Academic Freedom, the First Amendment and Ward Churchill

I've held back on commenting on this whole issue mostly because the thought of giving Ward Churchill any publicity (or any legitimacy in any way) made me ill.

Academic freedom does not mean you get to lie about your ethnicity, plagiarize legitimate scholars, make up facts and footnotes and episodes that support your delusional view of the world.  Realistically, outside the world of the college campus, such things will most likely result in a visit to a mental hospital or jail, perhaps both.

I'm no Constitutional scholar, but I believe that the right to free speech means you can say what you think, feel, or believe without any fear of imprisonment, torture, etc from your government.  It does not mean that if you say offensive things in public that you get to keep your nice job, or that people have to talk nicely to you.  It does not mean that they must have you come speak at their college/meeting/conference.  If you say perfectly awful things that make others question your sanity/integrity/values, you should not be surprised that no one wants to loan you money for your house or your car - crazy talk can get you fired and then how would you pay back the loan?  No, the First Amendment garuantees that you can say it.  You just have to be ready to live with the consequences that society may level on you once you've said it.

Ward Churchill.  Paul Campos, a law professor at Colorado, says it best in Freedom Unused is Abused (H/T: Instapundit) .  Excerpt:

Tenure and academic freedom are hard to defend if they don't provide us who benefit from them with the minimal degree of courage necessary to say, when confronted by someone like Churchill, enough is enough.

If even the extraordinary protections of tenure don't lead us to condemn a fraud of this magnitude in unmistakable and unapologetic terms, then we don't deserve them. What else is academic freedom for?

He is a poser and a fraud.  He is a liar and an anarchist.  The Constitution barely protects his hateful speech and attitudes, I certainly hope that U of C will decide that tenure does not.