Just in time for July 4, HBO debuted its First Amendment documentary, "Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech," this past Monday. Its perspective - that the First Amendment has not been under such fire since the 1950s - is something that anyone who cares about the First Amendment can't help but agree with. The documentary features First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus, and was made by his daughter Liz Garbus. She's already won two Emmys. Her work on this documentary should win her another and more.
Martin Garbus has been an heroic champion of the First Amendment - I quote him about the need for shield laws for blogger journalists in New New Media - and in this documentary, he is the main guide through recent attacks on our freedoms of expression guaranteed in the Constitution.
The key is that in order for the First Amendment to protect speech we value, we must support its protection of speech we may loathe. Communication that everyone including the government likes needs no protection from government censorship and punishment. "Shouting Fire" thus includes the battles of Ward Churchill, a professor who disparaged some of the victims of 9/11 as "little Eichmanns", and Chase Harper, a student who wore a tee-shirt in his high school that said "homosexuality is shameful".
You may disagree strongly with both points of view - I certainly do - but allowing them to be silenced, or punishing the people who espouse them, is destructive to the very basis of our democracy, or, as Martin Garbus aptly puts it, "a country where anybody can think anything, say anything, create anything." Technically, neither Churchill nor Harper was punished by the government, but Churchill (a tenured professor) was fired (on grounds that he plagiarized some of his credentials) and Harper was suspended.
Churchill's reinstatement is currently under consideration, after a jury found that he had been wrongly fired. But others whose First Amendment rights were trampled, as they tried to communicate ideas a lot more welcome than Churchill's or Harper's, have not yet been as fortunate. "Shouting Fire" tells the story of Debbie Almontaser, who was dismissed as principal of the first dual-language Arabic-English public school she was founding, after cowardly NYC officials caved to right-wing pressure. Her case is currently in the courts.
Liz Garbus's documentary - masterfully produced, with clips from movies and real-life interviews interspersed with keen analysis - concludes with a note on the importance of the Supreme Court, and the danger the First Amendment faces from the current court, which could be under the baneful influence of Bush appointees for decades.
No mention is made of Obama's first appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, because the documentary was no doubt already finished when Obama announced the appointment in May. But given the ruling of the Sotomayor Appellate court in the 2008 Doninger case, which upheld a high school's punishment of a 16-year old for objectionable language she wrote on her off-campus blog, the release of "Shouting Fire" is well timed.
I recommend this documentary to everyone who bears witness to our freedoms.
See also June 2009 Interview with Avery and Lauren Doninger and 2005 The Flouting of the First Amendment.
Showing posts with label Ward Churchill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ward Churchill. Show all posts
Friday, July 3, 2009
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Ward Churchill - Professor Pinocchio
The President of the University of Colorado has recommended that tenured professor Ward Churchill be fired.
This seems like a good time to go over what I see as the reasons why and why not.
Let's start with three issues that should have nothing to do with his firing:
1. His views about 9/11, ranging from crackpot conspiracy theories to repulsive metaphoric links of victims to Nazis, should not be grounds for his firing. A professor should never be fired for his or her political views, however outrageous they may be. Of all places in our society, the university must be open to the greatest diversity of ideas.
2. The First Amendment to our Constitution does not protect him. The First Amendment prohibits the government from interfering with speech and press. Although the FCC, with Congressional support and urging, violates this Amendment almost every day, neither one of them is going after Churchill. Universities should indeed encourage and enforce a maximum openness to speech and ideas - see #1 above - but this flows from university tradition and culture, not the First Amendment.
3. Tenure does not protect him. Tenure is often wrongly portrayed in our popular culture as giving its recipients immunity from being fired for any reason whatsoever. Not true. If a professor has tenure in a department which loses all of its students, and the professor has competence to teach in no other area, that tenured professor can be fired. Also, if a tenured professor commits a crime, or more to the point here is guility of fraudulent scholarly conduct, he or she can be fired.
Let's look at that last point, which in the university's view - based on its reports and the President's statement this morning - warrants Churchill's firing. Assuming the claims about Churchill's conduct are accurate, I agree.
