Hamilton College became embroiled in a media-fueled controversy last week after it was discovered that a University of Colorado professor invited to speak at the New York college had written an essay in which he called victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks "little Eichmanns," in reference to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann.
After widespread national media coverage, threats of violence caused the cancellation of the professor's visit, but discussion and reflection have continued this week at Hamilton.
The professor, Ward Churchill, a tenured member of Colorado's Ethnic Studies Department, was originally scheduled to come to Hamilton's Clinton, N.Y., campus Feb. 3 to speak about prisons and Native American rights, his areas of scholarly interest. After the outcry over Churchill's essay began, Hamilton President Joan Hinde Stewart ordered that the event be changed to a panel discussion on "Limits of Dissent" at which Churchill's views could be confronted.
The essay in question, titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" and written on Sept. 11, 2001, has been the object of denunciation particularly for its argument that the civilians who died in the terrorist attacks were not innocent victims.
Of those killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, Churchill wrote, "They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire. ... If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."
The controversy at Hamilton began after the student newspaper, the Spectator, published a story on the front page of its Jan. 18 edition about Churchill and his essay, according to Spectator Editor-in-Chief Ian Mandel.
Mandel told The Herald that from there the story "kind of snowballed from our paper to the local papers to the national media."
Churchill did not incite controversy when he appeared at Brown in April 2002 as part of a conference entitled "Imprisoned Intellectuals: A Dialogue with Scholars, Activists and (Former) U.S. Political Prisoners on War, Dissent and Social Justice."
After Churchill's scheduled visit to Hamilton became a national news story and was featured several times on the Fox News Channel program "The O'Reilly Factor," a section of Hamilton's Web site opened to comment from the public was flooded with negative responses.
Several posters identified themselves as alums and voiced their disgust with the college, while others wrote that they were formerly prospective students but no longer plan on applying to Hamilton.
Despite many public calls for Churchill's visit to be cancelled, including a Wall Street Journal editorial calling on Hamilton alums to boycott the college's capital campaign, Stewart initially stood by the event, citing free speech concerns.
"But there is a principle at stake, for once the invitation was extended ... and accepted by Ward Churchill, it became a matter of free speech," Stewart said in a Jan. 30 statement.
But Feb. 1, two days before Churchill's scheduled visit, Stewart canceled the event due to "credible threats of violence."
Churchill has since resigned his position as chair of Colorado's Ethnic Studies Department but stayed on as a faculty member. He has received threats of personal violence.
At Hamilton, students and faculty are still grappling with questions that arose out of the controversy, according to Mandel. Stewart took questions at a Tuesday campus-wide discussion. A faculty panel Wednesday night featured four Hamilton professors discussing academic freedom.
"It's still a hot issue - we're still talking about it," Mandel said.
Mandel said there is widespread agreement that a diversity of opinions should be offered at Hamilton, but "the thing that people have a problem with is the way this guy expresses his views ... that's where the disparity of opinion is."
As to whether Hamilton's reputation has sustained long-term damage, only "time will tell," said Hamilton Director of Media Relations Vige Barrie. Barrie said Hamilton's administration doesn't know what, if any, effect the controversy will have on the college's capital campaign or on volume of applications.
"Probably our greatest concern is how this might have distracted all of us from our primary mission, which is running a college, and that's the unfortunate part," she said.
