Onward and Bye, Ward

Progressives have nothing to mourn over the departure of Ward Churchill.

By Graham Webster, Campus Progress
Wednesday July 12, 2006

In Boulder, Colo., it is hard to mourn the departure of University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill. The city and the school are exhausted by years of scandal, Churchill being only the most recent. Most people are probably happy to see the controversy surrounding the provocative professor finally resolved with his dismissal on grounds of academic misconduct. In a small city with a large university—students comprise roughly a quarter of Boulder’s wintertime population—the university’s problems are the city’s problems, and CU has had plenty of problems recently.

As long as I can remember growing up in Boulder, the university got national publicity less for its Nobel Prizes than for its controversies. An end-of-semester party in 1997 ended in 1,500-person riots and as much as $500,000 in property damage. A Big 12 Football Championship win in 2001 yielded more riots, and tear gas wafted through neighborhoods. Some students’ habit of lugging porch furniture to the street to be burned led to a famously draconian measure: a municipal law against keeping a couch on your porch in the neighborhood near the action.

In recent years, CU controversy has continued to roil Boulder. A few years ago, the football team’s female kicker levied allegations of sexual harassment and rape against fellow players. The debauchery associated with athletic recruitment raised concerns. The university’s six-year program to reduce binge drinking ended in 2003 with CU being named the No. 1 party school by Princeton Review, and in the following two years several students died of alcohol poisoning.

And then, there was Ward Churchill.

Ward Churchill

Churchill came under scrutiny a year and a half ago after political furor erupted surrounding an essay he wrote in 2001 in which he described some of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns.” (Adolph Eichmann was a key Nazi bureaucrat who implemented the deaths of millions of Jews during Would War II.) Political controversy ensued. Conservative voices in the media called for Churchill’s dismissal, although he is a tenured professor, and even Colorado Governor Bill Owens said he should get the axe.

The university investigated, and it ultimately found ample grounds for dismissal unrelated to his controversial statements on 9/11—charges that Churchill “misrepresented the effects of federal laws on American Indians and that he wrongly claimed evidence indicated Capt. John Smith exposed Indians to smallpox in the 1600s,” and that he committed plagiarism, according to the Associated Press. In all, the faculty committee report charged Churchill with four counts of falsification, two counts of fabrication, two counts of plagiarism, four counts of “failure to comply with established standards” on citing authors and “serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research.”

Surrounding the Churchill controversy, two separate issues have emerged for intellectual freedom on campus: Are the violations explicated in the faculty committee’s 125-page report legitimate grounds for dismissal (most say yes), and more fundamentally, should the investigation have happened at all? Some have made an analogy to a situation where a police officer enters a home for legitimate reasons and finds evidence of an unrelated crime. As one reader wrote in a letter to the editor in The (Boulder) Daily Camera, another analogy might be “that the officer hears several calls on the police radio that a car has a pro-9/11 sticker and, as a result, the car gets pulled over, and the officer snoops around and finds a package of drugs. The fact that drug possession (like research misconduct at CU) is punishable does not change the constitutional right not to be singled out for a search (or audit of one’s writings) based on free speech.”

Some in the academic community are worried that the Churchill case will set a dangerous precedent for singling out professors with controversial beliefs. But Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the charges can’t be brushed aside. “I don’t think that one can just absolve him of misconduct because the investigation was triggered by his public speech,” Nelson said. He added, “My worry is not that under the present conditions this will set off a series of efforts to get rid of tenured faculty.” But he noted the potential for “encouraging impatience with faculty who are among the loyal opposition.”

David Horowitz, author of The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America whose “academic freedom” campaign paints left-leaning scholars as “dangerous,” told the Chronicle he hopes Churchill’s dismissal will be “the beginning of a national effort by universities to tighten up their academic standards.”

Others have rushed to Churchill’s defense, calling foul over a professor being singled out for investigation for constitutionally protected speech, however distasteful. Indeed, how many of the university’s tenured professors would come up completely clean if put under the intense scrutiny of an image-conscious university? We don’t know, because no one has checked. Churchill was singled out for inflammatory rhetoric, and that practice threatens academic freedom. Nonetheless, the charges against him appear to be legitimate, and academic dishonesty cannot go unpunished.

Progressive advocates of academic freedom should not rally to Churchill’s side. They should oppose the targeting of professors for their beliefs, even vile ones like Churchill’s. But the charges against Churchill justify his termination because fraud and plagiarism, as much as censorship, threaten academic integrity.

For the sake of academic freedom, let’s hope that Churchill falls out of the news, no matter what happens with his pending appeal over the next weeks. As for CU and Boulder, I look forward to a time when I hear more about a student-built space instrument on its way to Pluto than about a provocateur’s media wars or other embarrassing controversies.

Campus Progress has helped found the Free Exchange on Campus Coalition, which is fighting for academic freedom on campuses across the country. The views expressed by Graham Webster in this piece are his own, and are not part of the Coalition’s efforts.

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Comments

1. Ward Churchill represents an exceptional case, and I would argue that people should try to remove any, and all, professors like him. It seems fair to view his 9/11 essay as merely a symptom of his radical worldview, which pervaded all of his work. The nature of the charges against him reveals a “facts be damned” attitude and a willingness to go to any lengths to find, or fabricate, support for his radical ideology. Ironically, one of the main condemnations of the Bush administration has been that it holds exactly this attitude.

   In any event, this attitude has no place in academic discourse, which is fundamentally about pursuit of the truth. The 9/11 essay may have been a different issue from the final charges, but it demonstrates the same, underlying malaise – a radical left ideology with little respect for factual evidence.

