For critics of higher education, few campus controversies
have been as illuminating as the ongoing saga of Professor
Ward Churchill. His case
has uniquely intertwined all of the higher education issues
du jour – Academic freedom, plagiarism,
affirmative action, liberal bias, degraded campus culture – into one messy
cloud of controversy that just will not go away. And now that
Churchill has
sued his former employer,
University
of Colorado-Boulder, for
defamation, more unflattering facts about standard operating procedure on
campus may soon be revealed.
A brief
recap: Shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Churchill, then
the tenured chair of the UC-Boulder’s ethnic studies department, published an
essay titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” in
which he called the civilian victims of the 9/11 attacks “little Eichmanns” and
wrote that they were appropriate targets for retaliatory violence. Serious
readers of the essay understood that Churchill’s critique was directed toward a
capitalist society that enlisted a large number of faceless citizens to turn
the wheels of industry. It was a cheap and simple-minded critique masquerading
as a profound social and economic analysis of both the American society and the
context in which the terrorist attack landed – the sort of nonsense for which
post-modern leftist academics have become famous and (in some quarters)
popular, and which makes a mockery of serious liberal criticism.
In any
event, Churchill’s scathing critique of the 9/11 victims went completely
unnoticed until 2005, when the professor agreed to give a lecture at Hamilton College.
An article in Hamilton’s
student newspaper about Churchill caught the eye of a staffer at “The O’Reilly
Factor,” which unsurprisingly exploited this delicious bit of faux-liberal lunacy. A media firestorm ensued, followed by
calls for Churchill’s head., Of course, casual observers of the story forgot
about a little matter called academic freedom. His essay was completely
protected – a fact pointed out by very few observers, including, I’m proud to
say, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-profit organization
that I co-founded in 1998.
As a result
of FIRE’s letter
and other calls to protect Churchill’s academic freedom, the university kept
him on the faculty, although he gave up his chairmanship of the department. But
Churchill’s critics were not satisfied, and they initiated an investigation
into allegations that suddenly arose that he was involved in academic and
research fraud. A university-appointed committee completed the investigation last
year and found Churchill guilty of the fraud charges, but disagreed over an
appropriate punishment. The issue went before the Board of Regents, which voted
8 to 1 in favor of the university president’s decision to terminate Churchill.
The problem
in the case is this: It is clear that Churchill was protected by academic
freedom in the writing and publishing of his essay, which one can fairly
criticize as anything from odious to simple-minded. It’s equally clear that he
leaves much to be desired as a scholar, since the lapses found by the Committee
appear well-documented and real. But had Churchill not provoked a national
firestorm with his highly unpopular essay, including calls by state legislators
for lowering financial support for the University and its pampered faculty
(nearly all university faculties, it seems, are pampered), an investigation
into his academic honesty would never have been undertaken. In other words, the
investigation and his dismissal can be seen as pretextual.
Churchill
has sued. The difficult question posed by the lawsuit is this: Should a state
university have the right and the power to dismiss a tenured professor for good
and sufficient academic fraud reasons, where the investigation, and the desire
to dismiss him, are a pretext for the real reason he was investigated in the
first place – his political views that have become inconvenient to this
oh-so-politically-correct nest of vipers and incompetents running a major state
university? (They did, after all, make Churchill a departmental chair in the
first place.) One is tempted to borrow Mercutio’s solution in Romeo and Juliet: “a pox on both their
houses.”
My
prediction: Churchill and the University will settle. Churchill will not want
to shine more of a spotlight on his shoddy scholarship and lack of credentials
for the position he holds. (Churchill does not hold an advanced degree. He got his start in academia as an
affirmative action officer, leading many to question whether Churchill himself
was an affirmative action hire. Even this is complicated because his claimed
Native American ancestry has since been questioned.) The University will not want to disclose the
contents of communications and meetings that would show that its expressed
concern for academic honesty is really a cover for its lack of concern for
academic freedom. Neither side is going to want the intrusive process of
pre-trial “discovery,” in which each side has access to the other side’s
documents and testimony-under-oath, to demonstrate to the public precisely how
sausages are made in our hallowed institutions of “higher” education.