Open Letter Calling on the University of Colorado to Reverse Its Recommendation to Dismiss Professor Ward Churchill to be Published in The New York Review of Books

March 14, 2007 on 2:43 am | In Analysis

The Open Letter Calling on the University of Colorado to Reverse Its Recommendation to Dismiss Professor Ward Churchill – initiated by 11 of this country’s distinguished public intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Richard Falk, Derrick Bell, Rashid Khalidi, and Irene Gendzier – is being published as a full page ad in the upcoming April 12th issue of the New York Review of Books (their special Spring Book Issue), which appears on the newsstands two weeks earlier.

Someone who believes strongly in the effort to defend dissent and critical thinking in academia in today’s climate has put the cost of the ad on their credit card so that it can be published without delay. We still must raise the major portion of the $9,000 to pay for its publication, and are calling on everyone reading this to help - by contributing through the PayPal account linked to on the Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking website, forwarding this letter to colleagues, list serves, etc., and/or by directing colleagues to the www.defendcriticalthinking.org website. At the same time, we’re calling on you to circulate the letter broadly for signatures.

As we wrote on March 1st, “the appearance of this letter in the NYRB will contribute to significantly transforming a situation where entirely too few of this countries’ scholars and intellectuals are even aware of this case, and the implications of its outcome. And it will bring before them an articulate challenge, from some of this country’s most respected public intellectuals, to the overwhelmingly one-sided version of the facts of this case that people have been given to date.

“Through this we will be working to bridge the current gap that exists between the section of academia that recognizes and is responding to the urgency of the overall assault on dissent and critical thinking and the way it is manifesting itself in the Churchill case, and the broader community of scholars and students.”

If you have not yet contributed to publishing the letter, now is the time to do so!