He gave tribute to the September 11 attackers for “their patience and restraint” in waiting so long before “they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people.” Then, in the lines that became infamous, he mocked the “innocence” of the dead at the World Trade Center. “True enough, they were civilians of a sort,” he wrote. “But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire—the ‘mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved.… If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”83
The screed wasn’t a departure for Churchill. He had long written extensively of what he saw as America’s crimes. But the words seared sharply at this moment of mourning, igniting a firestorm that consumed conservative shouters on television and radio, provoked Colorado’s Republican governor, Bill Owens, to call for his resignation, and triggered what the university chancellor called “a thorough examination of Professor Churchill’s writings, speeches, tape recordings, and other works.”84
He had the protection of tenure, but even if he hadn’t, the university (a state institution) determined that his “offensive” and “appalling” views were insulated by the First Amendment.
So administrators went after him in another way, convening a committee that found enough academic violations to get him fired by the regents. He had committed plagiarism, the panel concluded with meticulous documentation, and had falsified and fabricated certain historical records to facilitate his assertion that smallpox had been intentionally spread among American Indians by Captain John Smith in 1614–1618 and by the U.S. Army near Fort Clark in 1837–1840.85
Tenure protects academic freedom, not academic misconduct. The guarantee of lifelong appointment took root after a wave of faculty dismissals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, engineered by pressure groups in business, religion, and government over concerns both ephemeral and parochial. “At universities across the country, from Stanford to Yale and Vanderbilt to Wisconsin,” writes Arthur Levine, “professors were fired or threatened with discharge for taking what were judged the wrong sides of controversial issues such as Darwinism, public ownership of railroads, immigration, alcohol prohibition, bimetalism [basing currency on two metals such as silver and gold], and U.S. entry into World War I.”86
Today, under the guise of protecting free speech, some right-wing organizations campaign vigorously for the rights of conservatives and aggressively against the same rights for liberals. They worry that the Churchills are propagandizing young people to despise their country. They yearn for a return to a curriculum centered on Western civilization; they reject the liberal academy’s search beyond conventional boundaries into the cultures of foreigners and minorities. They are replaying the conflict of the 1960s and exposing their frustration that the university remains one of the few major institutions still immune to conservative domination.
One group, with the deceptively neutral name American Council of Trustees and Alumni, was co-founded by former vice president Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne, who has railed against those calling for more teaching about the Muslim world to understand the roots of 9/11, as if such thirst for knowledge represented the blaming of America.
The council publicizes the intimidation of conservative views on campus but rarely highlights the actions against liberal expression that have also occurred. It portrays classrooms as “hostile” to students who don’t share the views of leftist professors, and its surveys bolster the thesis: 68 percent of students responding to one poll “reported that their professors made negative comments about President Bush.”87
Informing on faculty even became a paid profession, briefly, when a UCLA alumni group offered to hire students to record their professors’ attempts at “indoctrination.” After the university’s lawyer warned that this might infringe teachers’ copyrights and subject students to discipline, the organization canceled the monetary arrangements, but the Web site continued to rage against “radical” professors, naming them and turning selective quotes into smears.88
The classroom is a place of power relationships, of course, and students in college, as well as in secondary school, should not have to tiptoe through courses afraid to give their views. They should not be subjected to derision for their politics, their sexual orientation, their religion, their race. They need to be included in the enterprise of learning how to think for themselves. Nor should they have to endure political rants in physics class. As a matter of professional ethics, the bright line between course matter and unrelated topics is long-standing, and the best teachers don’t blur it.
The conservative campaign against liberalism on campus has been called a McCarthyite witch hunt akin to the 1950s, when suspected communists were hounded in faculties across the country. As then, the post-9/11 spasm of fear and jingoism has caused casualties; some professional lives have been hurt. But the First Amendment culture has survived less damaged this time, and while extremists at each end of the spectrum seem determined to shut each other up, the center of gravity has mostly held.
In fact, the thought police in the American Council of Trustees and Alumni inadvertently documented just how robust freedom of speech remained after September 11. By collecting professors’ “unpatriotic” remarks critical of American policy, they put the best of American values on display—not the most admirable political opinions, perhaps, but the best principles, which include the right to self-condemnation even in time of war. As George Washington told army officers at the end of the Revolution, “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”89
This is America’s central idea: the multiplicity of ideas. It has not succumbed to enforced orthodoxy.
