Tim Burke “reads through”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=201 the “ACTA”:http://www.goacta.org/ report, “‘How Many Ward Churchills'”:http://www.goacta.org/whats_new/How%20Many%20Ward%20Churchills.pdf, which — so far as I can see from skimming it — makes very strong claims (“Ward Churchill is Everywhere”; “professors are using their classrooms to push political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically”) mainly on the basis of inferences from course descriptions that they’ve found on the web. ( Naturally, they find some doozies. Big deal. College is full of funny people with weird ideas, haven’t you heard?) There’s little effort on the part of the report to ascertain whether the course descriptions they’ve found are representative, or to quantify what proportion of courses they constitute, or assess whether there’s been any change over time. Moreover, the report obviously can’t address how the material they find so objectionable is actually covered in classrooms. Worst of all, ACTA blithely claim that “professors like Churchill are systematically promoted by colleges and universities across the country at the expense of academic standards and integrity.” The University of Colorado’s “investigation into Churchill’s work”:http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/churchillreport051606.html, unanimously found evidence of fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. It seems that ACTA are happy to insinuate that if a faculty member has political views ACTA dislikes, then their work may be fraudulent and they have probably been promoted with little regard for academic standards. That’s quite a smear.
None of this stops ACTA from “claiming”:http://www.goactablog.org/blog/archives/2006/05/#a000174 the report is “documenting in exhaustive detail the kinds of course offerings that are becoming increasingly representative of today’s college curriculum.” Last time I checked, “exhaustive” was not a synonym for “impressionistic”, but who knows what they’re teaching conservative kids at home these days? Tim “has more detailed criticism”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=201. The bottom line is that this seems like one more iteration of the symbiotic relationship between organizations like ACTA and the likes of Ward Churchill. Those guys need each other.
For the sake of it, “here’s the syllabus”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/teaching/soc300-syllabus-f04.pdf for my undergraduate course on classical sociological theory. Oh no! Marx! And a French guy!
{ 48 comments }
Aaron Swartz 05.18.06 at 12:36 pm
I see how ACTA needs Churchill, but how does Churchill need ACTA? He seemed to have a fine career — several books with radical presses, article writing in radical journals, lectures and talks, head of the department — until the right-wingers came around.
Seth Finkelstein 05.18.06 at 12:38 pm
Going for the 102nd most dangerous professor in America slot, I see. The “Marxist indoctrination” gambit is a classic, though pedestrian these days. Try a “little Goering” (“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along …”).
Sebastian Holsclaw 05.18.06 at 12:40 pm
Whatever ATCA claims, it would be interesting to know how many Ward Churchills there are out there. We can certainly say that the gatekeeping institutions at his university and in his department failed horribly. He should never have been tenured. The research deception for which he is now being punished should have been detected and punished long before the scrutiny brought on by the 9/11 comments. John Lott is a similar case with similar academic research issues (all the way to self-referential sock puppets). The Bellesiles affair is also similar. It makes me wonder if there are lots of cases like this (where the self-policing of the university breaks down) that don’t come to anyone’s attention because they aren’t hot-button political issues.
(It is also possible that more cheating goes on in hot-button political issues).
So yes, ATCA has crappy evidence for its sweeping claims. But the issue raised by Churchill’s inexplicable gain of tenure and getting away with serious academic violations for years is that the self-policing of universities might not be what we think.
Timothy Burke 05.18.06 at 12:45 pm
I think it’s fair to ask that question, Sebastian, but it clearly requires a completely different strategy to try and answer it, because the focus is really on the mechanisms for hiring, vetting, supervising and tenuring faculty. My intuition is that those mechanisms are in some ways remarkably porous, but fascinatingly enough, I think that their relative porousness produces few “Churchill”-scale disasters, at least in tier 1 or 2 institutions. Part of the reason for that is that graduate study is typically such a long, humiliating and exacting ordeal, with high opportunity costs, that folks who are really dubious don’t want to suffer through it, and have a pretty high chance of getting caught if they try.
Which is why, much as I’m for reforming graduate study and opening up the academy somewhat, a person like Churchill coming in from an alternative direction of expertise, needs extra scrutiny.
harry b 05.18.06 at 12:48 pm
sebastian, surely, then, the issues that ACTA dismiss as secondary are the key issues (plagiarism etc). I agree, it would be interesting to know how bad things are in that regard; finding it out would take a lot of work.