Churchill is accused, among other things, of plagiarism (passing someone else's research and work off as his own) and its reverse, sock puppetry (passing your own voice off as someone else's). Either charge, if justified, would be ample grounds for Churchill's dismissal. Most people understand why plagiarism is wrong. What's up with sock puppetry?
I first became aware of the term almost a year ago on Wikipedia - where articles are edited, and can be removed, by group consensus. In this environment, an editor A logging on to Wikipedia under a false identity B, and arguing that A's point is brilliant, is clearly destructive to the system. Digg is beset by sock puppetry, too, but since Diggs and Buries are more the result of raw votes than protracted discussion, it takes a big number of sock puppets to do any real damage. (Meat puppets are real people who create accounts on an online system solely to support another person. Although they can distort online consensus-building too, the ethical violations of meat puppetry are far less clear than those of sock puppetry, since you can't know for sure what the meat puppet really believes.)
Back in the analog world, a scholar employing a sock puppet identity to support his or her work is the most damaging of all. At least on Wikipedia, a wrong decision made under the baneful influence of sock puppets can be easily reversed. A scholarly reputation in the real world and all that comes with it - including tenure at a university - can take much longer to undo, if necessary, because sock puppetry was part of its basis.
I am not directly privy to the facts in the Churchill case. But if it is indeed true that he even once wrote under a false identity to support his scholarly work, the University of Colorado should cut its ties to him and throw him out the door faster than a broken Pinocchio.
This seems like a good time to go over what I see as the reasons why and why not.
Let's start with three issues that should have nothing to do with his firing:
1. His views about 9/11, ranging from crackpot conspiracy theories to repulsive metaphoric links of victims to Nazis, should not be grounds for his firing. A professor should never be fired for his or her political views, however outrageous they may be. Of all places in our society, the university must be open to the greatest diversity of ideas.
2. The First Amendment to our Constitution does not protect him. The First Amendment prohibits the government from interfering with speech and press. Although the FCC, with Congressional support and urging, violates this Amendment almost every day, neither one of them is going after Churchill. Universities should indeed encourage and enforce a maximum openness to speech and ideas - see #1 above - but this flows from university tradition and culture, not the First Amendment.
3. Tenure does not protect him. Tenure is often wrongly portrayed in our popular culture as giving its recipients immunity from being fired for any reason whatsoever. Not true. If a professor has tenure in a department which loses all of its students, and the professor has competence to teach in no other area, that tenured professor can be fired. Also, if a tenured professor commits a crime, or more to the point here is guility of fraudulent scholarly conduct, he or she can be fired.
Let's look at that last point, which in the university's view - based on its reports and the President's statement this morning - warrants Churchill's firing. Assuming the claims about Churchill's conduct are accurate, I agree.
Churchill is accused, among other things, of plagiarism (passing someone else's research and work off as his own) and its reverse, sock puppetry (passing your own voice off as someone else's). Either charge, if justified, would be ample grounds for Churchill's dismissal. Most people understand why plagiarism is wrong. What's up with sock puppetry?
I first became aware of the term almost a year ago on Wikipedia - where articles are edited, and can be removed, by group consensus. In this environment, an editor A logging on to Wikipedia under a false identity B, and arguing that A's point is brilliant, is clearly destructive to the system. Digg is beset by sock puppetry, too, but since Diggs and Buries are more the result of raw votes than protracted discussion, it takes a big number of sock puppets to do any real damage. (Meat puppets are real people who create accounts on an online system solely to support another person. Although they can distort online consensus-building too, the ethical violations of meat puppetry are far less clear than those of sock puppetry, since you can't know for sure what the meat puppet really believes.)
Back in the analog world, a scholar employing a sock puppet identity to support his or her work is the most damaging of all. At least on Wikipedia, a wrong decision made under the baneful influence of sock puppets can be easily reversed. A scholarly reputation in the real world and all that comes with it - including tenure at a university - can take much longer to undo, if necessary, because sock puppetry was part of its basis.
I am not directly privy to the facts in the Churchill case. But if it is indeed true that he even once wrote under a false identity to support his scholarly work, the University of Colorado should cut its ties to him and throw him out the door faster than a broken Pinocchio.
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