This week, the Chancellor of the University of Colorado officially announced his intention to fire Ward Churchill. That doesn’t mean that Churchill has been fired, yet – there’s still an appeals process to go through, plus Churchill has announced that he’ll sue the University.
Joanne Belknap, a women’s studies professor at U of Colorado, summed up the Churchill case well:
…A seemingly white male, who’s benefited immeasurably through co-opting an American Indian identity, is providing rich fodder for the right and the racists (often one in the same) to damn, discredit and/or dismantle ethnic studies programs, not just at CU, but across the country.[…]
In this case, in daring the media and university to come after him, Churchill apparently didn’t care that when they revealed his co-opted identity and sloppy (even unethical) research methods, that it was ethnic studies programs that would take the real hit. Of course, Churchill may be taking a few hits as well, but he seems to enjoy his “I’m-a-bad-boy-leader-of-the-oppressed-world” identity. The real tragedy is that Ward Churchill has done an incalculable amount of harm to ethnic studies programs in order to promote himself.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Churchill is a dishonest scholar. Among his many academic dishonesties, what I somehow find particularly galling is his habit of citing claims to essays he wrote under different names, thus giving the false impression that his claims were supported by independent authority.
It’s true, of course, that Churchill only got in trouble for his academic dishonesty because of his unpopular political opinions. That’s disturbing to me, because it could create a chilling effect on unpopular speech. And it’s also true that few or none of the right-wingers calling for Churchill to be fired for his dishonest scholarship, called on the AEI to fire John Lott (Lott did finally leave AEI two months ago, but it’s unclear if he quit or was fired).
Yet despite all that, the kind of academic cons Churchill committed should be legitimate cause for firing, just as the AEI should have fired Lott years ago. Fighting to protect the job of a dishonest and lousy scholar is not the way to defend either leftism or free speech. Besides, Churchill does more to harm than to help progressive causes, as Professor Belknap argued. Facts and evidence, by and large, support left-wing views; dishonest scholars like Churchill don’t help the cause, they muddy the waters.
If we want to stand for the academic freedom of lefty professors, let’s start with some professors who deserve a defense, like David Graeber and Joseph Massad (see also here).
And while we’re at it, we should also object to the appalling case of adjunct professor Thomas Klocek, who was fired for his pro-Israel views.
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The link says that Klocek was fired in part for saying that Palestinians do NOT exist. This sounds like basic firedworthiness.
Fielder’s Choice, what sort of speech do you think a professor should be allowed to say without risking his or her job? Controversial ideas? Disagreeable ideas? Factually incorrect ideas? Unpopular ideas? Spoken outside of class? At a dinner party? Does a school have the obligation to protect a teacher’s right to free speech? Does a teacher lose his right to speak about any idea he wishes because he is a teacher?
The question that must be asked to determine whether or not the school had the right to fire Kloeck is not what you think of a person questioning a Palestinian’s existence; it is what do you think about any sort of political speech.
Is political speech protected by the first amendment?
Strictly speaking, Kloeck was correct to say that Palestinians do not exist in the sense that there is, as of today, no nation called Palestine. In fact, that is one issue at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict. There are a people, a nation if you will, that is without existence, without a homeland, that feel they richly deserve one. And this group of people feels that, whatever the name of the country was that they came from, it was dissolved beneath their feet without their consent.
A person’s opinion of this argument is irrelevant though. The question is does a professor have the right to participate in the discussion without the fear of being fired because he participated?
If you think that he does not, if you believe that the school was within its rights to fire him then I submit to you that you are not willing to defend the 1st amendment. This is PRECISELY the sort of speech it was intended to allow—without impediment—most assuredly without impediment by Congress and by extension a school. Controversial, unpopular political speech was the foremost type of speech the founders intended to protect, almost absolutely. We can argue whether or not a professor should be allowed to say a racial slur or a personal attack, we can argue that the school may have some say in determining what a teacher says as a part of his teaching in class, but we cannot argue whether a professor has the right to participate in a political discussion and still say that both of us believe that the Bill of Rights is worthy of defense.
You must choose. Either political speech, and the discussion of a country and who is a part of the country and where the country is and who has the right to make decisions about a country is inarguablely political, and therefore, worthy of protection or it is not. If you believe it is, then you must side with the professor.
Does a school have the obligation to protect a teacher’s right to free speech?
I have a question about this. Does a teacher have a right to unrestricted free speech in the classroom? I think that teachers have a right to such speech outside the classroom. They should be able to say whatever they choose within the law without fear of a threat to their employment. But does that right extend to what they say in class?
The real tragedy is that Ward Churchill has done an incalculable amount of harm to ethnic studies programs in order to promote himself.
