<p>I’m a current student at Grinnell, and I’d just like to throw my two cents in here:</p>
<p>1)His speech was one of several events that took place at 8pm near the end of what is here known as “hell week,” the week before exams when the vast majority of students are staying up studying until 4 am because ALL final presentations and most final papers are due that week. No one pays attention to campus events that week.</p>
<p>2)For some reason, with the exception of convocation at 11 am on Thursdays, the vast majority of speakers are Grinnell are largely ignored. I was actually at the speech, and there were probably 25 people there, all of us sleep-deprived. In addition, there were no advertisements for the speech: I found out about it through a professor in class about the history of the 60s.</p>
<p>3)Ward Churchill, though his is a very engaging speaker, seeks out controversy to make headlines, and made his deeply stupid comment in the midst of a lecture about mass deaths throughout history. Taken out of context it sounds absolutely nuts, but I’ve talked to several students who were there and none of us remember when he said this, presumably because he was in the midst of beating us over the head with accounts of genocide and therefore the comment got lost in accounts of the Holocaust and bad European diseases hitting the Native population, and because we were all operating on very little sleep and he must have been talking for an hour by then. Most people left the room early.</p>
<p>4)I’ve never actually attended a meeting for the group that invited Churchill here, but in my experience, most student groups at Grinnell have an ABSOLUTE max of 8 dedicated members organizing events. The planning was already in question, seeing as how they scheduled their Activist Week during hell week. Ward Churchill’s way-over-the-top opinions are NOT representative of Grinnellian’s opinions. I expect most Grinnellians would be embarrassed to be put in the same category. Most individual events are planned by 2 or 3 students, who are the only ones who know the full extent of the event. The entire club may not have even known the details of Ward Churchill.</p>
<p>If Ward Churchill spoke this week, there would probably be an outcry over something as stupid as the suggestion that the 9/11 victims are not civilians. But when 25 people operating on 4 hours of sleep with 3 presentations the next day are the only ones present, everyone trying to pass exams and packing to go home in a week, people like Ward Churchill can get away with murder.</p>