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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
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except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

A POST VERY MUCH HOPING
TO BE AMONG THE LAST UD
WILL WRITE ABOUT CHURCHILL



"The lifeblood of any strong university is its diversity of ideas which allows for the environment necessary to educate and train young learners and advance the boundaries of knowledge," a group of University of Colorado faculty have said in defense of Ward Churchill. "Debate is a fundamental characteristic of a university."

If I were an undergrad at CU, I'd wince at that "train young learners" bit, which sounds tres Sesame Street ... and I'd wonder why, when a whole group of my professors got together to whip up a statement hundreds of thousands of people would be reading, they ended up with one little cliche-sausage after another ("diversity of ideas...boundaries of knowledge...fundamental characteristic...").

But no matter. There is one more important thing to be said about this mess, and while they haven't said it well, this faculty group is correct. Churchill enjoys freedom of speech. He has been granted tenure. While his colleagues are wrong to claim that Churchill's ideas invigorate intellectual debate at their university -- Churchill's ideas are horseshit -- they are right to defend his employment. You can't have governors running around hounding tenured professors out of their jobs.