Article: WWU professor on author’s list of ‘dangerous’ academics

Ed: The following article on Professor Larry Estrada shows the extraordinary lengths to which the local press will go to provide a platform for academic extremists. This is not an article;It is a press release. Nonetheless it shows how accurate the profiles in The Professor are. MeCHA is a separatist organization and Estrada is a supporter of Ward Churchill, and that's basically what the profile says..

By john stark
the bellingham herald

Western Washington University’s Larry Estrada pleads guilty to most of the things David Horowitz says about him in his new book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.”

Among the facts Horowitz musters in a four-page report on Estrada:
u Estrada is president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies.
u He takes students to the Mexican state of Oaxaca every summer where, among other things, they study “Mexican sustainable agriculture” and “environmental justice issues.”
u He advocates “the expansion of ethnic, and specifically Chicano, studies on campus.”
u He advocates affirmative action.
u He has lamented ethnic segregation in the public schools that stems from segregation of neighborhoods.
But Estrada takes sharp issue with one statement in Horowitz’s book labeling Estrada “a radical ethnic separatist who believes that ‘Aztlan’ (the American Southwest) should secede from the United States.”
Estrada doesn’t see how his opposition to segregation squares with the charge that he’s a separatist, which he considers “libelous.”
“There’s a little bit of a contradiction there,” Estrada said.
Horowitz apparently bases the separatist charge on Estrada’s ties to MEChA, the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, a student group with roots in 1960s campus radicalism.
Estrada is the organization’s adviser at WWU. He also acknowledges he was one of hundreds of student participants in the 1969 conference where MEChA originated, although he does not claim the “founder” honor that Horowitz’s book bestows on him.
MEChA’s official documents contain statements that could be interpreted as separatist. For example, its “Plan Espiritual de Aztlan” states: “Once we are committed to the idea and philosophy of El Plan de Aztlán, we can only conclude that social, economic, cultural, and political independence is the only road to total liberation from oppression, exploitation, and racism.”
But elsewhere in the same document, the plan seems to define political independence as the development of a separate political party, not a separate country.
Estrada says it’s wrong to characterize MEChA by rhetoric taken out of context.
“MEChA has never stood for secession from the United States,” he said. “It stands for involvement and inclusion.”
The group emphasizes the long history of Latino peoples in North America and their ties to ancestors who lived here before the arrival of the Spanish, Estrada said. The point is that the Latino or Chicano people should be proud of who they are and don’t have to justify their presence here.
“We’re not interlopers in our own land,” Estrada said.
Estrada also acknowledges making public statements in support of Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado professor who wrote an essay after the 2001 terror attacks suggesting that World Trade Center tenants brought Islamic vengeance down on their own heads because their business activities benefited from American policies that caused the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children after the Gulf War.
Estrada said he was defending Churchill’s right to express his views — not the views themselves.
“I would not have made the analogy Ward Churchill made, and I would not condone his actual remarks,” Estrada said.
Estrada said he doesn’t think anything in Horowitz’s book will damage his standing at WWU. As he sees it, the damage is to free speech.
“I think he’s trying to chill free speech on campuses,” Estrada said. “That does a disservice to all universities and all faculties.”