It's deja vu all over again. Less than two months after Hamilton College tried to hire a former Weather Underground activist who was indicted in the 1981 Brinks murders, the Clinton, N.Y., liberal-arts college plans to showcase a cheerleader for the 9/11 attacks. Just the sort of thing parents pay nearly $40,000 a year in tuition and board to have their children hear.

Yes, that's how he looks now.

Among the invited panelists is Indian activist Ward Churchill, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While Mr. Churchill has caused controversy in the past--founders of the American Indian Movement denounced him as a "white" and a "fraud"--his screeds usually attract little notice outside obscure Marxist Web sites and the like.

On Sept. 12, 2001, however, Mr. Churchill performed an act of extraordinary crepitation, even for him. In "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," he saluted the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck the Pentagon and World Trade Center, asserting that the people who worked there ("braying . . . into their cell phones") and died that day deserved what they got.

The chairman of Hamilton's board of trustees, Stuart Scott, e-mailed Ms. Burlingame to say that the decision to invite Mr. Churchill was "a bad one" that made him "angry." However, "many who despise him feel he must be allowed to speak as a matter of principle. We have insisted that a person who opposes his rantings be on stage and empanelled with him."

Now that sounds like an edifying debate: 9/11 was good vs. 9/11 was bad. In a way, it's almost pathetic to see little Hamilton, with its at least 77% Caucasian student body, pretend to teach students about "diversity" and the real world by carting in rent-a-radicals to indoctrinate them in the theater of outrage. Except that it goes on all the time, at campuses everywhere, and the perpetrators are counting on normal people not to have the energy to constantly push back.