Northwestern's tenured holocaust denier, Arthur Butz

Crosssposted on Marathon Pundit.

Known as a prestigious university, Northwestern University has a dirty secret: Engineering Professor Arthur R. Butz, a holocaust-denier.

Northwestern has been trying to find a way to get rid of Butz for almost thirty years. I first heard the name around 1978 while a student at Carl Sandburg High School in Orland Park. A speaker from the Anti-Defamation League was addressing an assembly, not only was Butz' name brought up, but the ADL guy said he heard a rumor his nephew was a student at Sandburg. He was, and not only that, he was seated not too far away from me at the assembly, looking pretty embarrassed.

I haven't seen the nephew since I graduated from Sandburg. I wonder how he's doing?

Sometime around 1980, Professor Butz, who received his coveted tenure right before he delved into denying the holocaust, reached an agreement with the Evanston college: He wouldn't talk politics in the classroom, and in his writings--and for promotions for his speaking engagements--he'd be identified as Arthur R. Butz, Northwestern University Engineering Professor.

With out the tagline of the final two words, the implication for the uninformed would've been that Butz was a history of political science professor at NU.

Of course, just south of Evanston at Chicago's DePaul University, Norman Finkelstein actually is a political science professor. He's been called a holocaust-denier by the Anti-Defamation League.

Butz was in the news today, as reports surfaced that he made comments supporting Iran's holocaust-denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to the Daily Northwestern:

"I congratulate him on becoming the first head of state to speak out clearly on these issues and regret only that it was not a Western head of state," Butz said. His comments were reprinted in Saturday's Chicago Tribune.

That provoked a reaction at Northwestern. From the same article:

Stuart Loren, a Weinberg sophomore, created the petition against Butz on Saturday after reading the professor's statements in the Tribune. The petition has about 200 signatures.

"The importance of the petition is not so much whether he is fired or not, but to make a loud response from the Jewish community and the university as a whole," said Adam Dorsky, a Communication freshman who signed the petition.

Loren said he hopes the petition will encourage NU to clarify its standard of conduct for faculty and make wiser decisions when giving tenure to professors.

Good idea. Butz has tenure at Northwestern, but so does ex-Weather Underground terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, who made these 1969 comments shortly after the Manson "Family" committed the Sharon Tate murders:

Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!

The storm of controversy at Northwestern is even spreading to one of its heroes, David Protess, a journalism professor at NU. There are allegation that an innocent man was framed so a convicted death row inmate, Anthony Porter, could go free.

I could limit this blog to writing about the insanity known as "higher" education, and never run out of material.