Ward Churchill is a tenured professor employed by a public university, hence he has the right not to be dismissed except for a cause, and his public utterance protected by the First Amendment cannot be a cause -- in that sense, it's a free speech issue.
Also, remember that the government is putting pressures on the University of Colorado to fire him -- an infringement of academic freedom and faculty self-governance: both Governors Bill Owens and George Pataki and many other lawmakers are calling on the university to fire him. That's outrageous.
What is called "McCarthyism" worked mostly by economic sanctions -- firing Communists and other radicals -- rather than by the government using direct censorship or prosecution. "Many prosecutions faltered on appeal and only a few foreign-born radicals were actually deported. Only Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death; and of the roughly 150 people who went to prison, most were released within a year or two" (Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, Boston: St. Martin's Press, <http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/mccarthy/schrecker5.htm>, 1994). Blacklisting was extremely effective, which curtailed free speech more efficiently and diminished political opposition more smoothly than full-frontal assaults on the First Amendment would have while allowing the government to maintain an appearance of liberal democracy.
<blockquote>The punishments were primarily economic. People lost their jobs. The official manifestations of McCarthyism--the public hearings, FBI investigations, and criminal prosecutions--would not have been as effective had they not been reinforced by the private sector. The political purges were a two-stage process that relied on the imposition of economic sanctions to bolster the political messages conveyed by public officials. The collaboration of private employers with HUAC and the rest of the anti-Communist network was necessary both to legitimate the network's activities and to punish the men and women identified as politically undesirable. Without the participation of the private sector, McCarthyism would not have affected the rank-and-file members of the Communist movement or so effectively stifled political dissent.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The two-stage nature of McCarthyism, in which political undesirables were first identified by one agency and then fired by another, increased its effectiveness. By diffusing the responsibility, the separation of the two operations made it easier for the people who administered the economic sanctions to rationalize what they were doing and deny that they were involved in the business of McCarthyism. This was especially the case with the essentially moderate and liberal men (few women here) who ran the nation's major corporations, newspapers, universities, and other institutions that fired people for their politics. Many of these administrators sincerely deplored McCarthy and HUAC and tried to conceal the extent to which their own activities bolstered the witch-hunt.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It is important to realize that the dismissals were usually in response to outside pressures. Most of the firings of the McCarthy era occurred after someone had refused to cooperate with an investigating committee or was denied a security clearance. Major corporations like General Electric and U.S. Steel announced that they would discharge any worker who took the Fifth Amendment, and other employers made it equally clear that they would do the same. Some of these employers may well have welcomed and even actually arranged for a HUAC hearing, especially when it enabled them to fire left-wing union leaders. Left to their own devices, however, most of the other employers would not have initiated political dismissals, though they were usually willing to acquiesce in them once they were apprised of the identities of their allegedly subversive employees.
Self-defense was the primary motivation. Even when not threatened with direct reprisals, the leaders of the nation's major corporations, universities, and other private institutions seem to have decided that good public relations demanded the dismissal of someone openly identified as a Communist or even, in many cases, of people who were merely controversial. In retrospect, it is clear that the fear of retaliation for retaining a Fifth Amendment witness or other political undesirable was probably exaggerated. Those few institutions that kept such people in their employ did not suffer in any noticeable way. Alumni did not withhold their donations; moviegoers did not desert the theaters. But perception in this case was more important than reality.
Ideology shored up the dismissals. The cautious college presidents and studio heads who fired or refused to hire political undesirables shared the anti-Communist consensus. They were patriotic citizens who, however squeamish they may have been about the methods of McCarthy and the other investigators, agreed that communism threatened the United States and that the crisis engendered by the cold war necessitated measures that might violate the rights of individuals. By invoking the icon of national security, they were able to give their otherwise embarrassing actions a patina of patriotism. Equally pervasive was the belief that Communists deserved to be fired. Because of their alleged duplicity, dogmatism, and disloyalty to their nation and employers, Communists (and the definition was to be stretched to include ex-Communists, Fifth Amendment Communists, and anybody who associated with Communists) were seen as no longer qualified for their jobs. Since these disqualifications usually appeared only after the until-then qualified individuals were identified by part of the anti-Communist network, these rationalizations obviously involved considerable deception and self-deception.
