four decades ago, Dr. Crofts would have encouraged me to go and hear him. If this is (fair & balanced) iconoclasm, so be it.
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Who Defines "Acceptable" Speech?
by Maurice Isserman
Over the past several months, Hamilton College, the small upstate New York liberal-arts institution where I teach history, has been the site of some of the most heavily publicized conflicts ever fought in the history of American higher education to define the limits of acceptable speech on a college campus.
The most recent turmoil began when some faculty members invited Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, to give a talk this month on Native American issues. Churchill had spoken on many campuses without controversy, but several weeks before his scheduled appearance at Hamilton some previously obscure remarks he made in the fall of 2001 came to light. Those included the statement that the victims of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center were "little Eichmanns," who, Churchill seemed to imply, deserved their fate.
Churchill agreed to change the original topic for his Hamilton speech to a consideration of the "limits of dissent," but that did nothing to still the protests from people both on and off the campus, especially after Bill O'Reilly devoted two evenings on his Fox network program to denouncing Churchill and the college. Two days before Churchill was to appear, Joan Hinde Stewart, Hamilton's president, announced that, because of death threats directed at Churchill and others, the college would have to cancel the event.
That incident came on the heels of another divisive debate over free speech last fall. Hamilton had invited Susan Rosenberg -- who had been involved with the terrorist gang that staged the 1981 Brink's robbery in Nyack, N.Y., in which two policemen and a Brink's guard were killed -- to teach a one-month course about writing prison memoirs. Rosenberg served 16 years in prison and was granted clemency by President Bill Clinton. The invitation sparked widespread protest that eventually led her to withdraw from the position.
Perhaps it seems self-evident that former felons and people with outrageous opinions should not be welcome at college campuses. But what do we do then about Malcolm X?
Every spring one of the books I assign to students enrolled in my introductory American-studies course is The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book published shortly after its author's assassination in 1965. In many ways a deeply flawed man, Malcolm X struggled mightily to overcome his shortcomings and left a vivid record of that struggle in his autobiography. He was born in poverty and obscurity in 1925 as Malcolm Little, and, by the time he was the age of a first-year Hamilton College student, he had become a pimp, a thief, a drug dealer, and an addict.
Convicted of theft at the age of 21, he underwent a jailhouse religious conversion and emerged from prison in 1952 with a new name and identity. As Malcolm X he would rise to national prominence as a leading spokesman for the Nation of Islam, also known as the Black Muslims.
Over the next decade, following the teachings of the Nation of Islam's leader, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm argued that white Americans were descendants of a misbegotten race spawned by a mad scientist in ancient times, destined to oppress and exploit the colored peoples of the world until overthrown in a violent revolution. Not surprisingly, he proved a polarizing figure to both black and white Americans. He attacked the leaders of the mainstream civil-rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., for supposedly currying white favor at the expense of black freedom. And when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Malcolm called his death a "case of chickens coming home to roost" -- suggesting that in some way Kennedy, or the nation he led, had it coming.
By the time of his own assassination, 40 years ago this month, Malcolm had left the Nation of Islam and repudiated many of its teachings; he no longer regarded all white people as devils and had softened his criticisms of King. His autobiography, nonetheless, can still be read as a call for armed revolution, and contains passages that can only be interpreted as misogynistic and anti-Semitic.
Yet for all its troubling aspects, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is today widely recognized as a great American memoir. Like another book I assign my students every year, Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, Malcolm's autobiography explores in original and provocative ways questions of sin, repentance, and redemption. Malcolm, like Franklin, reveals himself as a man engaged in the classic American quest for individual self-definition.
Sometimes as I prepare for class I think how wonderful it would be if I had the power to resurrect an author or historical figure from the past and bring him or her before my students for a question-and-answer session. But if I could bring Malcolm back to life, would people object if he came to talk to my class?
