The Ward Churchill trial has finally begun--and what a circus it is. The opening arguments featured falsehoods from Churchill's lawyer (who I don't think is a performance artist, but whose remarks suggest a strong talent for satiric showmanship). Former Colorado president Elizabeth Hoffman delivered similar canards in her video testimony. And Churchill took the stand yesterday to defend his honor, wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a huge attitude. When asked how he should be addressed, the holder of a Master's degree and an honorary doctorate said, "I prefer professor, but doctor will do. ... I'm entitled to that." When called upon to explain some of the shady professional practices that got him fired, he defended himself by saying that there was nothing out of the ordinary about his methods of scholarship--that they were, in fact, common practice. (This line of defense recalls ACTA's 2006 report, How Many Ward Churchills? Academics across the country had absolute fits about that title, arguing that Churchill was a local aberration whose misdeeds tell us nothing about the ivory tower norm. In an odd twist, it would seem that Churchill, who has made lies about ACTA a centerpiece of his defense, disagrees with the premise that he is an anomaly, and seems prepared to document accordingly.)

Anyhow. I always think it's an interesting exercise, when in the midst of an escalating debacle like this one, to think back to how it all got started. Origins gain so much resonance in retrospect, and can tell us so much about how history makes itself out of the humblest and most unlikely beginnings. The Churchill scandal exploded during the winter of 2005, when word of his roosting chickens 9/11 essay made national news and provoked loud, inappropriate calls to have him fired. But why did it all blow up then, years after the "little Eichmanns" comment had floated into electronic oblivion? What was the tipping point? Do you remember?

Three cheers to you if you do. If you don't, I'll summarize very briefly, with an emphasis on how utterly local, anterior, and seemingly minor and mundane the precipitating events were. Churchill was not the quarry, and Colorado was not the scene. The quarry was institutionalized bias, as exemplified in one-sided speaker panels. The scene was Hamilton College, which was doing a bang-up job of bringing in far left figures such as former Weather Underground member Susan Rosenberg (sixteen years for weapons possession) and, yes, Ward Churchill, and which was not doing much of a job at all ensuring that other kinds of voices and perspectives got showcased on campus. Some students, faculty, and alumni got angry about that. They appealed to administrators, but got nowhere. So they went public. All they wanted was a broader range of campus expression. Churchill was Exhibit A in their campaign. And the end result, four years later, is a massive, protracted lawsuit between Churchill and the University of Colorado, in which Churchill alleges he was unjustly fired for his speech, and in which CU argues that no, he was fired for gross, longstanding academic misconduct that it finally got around to investigating in the wake of the scandal.

In a funny way, then, Churchill's entire saga has its roots in conflicts elsewhere about other things. It seems reasonable enough to conclude that if anger about unbalanced speaker series had not bubbled over at a tiny college in upstate New York years ago, Churchill would not have been fired, CU would not have been sued, and our national understanding of the fine lines between academic freedom and academic misconduct, between due process and disciplinary overreaching, would be very different today.

That's worth pondering, along the lines of butterflies flapping their wings far, far away.

I was thinking about all of these things as I read over this Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed from ACTA's program director, Charles Mitchell. He's got some ideas about what campuses should be doing to ensure a robust and varied calendar of speakers, while still honoring the right of student and faculty groups to issue invitations without interference from above. Check it out and see what you think.