In the Timothy Burke thread there’s a comment about “Eurocentric” being always used as a term of abuse. I think the commenter is basically right, but the first few times I encountered the term I didn’t realise that it was suppsoed to be a termof abuse, just a neutral description, and I use it (and Anglo-Centric and American-Centric) the same way; to specify the intended application of things I am going to say. Is this eccentric (forgive the rhyme)? I’m a bit worried that I mislead with such locutions, now.
David Eads 05.18.06 at 12:50 pm
For the sake of better public discourse in this country, how is it possible to create a society where citizens don’t simplistically equate political identification and beliefs with simplistic moral categories?
Or at least an atmosphere where such ideas don’t form the central features of public discourse? (If indeed they do… now I’m the impressionistic one.)
The ACTA is trolling. Obviously. Nonetheless, I know quite a few people who will buy these sorts of bogus inferences hook, line, and sinker.
Chris L 05.18.06 at 1:06 pm
Just another example of the kind of witch-hunting espoused by David Horowitz, conceived to sell books, ad-views, etc. At least he has the excuse of being a failed liberal to power his vitriol…
Louis Proyect 05.18.06 at 1:33 pm
I was pleased to see that Timothy Burke’s syllabus and the Duke University syllabus he referred to included Jim Blaut’s “Colonizer’s Model of the World”. Jim was a good friend of mine, although we never met in person. He died of pancreatic cancer in November 13, 2000 before he had a chance to complete the trilogy that this book was the first installment on. The next was “8 Eurocentric Historians”. The last would be a book offering a non-Eurocentric approach. I am sure that if Jim were alive today, he would be blasting away at the cowardly witch-hunters who are trying to get Ward fired. I should add that I am pleased that Timothy Burke and some of his friends at Cliopatria have stepped off the “get Ward Churchill” bandwagon of last year that prompted me to post here for the first time ever. I think people have learned that the attack on Ward is an attack on all of leftwing academia.
Sebastian Holsclaw 05.18.06 at 1:53 pm
I was unaware that “Eurocentric” had a purely clinical usage. Its most common usage is as a term of abuse. It would be like using “anti-choice” to describe people who don’t like some particular form or practice of abortion. You mark yourself with a particular viewpoint when you use the term no matter the technical point of view about the word selection.
Sebastian Holsclaw 05.18.06 at 1:56 pm
“I am sure that if Jim were alive today, he would be blasting away at the cowardly witch-hunters who are trying to get Ward fired.”
I can’t agree with this at all. Like Lott and Bellesiles, Churchill engaged in very serious academic misconduct. The fact that it came to light (in all three cases) ONLY because they initially attracted political attention is precisely what makes me skeptical that the gatekeeping is working the way it is supposed to. Please note that not all of those three examples are on the left.
Gene O'Grady 05.18.06 at 2:03 pm
It’s far from obvious to me, as a non-academic, that EuroCentric is inevitably or fundamentally a term of abuse.
Is Victor Hansen guilty of leftist rabble rousing when he speaks of wanting to write a non-AthenoCentric Greek history?
Timothy Burke 05.18.06 at 2:23 pm
Sebastian:
That’s a Humpty-Dumptyism. That you have only heard “Eurocentrism” as an epithet is fine, but I’m telling you that it has a technical use in world history, critical theory and so on which runs fairly deep into the historiography. That you have not read this large body of scholarship is fine, but don’t come to conclusions about what you haven’t read or thought about based on what you have heard. The use of the term as an epithet creates sufficient “noise” that I myself tend to avoid it, but it’s a reasonable way to characterize histories of European expansion that locate the primary cause of that expansion within Europe. One of the reasons that even that discussion has a political character (but is not deformed by that politics) is that the most typical line-up of antagonists within that debate is world-systems Marxists (or non-Marxist materialists of various kinds) arguing that European expansion is primarily explained by global political economy, geography or other material explanations outside of Europe VS. intellectual and cultural historians, philosophers and others who locate the cause of European expansion in particular ideas, beliefs, social institutions, economic institutions or particular events (such as the Reformation) that are endogamous to Europe. A lot of people in the latter camp are more “conservative” than people in the former, though not uniformly so.
Louis:
I still think Churchill is a hack and should never have been hired into the position he occupies. I think that the charges made against him vis-a-vis plagiarism and shoddy practice are serious charges that demand a serious institutional response from UC.
Sebastian Holsclaw 05.18.06 at 2:45 pm
“That’s a Humpty-Dumptyism. That you have only heard “Eurocentrism†as an epithet is fine, but I’m telling you that it has a technical use in world history, critical theory and so on which runs fairly deep into the historiography.”
