Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform

In The Myth of Academic Freedom - Personal Experiences of a Liberal Principle in the Neoconservative Era (Fragments of a Work in Progress) [Social Text 90, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 2007, Duke University Press] he provides previously unknown information about what happened during the great unpleasantness at Hamilton.

According to the piece,

• Eismeier is a bad buy who reads old web postings
• Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform is a pawn of Great Satan ACTA

and the less fun stuff:

• Rabinowitz paid Churchill by check when the event was cancelled
• Stewart ordered a stop payment (old news, see hcagr posting)
• Hamilton ’s legal counsel, Henry Kaufman, did acknowledge that the legality of her stopping payment was dubious and suggested that if Churchill were willing to sign a “confidentiality agreement” on the matter, he would authorize its (re)issuance.
• Ward wasn’t ‘down’ with the confidentiality agreement. Evidently, court ordered mediation ended with his money paid plus court costs & legal fees…and no gag order.

More interesting and regrettable is that we see a continuing pattern of behavior emanating from the communications of the college to create a collaborative pretense that is contrary to the facts. More on that later.

Excerpts from the 25 page article follow:

“On 2 July 2004, I was contacted by Nancy Rabinowitz, director of the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture at Hamilton College, in upstate New York, to deliver a public lecture on that campus sometime during the academic year. It was agreed that I would do so on 3 February 2005, in conjunction with Susan Rosenberg, a former political prisoner whose sentence had been commuted by Bill Clinton and who’d been contracted by the project to teach a course on memoir writing during the spring semester….

 

…the Rockland County Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association …contended that Rosenberg had “no right to teach the youth of our county” because of her supposed record as a “terrorist” and “cop-killer.” Both labels referred to her alleged complicity in a 1981 Brinks truck robbery in Nyack, New York, during which two policemen were shot to death, although she’d never been prosecuted, much less convicted, on any charge related to the incident. The publicity attending the campaign was sufficient to cause Rosenberg, who was on parole at the time and could thus ill afford to be saddled with such characterizations (no matter how gratuitous), to withdraw from her contract in early December.

 

By mid- to late January, a political science professor named Theodore Eismeier had come up with a three-year-old op-ed piece on the Web site of an electronic journal, Dark Night field notes , in which I’d described the investment bankers, stockbrokers, and other finance technicians killed in the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 as “little Eichmanns.”

 

The story first appeared in the Hamilton student newspaper on 21 January 2005 but was not picked up by the nearby Syracuse Post-Standard until 26 January. At that point, the storm broke quickly. On 28 January, my analogy was the topic of an editorial in the Wall Street Journal and was featured that evening on the Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor . For three straight nights, Bill O’Reilly provided Hamilton president Joan Hinde Stewart’s e-mail address to his viewers, suggesting that they “let her know how [they] feel” about my scheduled appearance. That very night, threats on the order of killing me with “a fire ax to the back of the skull” began to pour in. I received well over a hundred within a week and have no count on the number received by Hamilton.

 

By then George Pataki had entered the fray, publicly demanding that Hamilton rescind its invitation. President Stewart responded with a statement to the effect that the college would “never compromise” its commitment to defending the principle of academic freedom. Nonetheless, Saito and I were each asked whether we wished to back out, given what appeared to be a steadily increasing potential for violence; we both declined to do so, professing ourselves unprepared to acquiesce in a “heckler’s veto” of our First Amendment rights. The campus police thereupon initiated regular contact with me to coordinate security arrangements, and, as of 31 January, I was still receiving assurances that everything would go as planned.

 

Late the following afternoon, just hours before Saito and I were slated to board our aircraft, Stewart abruptly pulled the plug, stating that she’d been left with no alternative because the number of credible death threats received by her office indicated that public safety could no longer be ensured. I was initially inclined to accept her explanation, even while disagreeing with her decision. That same evening, however, an exultant O’Reilly, who’d been busily promoting the idea that Hamilton alumni should threaten to withhold financial contributions to the college unless my appearance was canceled, used the “Talking Points” segment of his program to offer an alternative scenario. “Hamilton College President Joan Hinde Stewart [says she] canceled the event because the college received, in her view, ‘credible threats of violence.’ Were those ‘threats’ the primary reason for the cancellation? Maybe. But Stewart must realize that donations to the college would plummet, and so would her job security. The truth is that Hamilton is home to radical professors, and is a troubled college.”

 

Far more convincing support to O’Reilly’s primary thesis would soon be provided by Hamilton’s avowedly liberal president herself, however. On 2 February, Professor Rabinowitz and I discussed our options by phone. She inquired whether I’d be willing to appear at some later date — “once the smoke has cleared a bit” — or deliver my lecture by videoconferencing. I agreed to do whichever she preferred. It was decided that she would consult with the faculty and students, meanwhile sending my honorarium (standard practice when an institution unilaterally cancels an engagement, especially when the cancellation occurs at the last moment). This she did on 3 February, and I deposited the check on 10 February. On 11 February, I received an urgent phone call from Rabinowitz, informing me that she’d been removed from her position directing the Kirkland Project — which she’d cofounded — and that Stewart had ordered that payment be stopped on my check.

 

On 12 February, I phoned President Stewart seeking an explanation. She dissembled, saying that she “understood [my] position,” and had “no intention of not paying” me, but, because the project had been “taken under review,” she herself was obliged to “exercise due diligence” in the matter. No explanation was provided regarding what was meant by the latter term, and Stewart declined to discuss either the circumstances of Professor Rabinowitz’s removal or the disposition of my offer to make the contracted presentation via satellite feed, but she did say she’d “be in touch within thirty days” concerning the status of my check. That was the last I ever heard from Joan Stewart…

 

In mid-April, I retained an attorney to resolve the situation. He was referred to Hamilton’s legal counsel, Henry Kaufman, who asserted that I’d “severely embarrassed” the college and that it had been forced to postpone a major capital campaign until such “damage” had been repaired. Notwithstanding Stewart’s previously liberal cant, her posture was now framed by her own attorney as a gesture of appeasement to the reactionary sentiments of potential contributors. Kaufman did acknowledge that the legality of her stopping payment on my check was dubious, however, and suggested that if I were willing to sign a “confidentiality agreement” on the matter, he would authorize its (re)issuance.  I flatly rejected the proposition. It was not until September, amid a court-ordered mediation process, that Stewart finally conceded that Hamilton’s obligation to make good on its debt entailed no reciprocal obligation on my part to collaborate in a pretense that it had not.

In a different forum Ward asserts that in the end he was paid his original speaking fees plus legal fees and court costs came along for the ride:

Hamilton College—did end up paying me the full and duly-contract amount. It also had to pay my attorney. And it was stuck with the tab for all costs associated with the case, which, to be sure, included a stable of sleek—and very pricey—Manhattan mouthpieces retained to try and stave off the inevitable.

Source: http://www.tryworks.org/blog/2008/05/02/sorry-to-wilt-your-woody-james-but%E2%80%A6/

It is unfortunate that we have to rely on Ward rather than Hamilton for the full story. But there it is…or maybe not.