For those of you who haven't been following this story, Ward Churchill was a professor at University of Colorado who wrote an essay shortly after the 9/11 attacks entitled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens", which compared some of the people who died in those attacks to Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking member of the Nazi regime who helped to organize infrastructure for the Holocaust. The long and short of Churchill's argument was that the powerful finance and business people in the World Trade Center that day were working to keep third-world countries poor by creating an infrastructure that resulted in so many deaths from malnourishment, etc., that those people were the moral equivalent of Nazis.

Needless to say, this wasn't a popular opinion.

But no one really noticed until the summer of 2005, when many conservatives, like David Horowitz, finally decided that they were offended by the comparison. So they made a furor over it that resulted in the governor of Colorado calling for Churchill to be fired. Of course, you can't fire someone for expressing their political views off the job, especially when they have tenure, so the president of UC announced that he would investigate everything Churchill had published and look for grounds for dismissal.

Anyone familiar with employment discrimination knows the way that employers who have a passing knowledge of the law look for alternative reasons for a discriminatory firing to provide cover for their actions. Six research violations were found in that investigation, three were found to be false charges, and only one of five members of the panel in charge of tenure at UC thought that those charges were serious enough for termination. But the board decided to terminate anyway.

So this is a pretty clear-cut case of someone being fired for his political views, right? Isn't that exactly what people like David Horowitz are around for? You might remember that guy from his endless quest to end supposed hiring bias at universities in favor of liberal professors. I've always thought, sure, professors are more likely to be liberal than conservative, but that's more because they're intelligent and educated, not because of any sort of bias. Considering how anyone who defends the current administration has to lie to prove her or his point, you can see why universities don't have many pro-Bush profs.

So since he's so in favor of academic freedom, and he's always saying that he isn't just trying to push a conservative agenda on college campuses, David should be front and center in making it look like he's at least trying to be fair and balanced here. But conservative mouthpiece OneNewsNow reports on Horowitz:

"They said that he plagiarized, that he had invented historical data. He had appropriated other people's work without attribution. He had lied about his Indian status in getting the job," says a disgusted Horowitz.

He's falling back on UC's excuse to fire Churchill, of course, but he's familiar enough with the case to know what actually went down. If he weren't so transparent before, this would prove that he isn't all about the academic freedom and just about making sure that campuses don't become welcoming to racial and sexual minorities.

Of course, he might just be too busy with fake violations of academic free speech to worry about real ones.

So what about The Fire? I've blogged about this organization before that goes around and sues schools that have codes against hate speech and sexual harassment in order to make sure that campuses are as white, male, and straight as they can be promote free expression.

On Churchill, they say that they were against the initial investigation because he had a Constitutional right to free speech, but:

Churchill was not immune to such scrutiny. FIRE wrote that Churchill freely injected himself into the public square, and that if “information that … legitimately places his job in jeopardy” came to light, “then that is simply the hazard of voluntarily participating in the marketplace of ideas.”

Forget the fact that nearly all the people actually involved in the nitty-gritty of research decided that none of his violations were worthy of termination, the Fire has its cover and its sticking to it. But as I said several months ago when I tried to get them to comment on the possible expulsion of two Notre Dame students for setting up a peaceful and religious remembrance for a gay soldier, they could at least call themselves a conservative advocacy group instead of a free speech advocacy group for honesty's sake. But perhaps they're too busy fighting diversity training to worry about a professor being fired for his politics.

Churchill has vowed to sue, and he might receive help from the ACLU, an organization that is actually committed to free expression, from NAMBLA's website to Fred Phelps protesting (military) funerals (no one cared when he was just protesting AIDS victims' funerals), from Nazis marching in a Jewish neighborhood to an American Indian professor comparing financiers to Nazis. He probably has a case considering some of the public statements made by the president of the University of Colorado.

But that's not the point, or at least for me it isn't. What really makes me mad is when people in a position of privilege use a principle, like free speech or equality under the law or innocent until proven guilty, but then when someone who isn't in a position of privilege seeks the protection of that principle, those very same people turn their backs on that someone. But the only way to fight it is to remember that the next time The Fire or Horowitz or any of these charlatans play on our sense of fairness to tolerate an abhorrent idea in the name of free speech is to remember that they're just playing on fair-minded people's goodwill and could never do the same for others.