[IPSM] Ward Churchill Fired from University of Colorado

[nora butler burke]

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Burrows
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 6:23 PM
Subject: [fgn] today's decision: churchill fired

The University of Colorado has now fired Ward Churchill, in what was largely
a pre-determined political witch-hunt in the guise of an investigation into
"academic misconduct."  Their statement is found on the university website
at:

https://www.cu.edu:443/churchillcase/release.html

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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=13360

University of Colorado Set To Fire Ward Churchill
by Ira Chernus 

July 24, 2007

CommonDreams.org 
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On Tuesday, July 24, the University of Colorado Board of Regents will decide
whether to accept the recommendation of CU President (and former Republican
senator) Hank Brown, and fire CU Professor Ward Churchill. It's not likely
that Brown, one of the shrewdest (and most conservative) politicians
Colorado has produced, would recommend the firing unless he was already sure
the Regents would back him up. So it's a very good bet that the Regents will
indeed give Churchill the axe. The only thing that might change their minds
is an outpouring of public opinion supporting a professor's right to voice
unpopular views. 

The Regents' decision is not merely a local affair. It has enormous impact
on the whole country. That gives you the right  --  and the responsibility 
-- to let them know what you think. The chair of the University of Colorado
Board of Regents is Patricia Hayes. You can write to her at:
Regent.Hayes at Colorado.EDU.
 
Why should you bother? It's still a rare occasion when a tenured professor
is fired because he is an outspoken leftist. But every time a witchhunt is
successful, it encourages other right-wingers to go after their favorite
target. It brings the next witchhunt closer and increases the odds that it
will succeed.
 
I'm an outspoken leftie professor at the University of Colorado too, so I've
got a personal stake in this. Someone once asked me to wear a big button
that said, "I am Ward Churchill." I said I'd prefer a button reading, "I am
Next." But you never know who will be next. There is nothing very special
about Colorado. It can happen anywhere. The witchhunters may be coming to a
campus near you. That's one reason the fate of Ward Churchill matters to
you.
 
The visible fallout from the Churchill case  --  the future attacks on
leftist academics  --  is only the tip of the iceberg. The bigger effect is
one we'll never see or hear: the silence of all those, on and off campuses,
who start censoring themselves, not speaking their minds completely and
directly, avoiding controversial topics in their teaching and research,
because they see which way the political wind blows.
 
Right after the 9/11 attack, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that
people had better "watch what they say." That's the same message the CU
Regents will send across the country by firing Churchill. The impact of this
chilling effect is invisible and incalculable, but it is very real. And it
will directly affect your freedom to hear the diversity of opinions,
including the most radical opinions, that our ailing democracy needs so
badly. That's another reason the fate of Ward Churchill matters to you, no
matter where you live.
 
Of course the chilling wind would blow coldest across our college campuses.
The quality of education in this country would take a blow. The efforts we
profs make to engage students in critical thinking would be compromised as
faculty avoid potentially damaging conflicts. The long-term trend toward
turning colleges into vocational job training centers would get a boost. So
would the powerful forces promoting what they call "politically neutral"
indoctrination in Western culture and values.
 
Do we want our universities to graduate incurious and obedient functionaries
rather than creative and bold leaders?
 
You may hesitate to weigh in on the case of the right wingers vs. Ward
Churchill because you don't know the facts. After all, the faculty's
Research Misconduct Committee produced a voluminous report detailing his
supposed misconduct. It's the basis for firing Churchill.
 
Was the committee fair and accurate in its assessment? To be honest, I don't
know. How could I? I'm not an expert in Native American Studies. I don't
have the knowledge or experience to make an informed judgment. But neither
did the committee, nor anyone else in the University bureaucracy who has
brought Churchill to the academic gallows. There were two experts in Native
American Studies on the committee for a while, but they quit (some say they
were hounded off) because they were trying to give the matter a fair
hearing, and it seemed to them that was not what the committee had in mind.
 
So a professor is about to be axed for research misconduct even though no
one with any expertise in his field has substantiated the charges. In fact a
number of experts in Native American Studies who examined the committee's
report found that it had numerous flaws and seemed to reflect the selective
use of evidence to advance a predetermined objective. They found no evidence
of gross errors, which is what "research misconduct" means, in Churchill's
work.
 
To be sure, Churchill has his critics in his academic field. So do I. That's
what academia is all about. But as Eric Cheyfitz of Cornell University, who
closely studied the committee's report, wrote, it "turns what is a debate
about controversial issues of identity and genocide in Indian studies into
an indictment of one position in that debate." If you start firing
professors because some of their colleagues don't like their research, most
all of us would have to go. And if you take apart the work of a productive
scholar, looking for every little flaw you can find (a misplaced citation
here, a small misquote there), most all of us would have to go. But that's
not research misconduct.
 
Churchill's scholarship as well as his politics has always been
controversial. Critics charged for many years that he wasn't adhering
strictly to all the academic rules. But CU officials ignored those charges
for most of those years. (In fact they granted him tenure even though he did
not have a Ph.D and his work was somewhat unconventional, because they
wanted a star to show their commitment to diversity. Now they are using the
same unconventionality to hound Churchill out --  and raise grave questions
about their concern for diversity.)
 
CU officials only became concerned about the quality of Churchill's work
after right-wingers discovered his now-famous essay that called corporate
functionaries working in the World Trade Center on 9/11 "little Eichmanns."
That triggered an avalanche of conservative pressure on CU to fire
Churchill. Of course the University administrators could not come out and
say they were investigating him for unpopular political opinions in the
post-9/11 era. So they got the Research Misconduct Committee to go through
his writings with a fine-tooth comb. Lo and behold, they found the
"evidence" they were looking for.
 
There's a lot more to the case. Charges of plagiarism rest on weak evidence
and strained interpretations that don't withstand serious scrutiny. The
University administrators broke their own system's rules in a number of
ways. Most importantly, they let a massive campaign by outsiders  -- 
conservatives from across the country  --  influence what should be strictly
an internal decision-making process.
 
It looks like President Hank Brown is catering to those outsiders. He has
rejected his own faculty advisory committee's recommendation to discipline
and suspend Churchill, opting instead to go for out-and-out firing.
 
The irony is that once the Regents do give Churchill the axe, he will go to
court and argue that his contractual rights were violated. Both sides will
trot out their experts. In the end, some judges who know nothing at all
about Native American Studies will have to decide whether there is
compelling evidence of research misconduct here. Since the whole case of the
right wingers vs. Churchill rests on political animus, the outcome will
probably depend on how conservative those judges are. If it ever reaches
Supreme Court, we can unfortunately pretty well predict how it will go.
 
The last chance to stop that slide down the slippery legal slope is to
convince the Regents that it's not in their best interests to fire
Churchill. They need to know that the whole world is watching. They need to
hear from you. Again, the chair of the Board of Regents is Patricia Hayes.
You can write to her at: Regent.Hayes at Colorado.EDU. If you want email
addresses for the other Regents, go to
https://www.cu.edu/regents/RgntsPUB0101.html.
 
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado
at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on
Terror and Sin. Email: chernus at colorado.edu