Give me tenure, or give me death

For all our disagreements, Jon, I always value you as someone who will passionately defend the individual's right to do or say as he pleases. Therefore, I was discouraged to see in your column that your zeal for liberty is diminished when the subject in question is not a gun owner or a stock trader, but instead a University of Colorado-Boulder professor.

I realize you are not seeking the abolition of tenure or even necessarily the dismissal of Ward Churchill, but are instead advocating the subjection of professors to periodic review of the quantity and quality of their scholarship. However, you do not take issue with the quantity or quality of Churchill's scholarship at any point, but rather its content. So what are you really trying to say?

The validity, or lack thereof, of Churchill's arguments aside, the right of an academic to ask the hard questions and make the unpopular point is as valuable as any right in the American political lexicon. We're all much better off if we tackle the knottier issues in the laboratory of the university instead of the battleground of politics. There is no argument that does not have a place in the academic discourse, if for no reason other than to prove it wrong. And yes, that includes socialism.

There's nothing particularly faulty with your column, save its casual attitude towards academic freedom. Liberty is liberty, and if you'll argue until you're blue in the face to protect your right to own a shotgun, perhaps the spirit of free inquiry should be treated as something more than a "secondary" concern.