Dear Chancellor Miller:
Attached, please find an uncorrected copy of my essay, “The Ghosts of 9-1-1.” This is the final refinement and fully annotated iteration of my 2001 response piece, “Some People Push Back.” It may interest you to know that the attached text serves as the lead essay in my 2003 book, ON THE JUSTICE OF ROOSTING CHICKENS, which was named as a runner-up for the Gustavus Myers Award for best writing on human rights, 2004.
In any event, this is the final clarification I am prepared to make with regard to the meaning of my work in this regard. I am entirely unprepared to undergo a personal interrogation at this late date in order to facilitate your deliberations as to my “worthiness” to deliver a public lecture on an entirely different topic at Whitewater.
The lecture, after all, has been contracted for approximately 6 months and I am fully prepared to deliver it as contracted.
While you do, one assumes, hold the prerogative to cancel the event on bona fide security grounds, your right to do so because of disagreements 'your own or others’ -- with certain political conclusions I’ve drawn is dubious at best.
Please be advised that should you opt to cancel the contracted event for any reason whatsoever, your institution will be obliged to pay me the full amount of my honorarium at the appointed time (i.e., the date scheduled for my lecture).
Please be further advised that these monies will be used, at least in part, to underwrite my coming to Whitewater at the earliest opportunity for purposes of meeting at some appropriate location, either off campus or on, with the students who originally desired to hear what I have to say with regard to Indian Affairs.
Sincerely,
Ward Churchill
If you review Miller's letter, it was very fair to Churchill. Had I received this response and I were in Miller's shoes, the invitation would have been rescinded. I'm a little baffled as to why Miller didn't rescind the invitation.
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