SECURITY AND INSECURITY
In the little farm town of Ponder, Texas, a thirteen-year-old, Christopher Beamon, was jailed for six days by a juvenile court judge for doing his homework a bit too graphically. Instructed to write a scary Halloween story, he composed a tale of drugs and guns. In the opening scene, he and a friend get high on the chemical from his air conditioner, then fire guns from his porch into the night, and finally shoot a few named classmates and his teacher “acssedently.” Despite the atrocious spelling and grammar, the teacher gave him an A and had him read the story to the class. She’d called him “an outstanding student” on his report card.
His creative effort didn’t score as well with other kids’ parents who heard about it. They found the violent narrative alarming, and so did school authorities, who called in the police. Having previously been a discipline problem, Christopher was locked in a juvenile detention center until the prosecutor gave up trying to find a violation of law. “It looks like to me the child was doing what the teacher told him to do, which was to write a scary story,” said the district attorney.90 As for the teacher, giving a high grade for semiliterate work is not a crime—well, it is, but not one you can prosecute.
Rights are eroded by danger, and especially in schools freedom of speech is trumped by security. This happens in practice, if not in strict accordance with constitutional law, as teachers and principals watch closely for signs of incipient aggression.
“Adolescents will sometimes alert you ahead of time that they will commit violence. Don’t dismiss it as idle talk,” says Supervisory Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group. After studying fourteen school shootings and four more attacks that were planned and prevented, the unit concluded that “violent behavior develops progressively,” not suddenly in a vacuum, and not a
lways secretly. You can often spot “leakage” of a student’s intentions in advance; “there are observable signs along the way.”
But don’t “profile” either, the team cautions in a lengthy report. Don’t predict violence based only on a youngster’s speech, writing, videos, or drawings without evaluating him closely in four areas of his life: his personal behavior, his family relationships, his school’s dynamics, and his social interactions, where warning signs may be visible if an attack is likely.
The study includes a long list of symptoms to look for in those four dimensions, including a student’s inability to cope with criticism or manage anger, the family’s lack of intimacy or the child’s intimidation of his parents, a school culture that tolerates bullying or disciplines unfairly, and the youngster’s unmonitored Internet use or intense involvement “with a group who share a fascination with violence or extremist beliefs.”91
Here is the most difficult intersection of safety and the First Amendment. Administrators are accountable for security and prevention, and after a string of shootings preceded by clues that were ignored, officials are easily alarmed by students who make threats or merely depict mayhem in artwork, fiction, or poetry. “In today’s climate, some schools tend to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to any mention of violence,” the report observes. “The response to every threat is the same, regardless of its credibility or the likelihood that it will be carried out … leading to potential underestimation of serious threats, overreaction to less serious ones, and unfairly punishing or stigmatizing students who are in fact not dangerous.”92
The FBI counsels a measured, considered evaluation of each instance, but some principals can’t wait: they quickly suspend or expel, which O’Toole’s unit criticizes as “kicking the problem out the door,” presenting risks of its own by neglecting treatment and deepening anger. In the end, a suspended student can return with a gun.
In few of the publicized suspensions do school officials appear to have exercised the level of assessment that the FBI recommends. Detailed court records show them covering themselves by acting precipitously on the basis of speech alone.
That’s hardly surprising. School shootings are mercifully rare, but those that occur cause trauma that reverberates brutally. When the sanctuary of school is invaded by its own students—children—who methodically walk from cafeteria to library to classroom gunning down teachers and classmates, the assault has the emotional force of terrorism. Reduced to its sheer numbers, it is a limited act—at Columbine High School, twelve students and one teacher killed, the two shooters dead from suicide. But its place and manner magnify it terribly. Fears are ignited among schoolchildren and parents far beyond the crime.
And so school officials have tried to preempt danger. Even little kids get ahold of guns. In 2011, a loaded pistol fell out of a six-year-old’s pocket in a Houston school cafeteria and went off, firing one bullet that fragmented and wounded three children.93 In March 2000, two weeks after a six-year-old shot and killed a child in Flint, Michigan, the principal of a kindergarten in Sayreville, New Jersey, suspended a five-year-old for saying “I’m going to shoot you” during a game of cops and robbers at recess—and the Third Circuit ruled for the school. The principal had suspended three other little boys earlier that month for similar remarks—one who told other kids that he planned to shoot a teacher, another for saying that he would put a gun in another child’s mouth, and a third for bragging (falsely) that his mother let him bring guns to school.94
Incidents abound. A Rhode Island high school student was interrogated by the Secret Service and suspended after fulfilling an assignment to describe “a perfect day” by writing about “doing violence to President Bush and various corporate executives,” the ACLU reported.95
Then Enrique Ponce, a sophomore at Montwood High School in El Paso, Texas, showed a fellow student a piece of imaginative writing in the form of a “diary” in which his protagonist described forming a neo-Nazi group that attacked gays and blacks, set another student’s house on fire, and planned for a “Columbine shooting.” The student told a teacher, who waited a day and informed the assistant principal, who asked Enrique to show him the notebook. The young man did, protesting that it was mere fiction. His mother told the school the same thing, unpersuasively.
