The Tookie-Brown connection

Being the curious fellow that I am, I sometimes like to read Wikipedia articles about random people/events/things that I have a passing interest in. Today I decided to focus on Tookie Williams. One of the things the Wikipedia article mentioned was that he was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. There was a link to this LA Times article, which discusses the nominations and other actions folks had done to advocate for clemency. One of the people who nominated him was a professor at my alma mater:

Brown University English professor William Keach, who is also active in the campaign to end the death penalty, nominated Williams for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Williams, Keach said, "has a remarkable ability as a writer, with a message and a personal history that gives his writing force."

Now, I don't really have anything to say on the subject of the death penalty or whether it should have been applied in this case, but I do have a few things to say about Keach.

Keach has a bit of a reputation for being a crazy hippie-socialist-commie-pinko-leftwing-nutjob uber liberal. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it is a bit embarassing when he supports things like confiscating and destroying every copy of the school newspaper because it ran an ad for David Horowitz's book on why reparations for slavery is a bad idea (sorry, can't find a relevant link -- it happened a few years ago). To clarify, I'm not saying I agree with Horowitz's argument, but I think there might be more constructive ways of disagreeing than burning newspapers. By the by, for those of you who weren't at Brown when this whole incident happened, it was a big friggin' deal. One of those things that got national attention for 15 minutes.

One other thing I'll say about Keach -- I had a couple of classes with him. One was a seminar about 19th century lit (something like "romantic writers"). The other was a mandatory (for English majors) survey course. I pretty much hated both. Of course, I'm also not real into 19th century lit, so that probably has something to do with it.

Update: Here's a link to the Brown chapter of the ACLU's decription of the aforementinoed incident and their response. Doesn't mention Keach, but you'll just have to take my word for it when I say he supported the paper-burners. Trust me. Mikey, you'll notice that the ACLU agrees with us that destorying the newspaper was a kind of stupid thing to do. So tell those roommates of yours to STFU.