UC Berkeley- academic freedom forum- w/ Ward Churchill

In the first sound file, Churchill starts talking at 7 minutes, and Dean Hexter starts at about 28 minutes.

The audience had quite a few older people, as well as a number from the elaborate Berkeley mental illness community - such as the tipi guy who stands by BART. Seeing someone flipping through a David Horowitz book in the front row, we had speculated that there might be a disturbance, in contrast to the character of the audience at the Bookfair appearance on Saturday. However, there turned out to be minimal disagreement and no disturbance. Churchill described the distinction between first amendment freedom and academic freedom. He also repeated his explanation of the Eichman comment, talked about a bar in the financial district that displays the teeth that Custer knocked out of his indian sex slave's mouth, and touched on his opinion of Thomas Brown, John Lavelle, concern over his ethnicity, and his income. The Dean commented on the difficulty of prescribing 'balance' in the classroom because how would one define the center of balance. Should classes be determined by a committee so each possible viewpoint be presented equally - so the LaRouche, communist, libertarian perspective etc. should be given equal time in a political class, or should time be allocated proportional to their estimate of that perspective in society.
Saito covered a few legal topics relating to academic freedom, and discussed personal political expression by professors, and what speech isn't covered by first amendment.

During the question and answer session, a number of people had long comments. There were really only one or two disagreeable questions.

In my opinion, Churchill should think about why people continue to misunderstand his Eichman statement. He wrote a well-known book on comparative genocides that discusses a long list of instances of genocidal activity, and also arguing that the World War II german genocide should not be considered exceptional. Yet, the reason he selected 'Eichman' as his example of a powerful manager of deaths and misery of others, but who got to keep his hands clean, is because of this german exceptionalism - everyone is familiar with World War II, but can be fuzzy about these other areas of history and other world regions. As a professor, wouldn't he be helping us out a lot more if he called immoral corporate managers 'little Lewis Cass' (of the 1830s department of War who denied smallpox vaccine to specific tribes as punishment, and arranged the trail of tears from Washington DC) and then proceed through the list of different massacres through history. People would learn something and start to get his point perhaps, although he would be less famous.