Earlham College, a Quaker (pacifist Christian) school in Richmond, Indiana, invited neoconservative William Kristol, publisher of the right-wing Weekly Standard, to speak March 29.

About a half hour into Kristolâs talk on U.S. foreign policy, an unidentified student smooshed an ice cream pie into Kristolâs face.

The college apologized for the prank and thanked Kristol for his graciousness in continuing to speak with ice cream on his noggin.

Two days later, a few hundred miles away, at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, a student was arrested for dousing conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan with what looked like creamy ranch while shouting "Stop the bigotry."

Buchanan, of course, is known for his xenophobic views on race, stopped his speech to wash his hair.

Russian political philosopher and mass murderer Vladimir Lenin might have said these anarchist outbursts are the "political reflection of the desperate and futile striving of the petty bourgeois to retain his individual freedom."

Lenin would likely condemn these food fights because they are not sustained grassroots organizing efforts and, if they were any more violent, would invite police repression.

For me, these amusing outbursts reveal that college administrators allow the right-wing pundits who advocate hate onto campus while censoring other views.

As offensive a man as Kristol is - he supports the invasion and occupation of Iraq - he was given the opportunity to address an audience. As much trash at immigrants as Buchanan spews, he merits a stage.

Yet back in February, Hamilton College in central New York cancelled the appearance of left-winger Ward Churchill.

Churchill, a University of Colorado professor, stirred the pot with his essay "Some People Push Back."

Churchill biggest sin: saying that members of the finance community who perished in the Sept. 11 attacks were "little Eichmanns."

Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi who helped mastermind the Holocaust. Churchill wrote that some of the workers in the World Trade Centers "formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the Îmighty engine of profitâ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved." And that "they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants."

Hamilton Collegeâs provost suggested that Churchillâs mere physical presence might incite violence (by whom?).

The podium is not level. A controversial interpretation of an event invites silence, while the repetition of Bush mantras receives applause.

Free speech is in trouble in academia. And the best option for students is to join the Biotic Baking Brigade?

I will admit, I have heckled as a political weapon. At the time, I felt it was better to do something, no matter how foolish, than nothing at all.

Today, I see the folly of it. My thinking now is "I may hate what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it and I will make sure that my point of view is equally represented."

Equal representation comes from education and organization, with the hopes that people see the value in your message, in this case pacifism and economic populism.

Yet the entity most capable of doing this, the Democratic Party, the supposed torchbearer of American liberal hopes, has neglected to organize and empower its most valuable constituency: youth.

4/05/05

Email this to a friend.

Index Pages

Topics

Archives

Some People Pie Faces

"Some People Push Back"