Ward Churchill's Berkeley address

[struggle4progress]

<snip> Professor Ralph Hexter, dean of arts and humanities at Berkeley, said he was once a colleague of Churchill's at the University of Colorado, and described the state's elected Board of Regents as "very partisan." He recalled that "the way to get elected" to the board was to "run against the Boulder campus," and criticized efforts in Colorado and beyond to bring about "the homogenization of discourse."

Hexter also objected to what he dubbed "the culture of offense-taking," saying that the proper antidote to objectionable opinions is the expression of opposing views. Students and professors, he said, are "engaged in a dialogue… that wants to hear marginalized voices."

And Carlos Muñoz, Jr., professor emeritus of Chicano and ethnic studies, emphatically called the campaign against Churchill "a direct manifestation of the war here in this country."

"The reality is that we are no longer living in a democracy," Muñoz maintained, framing efforts to oust Churchill as "the right wing versus those of us who speak truth to power" and condemning them as "an attack on the academy as a whole." <snip>

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2005/03/31_churchill.shtml

[donco6]

1. Now's not the time to be a CU student.

We're really entering a repressive phase here in CO. Profs can't speak out about anything without fear of losing their jobs. Our economy is a mess because of the wrong-headed TABOR tax-limitation measure. Colleges are being faced with double-digit tuition increases or draconian budget cuts. Sports scandals, rape charges, . . . it's all just a huge mess.

[struggle4progress]

2. Students can organize and fight back. eom

[donco6]

3. I'm not sure they want to.

I wouldn't count on the CU population fighting back at all. Frankly, I think they're mostly a bunch of pampered, rich white kids who wouldn't mind seeing these "liberals" taken down a peg.

It's not the university it used to be.

[struggle4progress]

4. America -- land of self-satisfied, complacent, couch potatoes.