Free Speech for Students?

Ward Churchill, the fellow who is enjoying the benefits of free speech in academia, in fact doesn’t like free speech when other people criticize him.

In 1994, when Churchill was scheduled to speak at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, a student cartoonist for the student newspaper attacked him. The student, Grant Crowell, describes what happened as follows:

Churchill arrived, as planned, and began his speech. Shortly thereafter, Churchill's speaking engagement changed from a book discussion into a public protest rally featuring . . . Churchill . . . blaring into microphones over my “racist cartoon” and demanding my dismissal.

During Churchill’s speaking time at the event, this man -- a man who had never met me and refused to do so before and during the event -- included in his speech a reference to me as “vermin,” and shared aloud a story of how an unnamed Nazi cartoonist was tried at the WWII Nuremburg trials, executed, dismembered and then cremated. Churchill’s ended this story with his own personal comment of, “Now, I’m not saying that should happen to Grant, but it would be a good thing.”