The Lichfield Group

University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill should be discharged for his signature intellectual lunacies. They blur the distinction between the reasoning of Socrates and the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels. As a role model for impressionable students, Professor Churchill’s ravings against the United States gyrate between catastrophic and disastrous. Further, he has no business amplifying his dementia by wearing the mantle of a state university. Hyde Park corners are available to host his twisted speech.

As Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson lectured in Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact. To protect its reputation and educational mission, the University of Colorado would leave the First Amendment undisturbed if it discharged Professor Ward Churchill. His wild likening of the 9/11 victims to Adolph Eichmann’s complicity in genocide and moral defense of the terrorists wretches are reasonably likely to impair faculty harmony, alumni support, recruitment of students, community relations, and sacred scholastic standards that teach students to cherish reason and to repudiate propaganda reminiscent of arch-Nazi Joseph Goebbels. These prospective evils are sufficient to justify denying Professor Churchill the state university’s platform and prestige to amplify his ravings with public resources. Freedom of speech does not shoulder the state with an obligation to subsidize.

Education is out of joint. It examines nature more than life, mathematics more than justice. It assumes that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants or to marvel at the speed of the Internet, not to learn how to do good, and avoid evil, as Socrates understood. Man is elevated only to the extent of his morality and moral wisdom. Education should take that precept as its North star.

The great business of the human mind is not external nature, but the discovery of a higher purpose between ashes to ashes and dust to dust. As unsurpassed philosopher Sam Johnson elaborated: “Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be pleasing or useful, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and of all places…Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians.”