Speech's cost far higher than its value

This March 1, 2005, column by Mike Nichols in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel puts the Ward Churchill circus in perspective.
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Ward Churchill will utter a lot of words tonight at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and the real marvel is not what he will say. Crackpots, pseudo-intellectuals and bomb-throwers are a dime a dozen.

The real marvel is that some folks are actually paying that dime - and a whole lot more - instead of using it to pay for a real education.

A UW-Whitewater spokesman, who stresses that no tax dollars will be spent, says the school's Native American Cultural Awareness Association is giving Churchill, the professor who has compared victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to Adolf Eichmann, $1,000.

The Black Student Union is giving Churchill, who has also suggested there could have been no better way of "visiting some penalty" upon the victims of 9-11 than what happened, an additional $400.

Donors to the school, most of whom probably don't know where their money is going specifically, will kick in another $2,600 - and that's just in speaker's fees.

Churchill's airline ticket and hotel: $265. Rent for the center where he will speak: $300. Set-up and other miscellaneous costs: $315.

The total cost of the speech, in the end, will be at least $4,880.

The total value, presuming Churchill makes as much sense as he has in the past: none at all.

The most logical part of you just wants to ignore Churchill completely. Gordon Haberman, whose daughter Andrea died in the attack on the World Trade Center, told me Monday that guys like Churchill are simply going to fall of their own weight.

His daughter, in the meantime, is having a far more lasting impact.

Andrea, as I have written before, grew up at Pipers, the restaurant her parents ran for years in Mequon. Clearly, she was a woman who knew the value of work.

A 25-year-old graduate of Kewaskum High School and St. Norbert College, she had moved to Chicago, was engaged to be married, had a great and productive job working for a futures brokerage and was spending the very first day of her very first business trip in New York when the terrorists attacked.

Nobody who knew her has forgotten.

To this day, Jerry Gosa, her high school chemistry teacher, can hear her voice. She has a place in his heart and a picture on his chalkboard, he said, as well as a scholarship at his school.

The Andrea Haberman Memorial Scholarship fund at Kewaskum High School currently amounts to about $25,000, Gosa said. But because they are trying to spend only the interest, annual scholarships for students who want to go on to college currently amount to only about $1,000.

That $1,000 isn't nearly what some folks apparently think Ward Churchill is worth. But it's something to a kid who wants to go on to college.

Friends of Andrea have also established a scholarship at St. Norbert in De Pere.

Known as the Andrea Haberman Endowed Scholarship, it is ideally used to help a female student majoring in psychology or sociology.

A St. Norbert spokeswoman couldn't give me the total amount of the endowment, but it's clearly pretty small. It currently provides a minimum of a $500 scholarship each year.

The main criteria for the St. Norbert scholarship: financial need.

I tried to reach a member of Whitewater's Native American Cultural Awareness Association Monday afternoon to see if maybe, now that they are throwing away a bunch of money on Ward Churchill, they would consider donating some money to a cause aimed at giving somebody a real education. He didn't answer his phone.

Maybe he was too busy wasting money on a guy nobody knew a month ago and won't remember a month hence - unlike Andrea Haberman.

"There are so many things going on," said her dad, "that this guy is not even worth the mental stress" of thinking about him.

"There are positives," he said, and these scholarships are among them, "as opposed to the words the Churchills of the world are spewing."

Donations can be sent to KEYS, which stands for Kewaskum Youth Scholar- ships, ATTN: Andrea Haberman Memorial Scholarship, P.O. Box 124, Kewaskum, WI 53040, or to the Andrea Haberman Endowed Scholarship at St. Norbert College: Tripp Maher, College Advance- ment, 100 Grant St., De Pere, WI 54115.