There were few legal restraints. The Supreme Court's refusal to interfere with the firings of public servants prefigured its attitude toward similar dismissals within other institutions. Again, the Court, which initially acquiesced in the firing of unfriendly witnesses and other political dissidents, began to change its position by the mid-19SOs. But the reversals were never complete and they occurred after much of the damage had been done. In 1956, for example, the Court invalidated the dismissal of a Brooklyn College literature professor who had taken the Fifth Amendment, but since it admitted that there might be other reasons why he should be fired, he never got his job back. A few people whose careers had been destroyed by the entertainment industry blacklist tried to sue for damages, but federal judges did not even recognize the existence of the blacklist until the mid-1960s.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It was possible to get removed from the blacklist. The clearance procedure was complicated, secretive, and for many people morally repugnant. The people who initiated the blacklists, such as the authors of Red Channels, charged a few hundred dollars to shepherd someone through the process. A loose network of lawyers, gossip columnists, union leaders, and organizations like the American Legion, Anti-Defamation League, and, it was rumored, the Catholic Church provided similar services. Naming names was required, of course. Ex-Communists usually had to purge themselves with HUAC and the FBI before they could work again. The better known among them often had to publish articles in a mass-circulation magazine explaining how they had been duped by the party and describing its evils. For Humphrey Bogart, whose main offense was his public support for the Hollywood Ten, rehabilitation required an article in a fan magazine confessing, "I'm no Communist," just an "American dope." It was also helpful to take some kind of overtly anti-Communist actions such as opposing the antiblacklist factions within the talent unions or circulating petitions against the admission of Communist China to the United Nations. The film industry required more than three hundred people to clear themselves by writing letters, which then had to be approved by James O'Neil, the former American Legion national commander, and such anti-Communist professionals as J. B. Matthews and Benjamin Mandel. Clearance was not routine. Even people who had no party ties had to write two or three drafts of their letters until they showed the appropriate degree of contrition.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The first important academic freedom case of the cold war arose in July 1948 at the University of Washington, where the state legislature's Un-American Activities Committee forced the issue by questioning a handful of faculty members. Six defied the committee and the administration filed charges against them. The faculty committee that dealt with the case in the fall recommended the retention of all but one, a professor who refused to answer any of its questions about his politics. The regents fired two others as well, since they had admitted to being members of the Communist party and were therefore, so the university's president explained, "incompetent, intellectually dishonest, and derelict in their duty to find and teach the truth." The rest of the academy agreed: Communists could not be college teachers. The academic community backed up its words with action or, rather, inaction; none of the dismissed professors was able to find a teaching job.
Within a few years the ban in academia extended to Fifth Amendment Communists. Concerned about the unfavorable publicity that unfriendly witnesses would draw to their institutions, the nation's academic leaders urged faculty members to cooperate with HUAC and the other committees. Because of the tradition of academic freedom, university administrators clothed their responses to McCarthyism in elaborate rationalizations about the academic profession's commitment to "complete candor and perfect integrity." The most authoritative such statement was released by the presidents of the nation's thirty-seven leading universities in the spring of 1953, just as the main congressional committees were about to investigate higher education. It stressed the professors' duty "to speak out"--that is, name names--and warned that "invocation of the Fifth Amendment places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society." The message was clear. College teachers subpoenaed by a congressional committee knew that if they took the Fifth Amendment or otherwise refused to testify they might lose their jobs.
The main academic purges occurred from 1952 to 1954 when the congressional committees had run out of more glamorous targets and turned to the nation's colleges and universities. Dismissals were not automatic; an academic hearing usually followed the congressional one. Though the faculty committees that mounted the investigations did not normally demand that their colleagues name names, they did expect them to cooperate and discuss their past political activities. People who refused, who felt that such questions were as illegitimate as HUAC's, were invariably fired. So were most of the others, especially at schools where conservative or politically insecure administrators and trustees refused to accept the favorable recommendations of faculty committees. In a few cases, if a professor had tenure, taught at a relatively less vulnerable private university, and cooperated fully with the institution's investigation, he or she could retain his or her job. But these were exceptional cases and they often masked the less publicized dismissals of junior professors, who were invariably let go when their contracts expired. By the time the McCarthyist furor subsided, close to a hundred academics had lost their jobs for refusing to cooperate with anti-Communist investigators. Several hundred more were probably eased out under the FBI's Responsibilities Program and similar measures. (Schrecker, 1994)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>