The University of Colorado is reviewing administrative records of all employees to see if they signed loyalty oaths after a controversy was sparked by the school's inability to find the loyalty oath of professor Ward Churchill.
State law requires that all teaching employees sign a pledge to uphold the state and U.S. constitutions, and school officials could not find Churchill's oath while looking through his personnel records.
Churchill has been at the center of controversy for statements likening some World Trade Center victims to a top Nazi, as well as other controversial statements.
Churchill signed another oath last week when school officials failed to find the one he should have signed when he was initially hired.
Administrators will ask other instructors whose oaths cannot be located to sign a new one, according to an e-mail memo.
I'm not quite sure what they mean by "Loyalty". You mean you can't criticize anything about this country? Everything here is perfect, and all it's citizens are without blemish?
"Little Eichmans." I heard Churchill's statement and his defense of it on Democracy Now and as a working stiff at a company that promotes products that may not be good for you, I can see his point about "Techncratic complicity". But making that comparison does not make him UnAmerican. It is Churchill's right as an American to speak out and say what is wrong with the system. It's his duty as a citizen to do so.
Now the University of Colorado, having someone sign a Loyalty Oath under duress or as a condition of employment should be taken to task for countering to the American Ideal of Freedom, unless, as I suspect, they are the vanguard of a wave of McCarthyism. And should that be the case, we as a country are for the worse off than ever before.
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