I believe it, I just hadn’t ever experienced it in a non-epithet circumstance, and I’ve experienced it plenty. I also agree that in general you should try to avoid using terms which may have a perfectly valid history or perfectly valid limited use but have nevertheless found a much more common use as epithet. And in course descriptions it can show up as either.
Speaking of that specific course description, isn’t it a little bit odd that the one in question assigns Ward Churchill’s book even after the controversy and even after the investigation into his academic misconduct had already started?
Barry 05.18.06 at 2:47 pm
“I can’t agree with this at all. Like Lott and Bellesiles, Churchill engaged in very serious academic misconduct. The fact that it came to light (in all three cases) ONLY because they initially attracted political attention is precisely what makes me skeptical that the gatekeeping is working the way it is supposed to. Please note that not all of those three examples are on the left.”
Posted by Sebastian Holsclaw
And what’s the difference? Beseilles (AKA ‘he who must be mentioned by Sebastian’) was kicked out of academia. Lott had no problem at all in his right-wing think tank, until he decided to go lawsuit cookoo.
Perhaps you should fix your ‘think tanks’, Sebastian. Then come b*tch about academia.
george williams 05.18.06 at 2:53 pm
I love this phrase from ACTA: “becoming increasingly representative of today’s college curriculum.” It’s such a slippery claim that nicely avoids the issue of which courses are actually representative of “today’s college curriculum.”
In other words, if there was one objectionable (to ACTA) course last year (out of tens of thousands), and there are two such courses this year, then such courses are “becoming increasingly representative.”
Heavens!
JH 05.18.06 at 3:04 pm
To those who complain that academia is left-leaning, many apologists have tried to argue that it is not. Yet reading the ACTA report, that it is hard to ignore a stark conclusion: that conservatism, or more specifically the type of conservatism implicitly endorsed in the report, is just not compatible with academia. If the purpose of academia is to examine and understand what we have, from the perspective – as far as possible – of the ‘hypothetical alien’ newly arrived on earth, and what is being proposed, in effect, by ACTA, is an educational system which simply teaches what the status quo is, how we got it, and why it’s so great, what’s the point? Why bother? If this kind of conservative is underrepresented in academia, it’s hardly surprising.
On another separate, but related point, the astonishing openness of US academia is a point of some interest. Of course one could just see it as the inevitable product of too much cash floating around the university system looking for somewhere to go, but of course, this would be cynical… More interestingly, from a British perspective, the US humanities professor could occupy much the same role as his or her British counterpart might have in the C19th , where hegemony demands a ‘national’ role of naval gazer. The difference, it is postulated, is that the present day US is multi-cultural, where C19th Britain was not. The role of ethnic and queer studies sub-sets of academia is to integrate these groups, without threatening the overall message, which is essentially Whiggish. Just a theory of course…
Yentz Mahogany 05.18.06 at 3:13 pm
Just reading the thing on Churchill. I’m sorry, I’m a bit thick, could somebody explain to me the following:
“Professor Churchill has not, however, respected those Indian traditions. He did not mention native oral sources in any of his published essays about Fort Clark. Instead he raised the possibility that he had drawn on oral material only in an attempt to produce after-the-fact justification for his claims during the course of this investigation. At that point, he purported to defend the legitimacy of his account by referencing oral tradition, but he provided no evidence that he had done any research whatsoever into the traditions of the Mandan or other relevant tribes regarding the smallpox epidemic of 1837 before publishing his essays. The Committee concludes that this behavior shows considerable disrespect for the native oral tradition by employing it as a defense against research misconduct while failing to use or acknowledge it in his published scholarship. In doing so, he engaged in a kind of falsification of evidence for his claims.”
So the logic here is:
1. Churchill ignored oral evidence in his work.
2. When pressed afterwards, he gives oral tradition as evidence.
:. 3. Churchill falsified evidence.
Does this make sense to anyone?
Louis Proyect 05.18.06 at 3:16 pm
Timothy, you are entitled to your opinion about Ward. If I were on a hiring committee at a good university and I took a look at one of your murky 80 word sentences, I’d pass on you as well. At any rate, it is good that the Cliopatria crew is not running 80 pt headlines today about the need to draw and quarter Ward Churchill like it did the last go-round.
