Now there are charges that Ward Churchill committed copyright infringement in his art. CBS4 in Denver broke the story last night. Today, Michele Malkin and the Freepers are all over it. Thanks to Grant Jones for the tip.

And Newt Gingrich is urging state legislators to amend tenure at state colleges and universities."The question here," says the Newt,

is ‘What obligation does society have to fund its own sickness?'
We ought to say to campuses, it's over…We should say to state legislatures, why are you making us pay for this? Boards of regents are artificial constructs of state law. Tenure is an artificial social construct. Tenure did not exist before the twentieth century, and we had free speech before then. You could introduce a bill that says, proof that you're anti-American is grounds for dismissal.

We also had lots of professors fired for exercising their free speech. I'm prepared to argue that exploiting and pandering to provincial, nativist bigotry is anti-American. Oh, and Eugene Volokh thinks that what Gingrich proposes is unconstitutional. See also: Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.

My colleague, KC Johnson, has a piece on the tiff over Harvard's Larry Summers,"Summers Beyond Harvard," at Inside Higher Ed. The response of another of our colleagues at Cliopatria, Tim Burke, to the Summers affair is"The Trouble with Larry" at Easily Distracted.

I'm still reading Hunter Thompson stories. The family tipped their glasses of Chevas Regal with his dead body sitting nearby in the room. Presidential historian, Doug Brinkley, has flown to Colorado to be a spokesman for the family and, apparently, Thompson's ashes will be shot from a cannon across his ranch, as he wished.