I suspect not. Fame and the passage of time have made him an icon of self-respect and self-help, sanitizing him in ways that he would be the first to find astounding. Americans tend to admire advocates of unpopular causes as long as they are many decades gone, and the rough edges no longer so visible. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrated at Hamilton just as the Ward Churchill controversy began to heat up, is a good example. We remember King as an apostle of racial harmony and nonviolent protest; we tend to forget he was also an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam and economic inequality, and that he was despised and persecuted by the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
I also wonder what would have happened if one of my faculty predecessors at Hamilton College had invited Malcolm X to speak back in the days when he was still alive -- say, right after he made his "chickens coming home to roost" comment. Would he have been welcome here? From what I know of the history and traditions of the college, I believe he would have been allowed to speak. But I also suspect that then, as now, some trustees might have been upset; some alumni might have withheld contributions; some prospective students might have decided to apply elsewhere; and some irate media pundits would have fumed about the college's willingness to provide a forum for the views of a thief, pimp, convict, and violent revolutionary who had just insulted the memory of a dead president.
I know what you're thinking. Although historical legacies are not always easy to predict, Ward Churchill is probably no Malcolm X. Nor is Susan Rosenberg. I share the common sentiment that Churchill's remarks about September 11 were despicable, and that Rosenberg's involvement a quarter-century ago with a group of lunatic-fringe desperadoes was an act of bizarre nihilism. I agree with those of my colleagues who have argued that neither Churchill nor Rosenberg should have been invited in the first place. A commitment to free speech and academic freedom does not require the college to ensure that the views of every disagreeable person and questionable doctrine be presented to our students.
But the equation changed once Churchill and Rosenberg were invited. Then the question became: Who gets a veto power over controversial speakers and faculty appointments? Ellen Schrecker's No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford University Press, 1986) suggests that the greatest damage to academic freedom in the McCarthy era came not at the hands of the junior senator from Wisconsin, or from J. Edgar Hoover. Rather, it came from well-meaning college administrators who sought to defuse controversy by treating the principle of free speech as one that was expendable in a time of international crisis and domestic anxiety. As Charles Seymour, the president of Yale University, announced in the spring of 1949, "There will be no witch hunts at Yale, because there will be no witches."
My colleagues at Hamilton who sought to rescind the invitations to Susan Rosenberg and Ward Churchill are not witch hunters. They want worthy advocates of unpopular causes to be welcomed at the college -- just not those two people, whom they (along with many others) deem unworthy speakers or teachers. But we must be careful in drawing such distinctions. The category of the unworthy varies with the eye of the beholder, and such categorical exclusions have been known to expand in unintended ways. Last semester a former felon was deemed unacceptable; this semester it's someone who made an obnoxious comment. Malcolm would have passed neither test as a visitor to Hamilton.
At some point, pushed hard enough, I know we would all be prepared to mount the barricades in defense of free speech. We would all love to be called upon to defend Martin Luther King Jr., for example, or Susan B. Anthony, or William Lloyd Garrison, or perhaps even Malcolm X. The choices given faculty members and administrators at Hamilton College this year were unfortunately not so attractive. But when it comes to a judgment call between extending too much free speech or guaranteeing too little, the historical record suggests that we should err on the side of excess.
Malcolm X did speak at a number of colleges in the early 1960s, writing of the experience: "Except for all-black audiences, I liked the college audiences best. The college sessions sometimes ran two to four hours -- they often ran overtime. Challenges, queries, and criticisms were fired at me by the usually objective and always alive and searching minds of undergraduate and graduate students, and their faculties. The college sessions never failed to be exhilarating. They never failed in helping me to further my own education."
Malcolm X said many things in his lifetime: Some of his ideas were worth listening to, some were nonsense, and some were offensive. Nevertheless, I wish I had been at one of those exhilarating college talks he gave, where "challenges, queries, and criticisms" educated both audience and speaker. The minds of today's students are no less "alive and searching" than those of a generation or two ago. It would be a pity if, in the aftermath of the current controversies, we stopped being the kind of institutions where a Malcolm X would be welcome to speak to our students.
Maurice Isserman is a professor of history and chairman of the American-studies program at Hamilton College. His most recent book is The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (Public Affairs, 2000). Another version of this article appeared in the Hamilton student newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator.
Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
