Ayers/Churchill Smackdown!

by: Colorado Pols

Fri Feb 20, 2009 at 12:53:58 PM MST

Two of academia's most controversial left-wing figures - ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers and fired University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill - will share a stage on the Boulder campus next month.

Three CU student groups recruited Ayers, a lightning rod of controversy during the 2008 presidential election, to speak at an academic-freedom rally just days before Churchill's lawsuit against CU goes to trial.

"What we're trying to show with this event is that Ward Churchill is not alone in this," said Aaron Smith, a recent CU graduate and member of Students for True Academic Freedom.

The March 5 event, "Forbidden Education and the Rise of Neo-McCarthyism," will be held at the Glenn Miller Ballroom, and also will feature author and activist Derrick Jensen...

Churchill is scheduled to participate in an audience question-and-answer session.

"These speakers are going to put (Churchill's) case into the political context of an attack on academic freedom on a national scale," Smith said.

Like we said a couple of weeks ago, it's a genuine shame that Ward Churchill's career-ending academic fraud and plagiarism had to be revealed in the context of a GOP-engineered pearl clutching freakout over protected speech, a freakout that quite possibly violated Churchill's due process rights. It seems like these are difficult concepts to keep distinct in the pot-addled minds of Che t-shirt wearing college radicals (or, apparently, their notorious Weatherman forebears), but we see the cautionary tale in both parts of this story.

And no, we're not going.