   — B Goldsmith - Jul 12, 01:01 PM - #
   
   

2. Professors have a right to radical views. Those radical views, like Galieo’s ideas, though at first believed to be heretical, are sometimes proven true.

   Now i believe Ward Churchill is an idiot, and if he did indeed falsify his research, he should be punished. But, singling out professors who say things the American Public doesn’t like, isn’t the best way to improve America.

   — Michael Radtke - Jul 14, 07:45 PM - #
   
   

3. Well said. While I think he should be guaranteed his right to free speech, we cannot ignore the rules he did break. It was just unfortunate he was singled out in the first place, but he should not have had “skeletons in the closet” to begin with.

   — Corey Ponder - Jul 14, 10:16 PM - #
   
   

4. What’s befuddling is that people presume that Ward Churchill is “an idiot” with only the slightest familiarity with his case or his academic career.

   Does anyone understand why Churchill used the “little Eichmanns” analogy?

   His point: targeting the World Trade Center was not an idle choice on part of the 9/11 hijackers. It was a political/military choice in their worldview.

   Why would that be? That’s for us to understand and try to do something about so that such an atrocity doesn’t happen again.

   Is there a connection between U.S. capital and repressive regimes and/or other atrocities outside the U.S.? That’s for us to discuss, research, and debate.

   We progressives need to be more self-reflective. And we need to see ourselves also as others see us.

   OK—let’s have the knee-jerk reaction at first, and then, let’s try to figure out what’s going on. We can strongly disagree w/ Churchill’s interpretation. But let’s not just dismiss it as “radical” or beyond the pale of reasonable discourse.

   Ward Churchill was denied academic freedom and fired for infractions that were relatively small compared to those of the Stephen Ambrose or Doris Kearns Goodwin.

   He was fired because he made that analogy. Let’s be clear about that.

   — Jane - Jul 17, 03:00 PM - #
   
   

5. Look more closely at the reasons given for removing Churchill, as quoted in the article: “misrepresented the effects of federal laws on American Indians and that he wrongly claimed evidence indicated Capt. John Smith exposed Indians to smallpox in the 1600s.” These issues are controversial within the field of Indian studies themselves, and having read Churchill’s work and the work of many of his detractors, I can say that while Churchill is speculative and scathing in his prose, he nonetheless reviews factual documents and then offers an interpretation of them, as do all historians acting properly. His interpretation of European settlers in America and their descendents tends to be more negative than those made by other professors, and Churchill remains one of the very few academic voices still willing to consider alternative interpretations from an otherwise mainstream neo-liberal account of the decimation of millions of American Indian lives. The work and conclusions found so repulsive by the university rely both on the Geneva Convention and firsthand documents from settlers and soldiers (including Captain John Smith).

   Regardless of whether or not Churchill is 100% right, which can never be known without omniscience reaching back into the minds of those who did things in the past, the viewpoints he was crushed for advocating are legitimate attempts to interpret piles of sometimes-conflicting historical data and analyze it for our education in the present. Churchill was acting as a scholar, researching and drawing conclusions based on evidence, and firing him over an academic disagreement of historical interpretation, and then calling what he did a “misrepresentation of facts” is a thinly-veiled way of saying “We don’t like the way he reads the documents, and we don’t want to hear that White people were deliberate in their destruction of Indians.” Firing Churchill is a repression of a certain point of view; the academic community’s unwillingness to consider the possibility that some White settlers and later White Americans may have deliberately killed Indians.

   In German academics now, it is very popular for neo-liberal and conservative universities (which dominate the mainstream much as they do in America) to argue that the regular German Army during World War II was not well aware of, or complicit in, the Nazy Party’s and the SS’ crimes. While anyone who reads the documents—including any Americans reading this post—might conclude that this is ridiculous, and that there are mountains of evidence showing that the German Army knew about, set up, defended, and guarded the concentration camps, German academics who say such things in Germany are burned to a crisp much as we are doing to Churchill here. They are accused of “misreading documents” and having a “vendetta against Germany.” Their careers are smashed and they are shut up so they cannot say any more troubling things.

   Academic freedom is there to ensure that our thinkers are able to inquire freely and expand the horizons of our knowledge, without limitation by our own short-term political fears. Churchill was crushed because he concluded something about the evidence that the nervous administrators and mainstream scholars did not like. In a fair and reasonable world, they would debate him, publish indictments of his work that point out how wrong he is (which they are continually trying to do anyway), and go on with life. But in today’s America, they so fear hearing his conclusions in an open exchange of ideas that they must attack his career and remove his voice from the debate entirely.

   — Karash - Jul 17, 04:26 PM - #
   
   

6. Thank you Jane and Karesh. At first I thought ‘gee why are the alleged progressives here sounding like rightwingers.’ It’s McCarthyism – metaphorically; if you get what metaphors mean :P

   — Thank you - Jul 21, 02:24 PM - #
   
   

7. Karash and Jane grossly misrepresent the extent of Churchill’s misconduct. Churchill plagiarized entire essays. Repeatedly. He stole Fay Cohen’s essay after she had explicitly denied him permission to publish it.

   CHurchill’s fabrications and falsifications are not a minor issue. They are tantamount to claiming that Germany won WWII, and then citing the Encyclopedia Britannica in support of that claim. This is not a matter of interpretation—it is a matter of gross dishonesty. If you support Churchill on this, then I would also expect you to stand up for David Irving’s right to interpret WWII history his way.

   While we can bemoan the political context of the situtation, it is disingenuous to understate the extent of Churchill’s transgressions against scholarship and decency.

   — Ferenc - Jul 24, 11:02 AM - #