Links
Archives
Sunday, February 06, 2005
|
UD SALUTES...
Stephen J. Goldberg, a professor of Art History at Hamilton College, who says it all. Guest column: Time to take back Hamilton College Uticaod.com Sun, Feb 6, 2005 ' I write on behalf of the many students, staff, and alumni of Hamilton College, the families of the victims of 9/11, as well as countless citizens of New York State, to express my utter dismay at the insensitivity and moral bankruptcy of the Kirkland Project and the current administration of Hamilton College for their plans to bring to campus polemicist Ward Churchill. Churchill is an extremist who, in a now infamous hateful statement, praised the 9/11 terrorists and attacked those killed in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns," a reference to the Nazi engineer of the Holocaust. To quote my esteemed colleague Ted Eismeier, professor of government: "The administration erred by speciously wrapping the Kirkland Project's folly in the mantle of free speech and then compounded that error by cobbling together a panel to discuss Churchill's views on 9/11. Such a charade demeans Hamilton College and gives our imprimatur to Churchill's outlandish and odious rhetoric." Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the captain of American Airlines Flight 77 which crashed into the Pentagon, informed me by phone that on the very day Churchill wrote those words, September 12, 2001, her brother's body and those of the other passengers on that flight were still burning in the wreckage of the Pentagon. Speaking for the families of the victims of 9/11, a very diverse group, Burlingame said that they are all offended by the actions of Hamilton College and were working tirelessly to bring pressure on Hamilton College President Joan Hinde Stewart and the Board of Trustees to stop this abomination from happening. The panel, as we now know, was finally cancelled. But as Ralph Williams, class of '71, recently penned to President Stewart, it was "the right thing, for the wrong reason." President Stewart tried to make this an issue of "freedom of speech." I understand the abstract principle of "freedom of speech," but there is a concrete context at stake -- this particular incident -- that helps us to understand the application of this principle. Coming on the heels of the Rosenberg Affair last semester, and due to the glaring absence of oversight and total lack of accountability on the part of the dean and the president with respect to the operations of the Kirkland Project, they left themselves and the entire college open, once again, to the predicaments in which we now have found ourselves. To be very frank, the remnants of Kirkland have destroyed the reputation of Hamilton College, and crippled it financially for the foreseeable future. The Board of Trustees, as in the Enron Affair, sat on their hands, and worse, rationalized and ultimately supported the actions of the president, despite the damage that this was clearly bringing to the institution and its students. What they and the president seemed not to remember is that their primary "fiduciary" responsibilities are to the "shareholders" of Hamilton College: the students and the alumni. Did we as a college and a faculty have to be maneuvered, once again, by the Kirkland Project and its director into the position of defending the indefensible: the freedom to speak by an extremist with a track record of inflammatory, hateful speech? By offering him an invitation to speak at Hamilton College, we would have thereby granted legitimacy to this hatemonger. Overlooked in all of this is the desecration of the memory of Kirkland College, for which this Kirkland Project is named. The vast sums of money controlled by the Kirkland Project would be far better used to establish a scholarship fund for fine young women to attend Hamilton College. This would be a most fitting way to honor the legacy of Kirkland College, rather than waste it on the likes of Rosenberg and Churchill. On Monday, a student my wife tutors at the college expressed concern about the impact that this latest assault on the honor of Hamilton would have on the failing health of Economics Professor Emeritus Sidney Wertimer; she was worried for his life. With the news of Sid's passing [the] very next day, Feb. 1, I told my students that we may also be witnessing the passing of Hamilton College as we've known it. Let us now work tirelessly to take Hamilton back. ' |