The best way to prevent this would be for those favoring the promotion of ethnic studies in academia to hunt out and get rid of any other Ward Churchills. If there are any. I don’t follow such things myself in general, but I have heard of Ward Churchill. It’s always better to clean one’s own house than to have someone else do it. Doing that will give the detractors fodder for their claims, but much less; and it will give the supporters the ability to say “the discipline as a whole is reputable, as demonstrated by the fact that it threw these people out.”
Here is what I believe. Once, btw, I took the line that Palestine was a fiction and that therefore such a line as “Palestinians now don’t exist” wasn’t quite rude. But listen. Many nations of people without an independent country certainly do exist. Do Navajo exist? What about Chamorro? Greenlanders? Lapp? Breton? Chechens? Tibetans? Kurds? Whatever the wrongness or rightness of Palestinian statehood, those people are really there. They don’t believe that they’re Israeli and Israel does not permit them citizenship if they live beyond a certain historic boundary. They regard themselves as Palestinian. Telling a person that they have no right to be an American because this is another person’s land is a fair comparison. So is telling her, or him, that their country was founded upon the principle that no one has any rights because it’s Sunni. People are not their nationality, people exist no matter who is regnant.
To some extent, Ron is right. As a tenured prof at a rinky-dink community college (and, like Churchill, a white man who teaches in a radical field, in my case, women’s studies), we do need to police ourselves. But that policing needs always to be on the grounds of dishonest scholarship (a firing offense) not one’s public or private views. Churchill deserved to be fired, but certainly not because of his 9/11 remarks.
We have to do everything we can to remind folks that fields like ethnic and gender studies are academically rigorous disciplines; Churchills do real damage if we let them.
I specifically addressed that issue. I think it is arguable. I have not heard convincing arguments either way. I suppose it would be contingent under what circumstances the person accepted employment. If I were a teacher or a student I would not want my speech restricted, but if I were a school administrator or possibly a parent of a student, I can see why I would want speech that a teacher says in class as a part of the curriculum to reflect my ideas whether the teacher agreed with them or not.
I agree with Ron and Hugo that the best way to avoid this sort of problem is to expose dishonest scholarship in our own ranks. I’ve often had to say to less than reputable people who hold similar views, “Don’t be on my side.”
Now how the heck did I do that?? It looks like I did everything correct for the first line only to be a blockquote. Sorry people, I’m still really new to things like links and blockquotes. I’ll practice. That’s what I get for posting for the first time without previewing.
[You forgot to close the blockquote. No problem, I fixed it. :-) ]
We have to do everything we can to remind folks that fields like ethnic and gender studies are academically rigorous disciplines…
You’re going to have to convince us before you can remind us.
Do you have any expertise in either field, Robert?
Nope. What does that have to do with anything? I’m not a physicist, but I know that physics is an academically rigorous discipline. Nor do I need to be thoroughly conversant in the latest theory of discourse to know that making shit up doesn’t qualify as rigorous, regardless of what you’re talking about.
The public perception of gender and ethnic studies programs is a lot closer to “making shit up” than to “geez, lookit all the numbers”. That perception might be wrong; I don’t know. But it exists, and thus my statement to Hugo.
Or were you just trying to play an argument from authority game?
“That perception might be wrong; I don’t know. ”
Then why the hell did you say “you have to convince us before you can remind us?”
And since you were talking about the “public perception” in second person, therefore including yourself, I was wondering whether you had any actual experience in the discipline to base your assertion on. I guess you don’t. So you must have some other kind of experience, then.
What is it, pray?
And I tell you what, don’t deride my questions as “games,” and I won’t point out your one-liners as mean-spirited, cool?
RonF wrote:
A course’s catalog description, combined with an instructor’s syllabus, constitutes–at least this is how it is understood in my department at the college where I teach–a binding contract between teacher and students. (Whether it is legally binding, in the sense that a student could sue over a perceived violation of that contract, I don’t know.) At least one professor in my department has been disciplined for failing to adhere to that contract and his failure absolutely had to do with things that were said in class. I am not going to provide specific details because the information I have is privileged, but suffice it to say that the things he said were arguably legitimate from a broader intellectual/academic point of view. Nonetheless, they were inappropriate because they fell far outside the bounds of what the course description indicated the course would be about, and while, as I said, I will not provide detail, I can say that the problem had a great deal to do with the instructor’s politics and questions that were raised about the scholarship presented as teaching material in the class in question.
Then why the hell did you say “you have to convince us before you can remind us?”
Mandolin, I don’t know whether the perception is correct (because I’m not intimately familiar with the discipline). I do know that the perception exists. If Hugo wants the world to believe that the discipline of gender studies is academically rigorous, then he has to convince the world of it first – not remind us of something we already know. It was a minor point, intended to be made in a linguistically clever way.
