Denver Radio Hosts Use Colorado's Public Info (FOI) Law to Expose Ward Churchill

Craig Silverman is a co-host of a Denver area talk radio show and is on O'Reilly as this is written explaining how he has been using the Colorado public information (i.e. FOIA) law to turn up document after document concerning University of Colorado "professor" Ward Churchill. Among other things, Silverman says it appears Churchill didn't sign an oath required of every University of Colorado professor to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

O'Reilly speculates that this is the latest indication that Colorado officials are preparing to oust Churchill. I am skeptical, frankly, that Churchill will actually be fired. Disciplined in some meekly symbolic way, yes, but I just don't see the typical academic administrator or university board of regents member having the backbone to fire an academic who is at the center of a political controversy engendered by yet another Radical Left "critique" of "Amerika." If the man was to be fired, it should have been done long ago and ought not require the kind of drawn-out set-up process O'Reilly imagines.

Here's why I doubt that Churchill's University of Colorado paychecks will be stopping anytime soon: As disgusting and outrageous as was his calling the nearly 3,000 U.S. citizens who died in the 9/11 attack "little Eichmans" for their work on Wall Street, such views are commonplace on campus these days among the professoriat and have been for decades. I believe this accounts at least in part for Churchill's brazened defiance of the Colorado taxpayers for whom he does work - contrary to his loud protestations otherwise - and whose sons and daughters he has for years been filling with the hate and bitterness of the Extreme Left. He knows his colleagues well enough to know they mainly agree with him and don't have the guts to fire him even if they did disagree with his views.

The Ward Churchills teaching and running the colleges and universities of today were the New Left radicals of the 1960s, preaching hatred for America and economic freedom then just as they do now. Since the 1960s, they have turned out generations of acoloytes populating the non-tenured teaching staff and dominating the lower management levels of school administration.

Virtually all that has changed for such people since Mario Savio and "Free Speech Movement" at Berkeley in 1963 is the fact so many of them moved from attending the occasional class and organizing demonstrations to teaching the occasional class and ... organizing demonstrations.

Bottomline: Churchill is a mere PR problem, not an outcast, from the groves of American Academe. And he is far from alone. That's why, for example, the faculty at Eastern Washington University recently voted to reverse the disinvitation by the school's president of Churchill to come speak at that school.

The claim by academics like O'Reilly guest Prof. Patti Chantrill of EWU who claimed she and the faculty were merely affirming free speech is a hypocritical smokescreen, unless she and her ilk are prepared to disavow all forms of political correctness, hate speech codes, and the rest of the typical school's tools for suppressing non-Leftist expression, including especially that of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. Don't hold your breath waiting for that disavowal.

Take note, Blogosphere - in the right hands, the FOIA is a powerful weapon on behalf of the truth. Yet another illustration of why passage of the Corny-Leahy "Open Government Act of 2005" is important.