Churchill verdict

Yeah, but the rest of us at CU don’t deserve him!

Seriously … this is obviously a clusterf$%^ from every angle. He wouldn’t have been investigated if it hadn’t been for the essay. But a 20-member faculty committee did find him guilty of intentional, serious and repeated academic misconduct and recommended (with some dissension) that he be dismissed. I find this a very credible signal, as we would likely expect that group to be very wary of treading on Mr. Churchill’s academic freedom. And contrary to the assertions by Mr. Churchill’s lawyer, this committee was hardly a handpicked lynch mob doing the bidding of the administration.

I don’t give a whit about Mr. Churchill, but two things that I do care about are at stake if he should return to campus. First, I love CU and hate to see this charlatan associated with us, now especially free to act irresponsibly since he is basically untouchable. Second, and this is my bigger concern and a quite honest one, how do I tell my students that they shouldn’t engage in academic misconduct when a full professor on campus has been found to have done so with impunity? We all know how big a problem plagiarism is. I really do fear that this is going to have very negative consequences on our (faculty members’) ability to enforce standards of academic integrity vis-a-vis our students.

I don’t remember the exact distribution around the recommendation (suspension vs. firing, etc.) of the committee, but you could well be right. And I agree that he probably never would have been investigated, and almost certainly not fired, if it hadn’t been for the firestorm surrounding the essay.

It’s a lose-lose-lose, for sure. There is no good outcome available, either. I think I am going to just make a point of mentioning Mr. Churchill specifically as *not* providing an excuse when I give my students my periodic soapbox speeches on academic misconduct. I just gave it again in class on Wednesday, so missed the opportunity to add the new flourish this time around.

If you don’t want tobe held responsible then don’t hold anyone else responsible.

I’m perfectly comfortable having universities censure faculty who plagiarize or otherwise violate scholarly standards, so long as they make an honest effort to punish all guilty parties. But selective enforcement on the basis of a particular guilty party’s political views is appalling, whether the punishment is firing or merely censure and however serious the scholarly violation.

It wasn’t so much the case of a split committee, but of a split among committees. While one (or two, I can’t recall) other ad hoc (administration-selected) committees recommended dismissal, the CU Faculty Senate Privilege and Tenure Committee, the final oversight committee and one composed of elected faculty representatives, recommended demotion and a one-year suspension without pay. There are links in this blog post of mine from 2007: http://tinyurl.com/d29d57.

Why is it abhorrent to fire a professor for his/her political views?

What should a university do if a history professor starts praising Hitler or denying the Holocaust, a cultural studies prof preaches misogyny or racism, a philosophy prof writes papers justifying genocide etc. ?

Or Dershowitz. The difference with Yoo was his help with making torture happen.

P.S. I wouldn’t be in favor of firing Yoo either (unless he’s actually convicted of a crime), but nor would I let him teach Constitutional law since he clearly knows nothing about the subject.

This just goes to show that you can’t defend a witch-hunt by producing an actual witch.

Incidentally, on the Leonard Jeffries case, which was mine, the trial court decision (it was a jury trial, but the judge decides issues concerning reinstatement) was eventually overturned, but too late. The Black Studies Department, which had been dying for lack of competent leadership, was eventually wound up and the members who could keep their jobs sent to join their colleagues in their original disciplines.

I simply don’t think academic freedom (or freedom of speech for that matter) is an absolute value.

It is, hwoever, tough to be enthused about the incentives created by telling professors who have committed violations of academic integrity that, if they say something sufficiently inflammatory as well, they’ll have a chance at the defense that they were fired for their political views.

Jacob- isn’t that concern best handled by not hiring and tenuring charlatans in the first place? I mean, they may not have known about the plagiarism (not that they seem to have looked very hard), but how could this guy have been taken seriously as a scholar even so?

I don’t know how serious your question is, Steve, and I don’t see Churchill’s CV online, but if page three of this thing (http://wardchurchill.net/files/churchill_response_to_regents_071207.pdf) is right he has a serious record of publication, much of it refereed. If you set that against the rather slender findings of the committee that was set up to find reasons to fire him, this is the profile of a busy activist-scholar whose wide range of publication includes several culpable misdeeds, not that of someone who avoided refereed venues (e.g. L. Jeffries, if memory serves) or someone who systematically cheated his way to academic advancement, like the feller in Henry’s Chronicle link. I’m not offering a defense of the style or content of Churchill’s work, but I’m troubled by the easy slide to “charlatan.”

Colin:

I think one reason that many of us regard Churchill as something of a charlatan is the disjunct between his academic preparation and his appointment. I’m all for interdisciplinarity, but it does seem that it was his claim to being a Native American that got him hired. Which brings me to the second reason for holding him in disregard (and as a charlatan): there is no evidence that he is NA.

Don’t forget that the regents of the colorado university system are elected officials. If they didn’t fire the guy, then they wouldn’t have been re-elected.
http://www.elections.colorado.gov/DDefault.aspx?tid=974

Free speech and tenure arguments aside, the fact that Churchill was a documented plagiarist and fraud who lied on his job application is reason enough for ANY employer
to terminate the man.

Except that Churchill was not a documented plagiarist and fraud, as that argument got shot down handily in the trial which has just concluded.

He MUST therefore be directing his suspicions toward the very Indian tribe which publicly/formally revoked Churchill’s strictly HONORARY membership in their tribe for abusing it by claiming false blood ties as a way to finagle his was to his both his academic and administrative positions at CU.

You, on the other hand, are a demonstrable liar.

Ward Churchill’s membership in the United Keetowah Band of Cherokee is an associate membership, not an honorary membership. This means that Ward Churchill has demonstrated, to the satisfaction of the the Keetowah Band that he was less than of 1/4 “Cherokee” heritage (granting the racist assumption, promulgated by the Dawes Roll, that Cherokee identity is reducible to a strict blood quantum). 1/4 or above can be admitted as a full member.

His membership was confirmed by the very same Keetowah Band on June 4, 1994, after Churchill’s initial enrollment and despite the alleged “formal” revocation (which was never formal, nor was his membership revoked).