And since you were talking about the “public perception” in second person, therefore including yourself, I was wondering whether you had any actual experience in the discipline to base your assertion on. I guess you don’t. So you must have some other kind of experience, then…What is it, pray?
You don’t need experience in a discipline to make assertions about what the world thinks of it. You just need to be in the world. In the world, right here.
Sheesh.
Robert,
If you live in the NY area, I would be happy to let you sit in on my ethnic studies and or gender studies courses (they are listed as sociology, but I teach pretty much all courses that could be considered gender and ethnic studies). That way you may actually be able to make an informed judgment about the rigor of an ethnic or gender studies course.
For Robert, I think the Physics class would be somewhat less rigorous. I took one sociology class where less than half passed and people, almost all of whom were White, complained about how tough the teacher was, urging people not to take the class, including myself. I took it, worked hard, learned a lot and got an A.
Just as long as you aren’t the student who picks a fight the first day of class, leaves in a huff and then writes and publishes an expose on the evils of ethnic studies. That’s so been done already.
But given this statement:
Maybe you should just stick to easier subjects.
Who’s the “world” anyway? Your friends? Your crowd? There’s a lot of different opinions on ethnic studies and gender studies out there.
Thank you for the invitation, Rachel. Alas, two thousand miles is rather a long way to go for a class.
I think it’s a mistake to confuse the rigor of an individual class with the rigor of a discipline.
For instance, practicing anthropology is very difficult. Taking an anthropology class (at least where I got my BA) could be really easy, since most of the teachers didn’t really believe in grades and preferred to allow the students the opportunity to self-motivate.
I don’t have any personal knowledge of ethnic or gender studies, but the defensiveness about whether they are rigourous is pointless. Why be surprised that realtively new areas of study are not quite taken as seriously as older ones? It’s up to time and performance to raise the level of credibility. Respect isn’t included automatically. I just heard on NPR of an area of study called Video Game Critique. There is probably a lot more to it than I think, but I’m a little taken aback nonetheless.
Good for the University of Colorado. If Ward Churchill used sock puppets in publications, it’s academic dishonesty, and he should be dismissed. But so should John Lott, if it can be proven that he fabricated evidence for More Guns, Less Crime (I’m surprised that *no* pro-gun person would be able to argue for him, and that no one has been able to locate his research assistants, though.)
And Klocek should be rehired, although I think the situation is a little different because it appears he was an adjunct without a Ph.D. But there’s no indication he physically threatened the Palestinians or did anything else that rose above the level of a heated argument.
And Palestinians do appear to be a 20th-century construct – but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to have a homeland in the West Bank and Gaza. Again, what makes someone a group that deserves to have a nation-state? Nations are born and die out – a Palestinian is as much as an ethnic group as a Jordanian, a Syrian, a Lebanese, or a Zionist, all groups formed in the decline and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th Century.
And I forgot the biggest elephant in the room – can a university dismiss a professor who aided and abetted war criminals? If so, John Yoo of Berkeley has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. Remember, a lawyer cannot assist a client in committing a crime or fraud, but can explain the consequences of a particular course of action.
The torture memo appears to be Yoo assisting the Bush administration in committing torture by using a bad-faith definition of torture and explaining that the law doesn’t apply to them. It fails the Rule 11 test that courts apply to pleadings; the torture memo does not explain settled law, nor is it a good-faith argument from established law and fact. It was fabricated to give cover to illegal acts, and appears to be unethical conduct on the part of Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Alberto Gonzales.
Sounds a lot to me like poisoned fruit of a tree, or fruit of a poisoned tree. Whatever. Churchill wouldn’t have been busted, or wouldn’t have been busted so publicly, if he hadn’t written his essay about 9/11.
On the other hand, if you’re an axe murderer on the run, you shouldn’t be going on Larry King. You draw negative attention to yourself, people look for negative things in your past.
I remember reading a few of Churchill’s essays from the radical left press from fifteen, twenty years ago. Maybe it was in Covert Action Information Bulletin, and/or other places. He seemed to be associated with the people around Chomsky’s followers. He struck me as a little unbelievable back then, and maybe I was right.
On the bright side, he could have claimed to have been a Native American and opened a casino.
Is it a consensus here that Ward Churchill’s remarks about 9/11 are what got him noticed enough by people who oppose his viewpoints that a closer examination of his scholarship was made (or made public), which in turn got him fired?
If so, the question I ask is, why did it take that for this to happen? Where have the people inside his discipline been up to now? Where has the academic community of his college been? If you say, “If he hadn’t made those comments about 9/11, he’d probably still have a job,” you are very likely right. But I find the issue of his exercise of freedom of speech having a negative effect on him less worrisome than the issue of why someone as dishonest and unprofessional as this was able to persist and even thrive academically; after all, if he had been honest and professional, he’d still have a job.
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