Even without evidence that the boy had violent tendencies, access to weapons, or any other characteristics outlined in the FBI’s guidelines, the assistant principal called him a “terroristic threat” and asked the police to arrest him; the district attorney wouldn’t bring a charge. So the school suspended him and transferred him to a special school for “high risk” youth, Keys Academy, although he didn’t fit the profile of troubled kids that Keys was designed to help: those who had been kept back a grade, had dropped out, or were in danger of doing so. Enrique hadn’t made any real threat, and his parents worried that a marred permanent record would hamper his application to college. So they put him in a private school and sued.
They lost in the Fifth Circuit, which cited Justice Samuel Alito’s concurrence in the “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” case, Morse v. Frederick, portraying schools as dangerous places where, in the absence of parental protection, students were forced to spend their days close to others who might do them harm. “If school administrators are permitted to prohibit student speech that advocates illegal drug use because ‘illegal drug use presents a grave and in many ways unique threat to the physical safety of students,’ ” the federal appeals court declared, “then it defies logical extrapolation to hold school administrators to a stricter standard with respect to speech that gravely and uniquely threatens violence, including massive deaths, to the school population as a whole.”96 It was a clear example of how courts can walk step-by-step to trespass more and more deeply on the Bill of Rights. The Alaskan kid who had held the nonsensical sign had set in motion a constitutional argument that now moved well beyond his little act of defiance on that Juneau street.
A different circumstance prompted more careful consideration by a high school in Blaine, Washington, before imposing “emergency expulsion” on James LaVine after he asked a teacher for comment on his poem “Last Words.” Written in 1998 after a rash of school shootings, the verse was a badly spelled, first-person sketch of a youngster yearning to feel guilt for shooting twenty-eight students, and finally—fearing that he might kill again—taking his own life.
“As I approached. / the classroom door, / I drew my gun and, / threw open the door, Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang. / When it was all over, / 28 were / dead, and all I remember, / was not felling, / any remorce, / for I felt, / I was, / clensing my soul. / … I feel, / I may, / strike again. / … and now, / I hope, / I can feel, / remorse, / for what I did, without a shed, / of tears, / for no tear, / shall fall, from your face, / but from mine, / as I try, / to rest in peace, / Bang!”97
This may have been a purely artistic meditation on the inner thoughts of a fictitious boy, or it may have been “leakage,” a precursor to violence. It could have reflected a fear of being killed or a fear of his own impulses. The school looked at the poem in much the same context that the FBI recommended two years later. According to court records, the teacher thought that the verses might be a call for help, that “maybe something’s hurting him, maybe he’s upset about something, maybe he’s afraid.”
She consulted with the school psychologist, who knew James well as his counselor. Two years earlier he had told her of suicidal thoughts. Earlier that fall, he had told her about conflict with his father, who had thrown a rock at James’s car after the boy disobeyed instructions not to park it in a barn. James had called police, a judge had issued the father a no-contact order, and James had moved out to his sister’s.
The boy had recently broken up with his girlfriend and had been stalking her, according to a complaint by the girl’s mother. James’s file also showed a couple of incidents in school—a fight and “insubordination” toward a teacher, as well as a run-in with the vice principal over a T-shirt he wore r
eading, “Eat Shit and Die.”
So there was more than the poem. The vice principal called the parents, then the police, then Child Protective Services, which referred him to a mental health crisis line, which sent him to a duty psychiatrist, who suggested that the boy be brought by police for an assessment. A deputy sheriff visiting the house confirmed with James and his mother that he had no access to weapons—a key element in the FBI’s checklist—and that “there were insufficient grounds for anyone to make a determination that James LaVine was in imminent danger of causing serious harm to himself and others.”
Since the police wouldn’t act, the principal imposed the expulsion, notifying the parents in writing that the poem “implied extreme violence to our student body.” After the family hired a lawyer, the school system paid for an evaluation of the boy by a psychiatrist, who agreed that he should have been removed temporarily but believed that he was fit to return to school. The expulsion had lasted seventeen days, and he finished the school year with no problems.
Worried that the record of punishment would prevent James from enlisting in the military, his parents sued and lost. The Ninth Circuit found no First Amendment violation in the school’s expulsion order, based on a loose reading of the limits under Tinker, which restricted student expression that would cause “substantial disruption” to the school. The Supreme Court declined to review the case, letting the decision stand.
Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America (Vintage) Page 42