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Some may say it's nothing to laugh about but I can't help but find humor when the snobs of the academic elite find themselves mired in paradoxical hypocrisy. One can almost smell the heat from their cerebral wheels, the publicly funded oil burning away, as they try to come up with an explanation of why they are between such a rock and a hard place. It reminds me of the old Bill Cosby bit about the student who asked his Catholic teacher the hypothetical question, "Father, if God can do anything, can He Himself make a rock so big that He can't move it?" All the priest could say was "Sit down, Don."

If, for the sake of analogy, our liberally slanted education community is a ship that ship is listing so hard to port all it can do is sail to the left. An image of a disabled vessel constantly drifting to port, doomed to an eternity of increasing insignificance comes to mind. Within one of these seven circles of Dantesque liberal hell is the paradox of Lawrence Summers and Ward Churchill.

Unless you have been too caught up in the non-reporting of the facts by the mainstream media, you know that liberal activists on our college campuses are in an uproar over two of their own; Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, and Ward Churchill, a professor from the University of Colorado. Both of these men -- having made controversial statements -- find themselves engaged in battles involving their First Amendment free speech rights. All the while the liberal academic community finds itself standing on both sides of the spectrum, essentially, in two places at the same time, screaming for protection for one while shrieking for the other's head. The interesting thing is that both Summers and Churchill did basically the same thing.

Summers is being criticized by faculty, staff, students and liberal zealots for daring to theorize that there are innate differences of "intrinsic aptitude" between men and women. He speculated that it was because of these differences there was a dearth of women employed in the natural sciences. He repeatedly peppered his comments with the idea that his words were meant "provoke" the academic community into thought and discussion on the matter.

Conversely, Ward Churchill is being defended by most in the academic community for statements he made likening the traders and brokers who worked in the ill-fated World Trade Center towers to "little Eichmanns." Of course, Churchill was referring to Adolf Eichmann, who orchestrated the "Final Solution," the genocide that delivered millions of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and Catholics to the death camps of World War II occupied Europe. While his claims are grounded purely in opinion and conjecture, Churchill maintains his right to state his grossly seditious and cruel theories without apology and without consequence.

The paradox here is that while the snobs of the liberal elite trip all over themselves to defend Churchill's right to free speech -- seditious as it is -- they are climbing over each other to cast their votes of no confidence for Summers who admitted to theorizing the provocative in an effort to create dialogue. I thought the liberal left enjoyed dialogue.

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