Let’s be clear: freedom of speech is a right, one worth defending regardless of how distasteful that defense might become. That written, can we find the world’s smallest campus (enough room for two desks and two huge egos) and send Larry Summers and Ward Churchill there? In recent days Mr. Summers, president of Harvard, wondered aloud if perhaps women are somehow physiologically disinclined toward math and the sciences. Mr. Churchill was pointedly disinvited to speak at Hamilton College in New York and volunteered for a demotion at the University of Colorado, where he teaches ethics, because of a 2001 essay in which he wrote that some of the 9-11 victims got what was coming to them.

Mr. Summers, speaking informally and without notes at an economics conference, suggested that innate differences between the sexes – rather than old boy sexism – explains the dearth of women represented in those disciplines in higher ed. Predictably, Mr. Summers set off a storm of protest from academics and pundits of both genders. He responded by saying he was merely being “provocative” and trying to stimulate statistical research into the disparity.

Uh huh. Like I wrote, free speech, particularly at a university, is a sacred thing and who knows, maybe some day statistical (or other) research may show Mr. Summers has some sort of point there… somewhere. Or not.

It does, however, strike one as odd that the president of Harvard would decide to take a wild hare and throw out a statement like that and then decide, after the fact, to announce his provocative intent. Is this what a grown-up university president would do?

It’s been three years since Mr. Summers left the Treasury Department and returned to his alma mater. First thing he did on arrival was to “provoke‿ the eminent African-American scholar Cornel West to decamp for Princeton. Then he provocatively accused unnamed faculty members of being anti-Semitic. Hey! Lab partner! Hypotheses are fine, but they’re only the first stage in an experiment. You have to have a little follow-through if you want to be a real academic. Maybe you missed that class.

In December ‘91, Mr. Summers, then a rising economist at the World Bank, wrote a famous memo in which he recommended that pollution be steered toward African nations and other less-developed countries because, since wages are low in those places, people’s lives have less value. After the memo was leaked and people started screaming, Mr. Summers protested that he had been misunderstood and that he was only trying to be – guess what? – provocative.

Do a bit of Googling on Mr. Summers and you’ll see any number of pundits rising to the defense of his free speech and the sacred grove of the academy. This may be principle, or it may have to do with the fact that Larry Summers is a white guy presiding at the definitive eastern establishment. And after all, he only bashed women, right?

Notably fewer voices, almost none really, have been raised in defense of Ward Churchill, not a college president, not a white guy (he’s Native American), not eastern and definitely not establishment. Whatever he may have going against him, Mr. Churchill is giving Mr. Summers a run for the money in the jackass department.

In late 2001, Mr. Churchill wrote an essay saying the 9-11 attacks were in part the result of US military and corporate policies around the world. He further noted that the rules of war the U.S. plays by would have made buildings like the Pentagon and World Trade Center legitimate targets for attack. (The WTC had a CIA office in it.)

Those points could be the start of an interesting debate. Unfortunately, Mr. Churchill chose to write: “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.‿

If you use fighting words, don’t start crying when your nose gets punched. It’s clear Mr. Churchill was looking for attention, to be “provocative‿ or trying to start a fight. After he got one, he discovered his skin was too thin and wants to portray himself as victim.

Ward Churchill has a right to speak his mind and I’ll defend that right but at the same time remind him that as a professor (of ethics, no less) he has a responsibility to use tones more elevated than the pre-fight trash talk boxers engage in.

As mom used to scold, it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it. If you want respect for your ideas, you have to give respect to your intended audience.

© Mark Floegel, 2005

January is the month for presidential oratory. In January 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered both inaugural and State of the Union addresses. America was pulling itself from a decade of economic depression and was sobered by looming war on two oceans. President Roosevelt’s State of the Union address to Congress that year is remembered for his “Four Freedoms.‿

Those were bleak days. Mr. Roosevelt said, “at no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today.‿ He did not, however, call for the suspension of Constitutional rights. Quoting another Franklin (Benjamin), he said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.‿

Mr. Roosevelt did not call for tax cuts for the rich in the face of war. He said, “We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.‿ He called for “The end of special privilege for the few. The preservation of civil liberties for all.‿
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On August 4, 1914, the Imperial German Army kicked the First World War into high gear by invading Belgium, a neutral nation that posed no threat to Germany. Although this was a violation of international treaty (Germany had pledged to protect Belgium’s neutrality), Kaiser Wilhelm and his generals hoped to convince Belgians that resistance was futile and to let the Germans pass unopposed toward France, their ultimate goal.

The Belgians did no such thing. The Belgian Army fought effectively, given its size (small) and the state of its weapons (small and old). As the German Army gained ground, it was harassed from the rear by citizen resistance. The remedy for such resistance laid down in the Kreigsbrauch, or German war manual, was terror. Civilians were killed in the dozens, then scores, then hundreds. Towns and cities were burned; national treasures were destroyed. The idea was to break the will of the nation and make resistance more distasteful than acquiescence. The opposite occurred. Belgians (and the French and British and eventually the Americans) realized no accommodation could be given to the Germans and instead of shortening the war, the use of terror lengthened it exponentially.
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After eighth grade, I thought I was through with nuns forever, but one can never tell where the ways of life will lead and so on our recent trip to Mexico, Adrienne and I put ourselves voluntarily (albeit apprehensively) into the care of the Benedictine Sisters of Guadalupe. These women – short, brown and radiating more warmth than the Mexican sun – were our guides and teachers on our tour of real Mexico.

For ten days they brought in economists, political scientists and eyewitnesses to tell of such horrors as the Guatemalan holocaust of the 1980s. Other days, they escorted us into the colonias – poor neighborhoods – to meet struggling workers and teachers educating the children of the indigenous. One thing the trip was emphatically not was a sightseeing tour through Mexican slums, designed to evoke gringo pity over “the poor Mexicans who have so little.”

The sisters do not seek to make the poor rich. Mexico possesses the widest gulf between poor and rich of any nation in the Americas; it is abundantly clear how profoundly riches corrupt. Rather, what spoke eloquently was the dignity of the Mexican working class and how that dignity deserves to be answered with justice in the form of decent food, water, education, employment and housing.

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