State of the Profession: Birds of a Feather?

By Martin D. Snyder

Churchill's trouble started early this year when he was invited to speak on a panel at Hamilton College about the limits of dissent. A member of the Hamilton College community discovered a 2003 essay that Churchill had written, "Some People Push Back," in which he described the attacks of September 11, 2001, as chickens coming home to roost, and the victims as "little Eichmanns," complicit in American imperialistic foreign policy. All hell broke loose. Television commentators urged viewers to write to Hamilton College to condemn what the professor had written. More than six thousand e-mail messages were sent to Hamilton College president Joan Hinde Stewart, who described them as "ranging from angry to profane, obscene, and violent." The prospect of violence at Hamilton College led the administration there to cancel the visit. In Colorado, university regents and politicians called for Churchill's dismissal; at the regents' behest, as of this writing, Churchill's scholarship and qualifications are under review at the university.

No stranger to controversy, Hoppe, like Churchill, has espoused provocative positions. In a 1995 essay "The Political Economy of Monarchy and Democracy and the Idea of a Natural Order," he links what he deems to be the decline in the intellectual and moral fiber of Western civilization to the rise of democracy, and he advocates the dominance of a natural elite (nobilitas naturalis), those who demonstrate superior achievements in wealth, wisdom, and bravery. In his 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, Hoppe maintains that in a libertarian utopia dissidents would be unwelcome: "There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They—the advocates of alternative, non-family-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism—will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order." Those with a better memory than Hoppe for segregation, apartheid, internment facilities and concentration camps, for yellow stars and pink triangles, will find much that is offensive in his writings.

So what ignited the controversy in Nevada? In March 2004, a student formally accused Hoppe of creating a hostile classroom environment during a lecture on time preference, a notion in economics identifying individuals' varying degrees of willingness to defer the immediate consumption of goods in favor of saving and investment. Hoppe opined that certain demographic groups, for instance homosexuals, tend to be more shortsighted in their economic outlook than those who have children. He also suggested that the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes might be explained by Keynes's reputed homosexuality. A grievance committee unanimously upheld the student's complaint against Hoppe. In February of this year, even as the Ward Churchill controversy was flaring, the UNLV provost issued a "nondisciplinary letter of instruction" to be placed in Hoppe's personnel file chastising him for introducing opinion and speculation into his lecture rather than restricting himself to theories supported by peer review. On appeal, however, university president Carol Harter wisely dismissed the discrimination charge and removed the letter from Hoppe's file. "Teaching is of its nature and origin provocative," she said. "Faculty are called upon to challenge students, to push them to a greater understanding, and to encourage them to question the current base of knowledge and, in so doing, to create new knowledge."

Freedom of faculty members to express views, however unpopular or distasteful, is an essential condition of an institution of higher learning that is truly free. Without vigorous, open debate, education becomes mere indoctrination. Opportunistic politiciansand radio ranters have judged Ward Churchill harshly because his statements evoke special anguish among survivors of September 11 and victims' families, but neither Churchill nor Hoppe should be punished for freely expressing his opinions. Churchill's provocative speech deserves the same protections as Hoppe's. What's good for the libertarian goose is good for the leftist gander.

Martin Snyder is AAUP director of planning and development.

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