Louis Proyect 05.18.06 at 3:25 pm
On the Fort Clark business. There is absolutely no doubt that Ward screwed up on this. He footnoted a reference that supposedly backed up the claim that the army distributed smallpox blankets, but the citation had nothing like this one way or the other. Big fucking deal. Alan Dershowitz and Doris Kearns Goodwin have come up with worse offenses, but there’s no committee at Harvard trying to find reasons to fire them. This is all about politics. If Ward Churchill gets canned this month, next month it will be Timothy Burke for including the wrong books in a syllabus. Wake up and smell the coffee.
r4d20 05.18.06 at 3:34 pm
Ward Churchill HAS claimed that his actions were not unusual for the field of NA studies. I dont know if its true, but if citing your own work under another name, without giving any indication that it was actually your own work, is “acceptable” in Native American Studies, then the academy needs to take a look at the field itself.
r4d20 05.18.06 at 3:40 pm
“Perhaps you should fix your ‘think tanks’, Sebastian. Then come b*tch about academia.”
Apples and Oranges dude. Thinks tanks do not have, nor do they deserve, the reputation of legitimate academic insitutions. I would prefer to keeop academia respectable, but if you want to turn it into just a collection of biased “think tanks” go ahead.
r4d20 05.18.06 at 3:49 pm
“Big fucking deal. Alan Dershowitz and Doris Kearns Goodwin have come up with worse offenses, ”
So its ok to be a fraud if you can point to another fraud and say “he did it too?”. I dont know if they should fire him, but this kind of stuff should not be “defended” – especially by arguments that suggest fraud should be normalized. If I were reviewing a paper that cited an esay by WC I’d be tempted to reject it as fast as I would a paper on Physics that cited Pons and Fleischmann. If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas, and if you cite a fraud your work is immediately suspect.
Brett Bellmore 05.18.06 at 4:01 pm
“And what’s the difference? Beseilles (AKA ‘he who must be mentioned by Sebastian’) was kicked out of academia.”
LOL After enough pressure was brought to bear to convert coal into diamond. He won the Bancroft prize AFTER his fraud had been exposed, remember.
No, there’s something seriously wrong in academia; I think it’s a combination of ideological monoculture, AND distain for “non-academics”, to the point where they just won’t look if somebody outside the halls brings attention to something fishy.
DC 05.18.06 at 4:14 pm
I feel nervous about your course just reading the outline. A weekly quiz to test the readings – tough task master! Is that sort of treatment really necessary? Surely not doing the readings is an inherent privilege of college life, no?
Louis Proyect 05.18.06 at 4:33 pm
r2d2: “So its ok to be a fraud if you can point to another fraud and say “he did it too?”
Er, no. I am just calling for a uniform standard of justice. If they fire Ward Churchill, they should fire Alan Dershowitz and Doris Kearns Goodwin as well. That being said, I think the entire university system is uttterly bankrupt and authoritarian, including Columbia University, my employer. An old friend who taught sociology and who was on a tenure track got the heave-ho from Charles Tilly. What went on, according to him, had more in common with “The Sopranos” than anything else.
des von bladet 05.18.06 at 4:48 pm
In the spirit of gratuitous and irrelevant abuse (that is what we’re here for, isn’t it?): an 8 page prospectus in the world’s gayest font (trust me, early digital remasterings of “classi”c fonts are the DX7 string pads of future typographical contempt, and rightly so), and Max “Chuckles” Weber’s heading is still just above a page-break? Give me the complaint form and I will rationally-technically fill it in triplicate!
Daniel may well be wrong about everything else, but LaTeX? Not so much. (I still use it, of course, but it’s the equations, those endless equations.)
Kieran Healy 05.18.06 at 4:58 pm
I float above your contempt, des, and fart in your general direction.
Barry 05.18.06 at 5:01 pm
“Apples and Oranges dude. Thinks tanks do not have, nor do they deserve, the reputation of legitimate academic insitutions. I would prefer to keeop academia respectable, but if you want to turn it into just a collection of biased “think tanks†go ahead.”
Posted by r4d20
Gee, and here I thought that academia was politically biased, or something.
belle le triste 05.18.06 at 5:19 pm
more interesting maybe than the usual sniping would be for eg sebastian h. and louis p. to argue out — and hoho agree on — a BETTER gatekeeping system?: which takes down the frauds fairly and with all dispatch yet screens out mere nuisance complaints from the wacky fringes AND repressive political manouevring from the Establishment
snuh 05.18.06 at 7:22 pm
not much of a nerd of the academy, i had never heard of ACTA before. their “mission and history” page helpfully enlightens me that:
“ACTA was launched by former National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Lynne V. Cheney, former Governor Richard D. Lamm of Colorado, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, distinguished social scientist David Riesman, Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow and others.”
Ted 05.18.06 at 8:13 pm
Oh, right, ACTA: the people who published that “Defending Civilization” thing after 9/11 claiming that academia was objectively pro-Al Qaeda. I remember them.
