Letter: University lucky to have Panther activists teaching

Editor,

Transparently self-contradictory letters are often disingenuous ones. Such was the case with the sadly illogical diatribe by L.H. Crum in Thursday's Daily Lobo against two distinguished faculty members at UNM, Finnie Coleman and David Hilliard.

We are indeed fortunate to have both of these scholars and activists - along with Elaine Brown - teaching here at UNM, as many well-known professors would be the first to say at Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with many other universities.

I have personally heard David Hilliard lecture, and his thoughtful eloquence about the civil rights movement matches the truly historic role he played through the Black Panthers in the grass-roots democratization of the U.S. Few other professors at UNM, myself included, can claim that - in addition to writing with expertise about modern history - we have also played a memorable role in the shaping of that history.

Among the few faculty members at UNM who can make such an extraordinary claim are David Hilliard and Elaine Brown. Their founding and/or leadership of the Black Panthers will always be given a prominent place in any narrative about U.S. history in which greater attention to social justice is a key concern. They are both, to use correctly an often misused analogy, "the moral equivalents of our founding fathers," and thus are qualified to "teach the teachers," as Coleman rightly points out.

Who should decide which figures have the requisite qualifications to teach at a university? Crum admits that, unlike himself, these people would have to be the professors who grant degrees and author scholarly books. Yet no sooner has Crum - a nonfaculty member - admitted the obvious, then he immediately contradicts himself. He attacks a faculty member with the expertise he himself utterly lacks simply because that faculty member disagrees with him about qualifications - qualifications that Crum neither has nor understands.

I have no interest in trying to instruct Crum on what it takes to be an electrician. Similarly, I have even less interest in hearing his advice about whom we, as professors in the humanities, should invite to be among our ranks.

David Craven

UNM faculty