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Friday, January 28, 2005
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UD SALUTES…
…the students at Hamilton College, who happened upon the same photo of Ward Churchill UD did (she linked to it in her post dated 1/26/05) and have now distributed it around campus as part of their protest against his upcoming visit: ‘Posters have gone up showing Churchill holding a machine gun, questioning whether his appearance is a good use of tuition money and repeating Churchill's "little Eichmanns" quote, school officials said.’ While Hamilton’s students have quickly grasped and acted upon the obvious -- they shouldn’t be asked to underwrite the expression of loathesome reactionary ideas -- faculty and administration are slower on the uptake. They mutter about how everyone’s gotta have an open mind and how, you know, college is about learning to handle shocking new points of view and all. ' "We try to train them to be critical thinkers and to respond intelligently to what they hear," said Nancy Rabinowitz, a comparative-literature professor and director of the program bringing Churchill to Hamilton. "I think the students should hear his whole argument before they boil it down to a few sound bites." ' Hamilton students may be boiling Churchill’s argument down, as Professor Rabinowitz suggests. But Churchill would like to boil Hamilton students alive. He is a hater. He hates white people, rich people, urban people, and a whole lot of other categories of people. American universities, like the University of Colorado, where Churchill is a department chair, are free to harbor fanatics with guns, but it’s always nice when people at those universities and in their communities recognize the haters among them and protest against them. Hamilton College is free to honor a man whose revolutionary excitements have made a hater out of him, but UD thinks it’s nice when people at Hamilton recognize what their institution has done and decide to rebel against it. |