Fred Jones 05.18.06 at 10:25 pm
Here I will open myself to some abuse by everyone probably but reading the report, I have strong mixed feelings. In my experience (mostly but not exclusively limited to 2 big 10 universities) the curriculum is highly politicized and this IS enforced by doing things like having classes in theoretically more general issues meeting with highly ideologically controlled classes. While the left loves to have have these cute discussions of ideology, it does always seem to leave them bright shining morally clean with the other guy in mud.
On the other hand, the report is pretty clearly irresponsible for many of the reasons noted above, sweeping claims, in many cases overstating the issues. Also the report cites many cases of things like professors asking students to respect one another as somehow ideologically loaded which is ridiculous. This seems to be the major problem with these discussions right now. Both the left and the right are being hysterical and refusing to really fight for common ground choosing easy superiority over honest rational discourse.
The most pathetic part about this whole thing is the fact of the left having spasms in chat rooms like this over theoretical issues while our president remains unimpeached. So much for activism.
r4d20 05.18.06 at 10:33 pm
“If they fire Ward Churchill, they should fire Alan Dershowitz and Doris Kearns Goodwin as well.”
Perhaps – I’m just going on what I see in this report and know nothing about the others. From my perspective, the firing question is unimportant next to the academic reaction.
The report was careful to say that it was not ruling on the hisotrical facts themselves, and the allegations of WC tended to were “unsupported” rather than “contradicted” – he could be correct on the historical details in some cases. So, will the reaction be to condemn his fraud or to excuse it because they think it he arrived at “truth” regardless of his methods?
rollo 05.19.06 at 2:37 am
“the likes of Ward Churchill”.
That’s damn near spineless, Kieran Healy.
abb1 05.19.06 at 4:58 am
As a US taxpayer spending billions of my tax dollars every year to subsidise the farmers, I resent appalling conservatism of the American farming community with Terry Nichols kind of extremists prospering among them. Something needs to be done about it pronto. I’m not sure what can be done, perhaps those who refuse to become more liberal should have their farms confiscated and we could settle them in Alaska. Or something.
Brett Bellmore 05.19.06 at 5:57 am
“Also the report cites many cases of things like professors asking students to respect one another as somehow ideologically loaded which is ridiculous.”
I suppose whether it’s ridiculous depends on the sense in which “respect” is used. I’ve seen it used in some senses which are awfully loaded.
Daniel 05.19.06 at 5:58 am
I am with Des on this one. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”, but that is a really poovey font. The É on “Émile Durkheim” actually smells of lavender.
Daniel 05.19.06 at 5:58 am
oh effing great. HTML accents show up in preview but get stripped out for the actual post. Or possibly, Kieran did this on purpose to make me look stupid.
Chris Bertram 05.19.06 at 6:06 am
\'{e}
was what you were groping for. If only you hadn’t agreed with Des.
Chris Bertram 05.19.06 at 6:08 am
Damn … and there’s me trying to be clever, and the backslast disappeared and the inverted comma went curly. What I meant was
\'{e}
of course.
Chris Bertram 05.19.06 at 6:09 am
WTF! … even using the pre tag it messes up!
des von bladet 05.19.06 at 7:01 am
Anyone for é (or in fact É)?
Are all of you silly Engleeshes (and Welshes) really totally incapable of fixing your many keyboards to handle iso-latins? Even stinky old LaTeX has a package for that!
(And am I going to look even more of a tosser when this gets scrunged into the local charset? Only one way to find out…)
Kieran Healy 05.19.06 at 8:02 am
Î cårë nøt.
Michael Bérubé 05.19.06 at 11:15 am
I’m up for an é or two. More important, I’m up for this:
As a US taxpayer spending billions of my tax dollars every year to subsidise the farmers, I resent appalling conservatism of the American farming community with Terry Nichols kind of extremists prospering among them. Something needs to be done about it pronto.
I hope abb1 will support my Agricultural Bill of Rights (in progress). Remember, Terry Nichols is everywhere, and is increasingly representative of something.
abb1 05.19.06 at 11:38 am
If you absolutely have to have two of these things, why not have é and è?
des von bladet 05.19.06 at 12:04 pm
Éh. An occurence just occurred to me, which this is intended to test.
des von bladet 05.19.06 at 12:06 pm
Yup. It is the previewer that misparsed Daniel’s HTML, and Daniel who neglected to finish his HTML entity insertion with the required semicolon.
(I assume he will wear this evidence of his ignorance of such nerdy minutiae with the usual pride, and why not?)
Daniel 05.20.06 at 5:18 am
Fucking À!
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