In Colorado, a jury is currently deliberating the case of Ward Churchill, the Ethnic Studies professor fired by the University of Colorado (UC) on grounds of serious academic misconduct who subsequently brought a lawsuit against them for wrongful dismissal (see also here).
The chronology in this case is about the only thing that's beyond dispute. After the 9-11 attacks, Churchill wrote a provocative article in which he claimed that the people in the towers were participants in a global capitalist network which oppressed peoples around the world and that, to use a phrase borrowed from Malcolm X, the attacks were thus essentially a case of chickens coming home to roost. As bureaucratic participants who claimed innocence from the larger endeavour in which they participated, those killed in the World Trade Center were essentially a group of ‘little Eichmanns’, he said. This article percolated through the internet for some time, but achieved national interest in February 2005, at which point the usual elements in the national media took up the issue with some alacrity.
A series of complaints were then directed to UC about Churchill. These tended to include the following elements:
- that Churchill’s ideological position was unacceptable in the United States and an abuse of academic freedom;
- that Churchill had engaged in deliberate and repeated instances of academic misconduct relating to plagiarism, poor research and intent to deceive; and
- that Churchill had misrepresented his ethnicity as Native American in order to cement his credentials
UC then launched an investigation, which unanimously concluded in May 2006 that Churchill had engaged in academic misconduct, though it quite rightly refused to consider the question of Churchill’s ‘roosting chickens’ article or his ethnic background, which were not within its purview. The Standing Committee Report concluded that Churchill had engaged in a “pattern of repeated misrepresentation”, which included “[p]roviding misleading or incorrect citations, bending accounts to fit one’s desired interpretation, or simply making up information ...” Probably most notable amongst the specific claims were:
- allegations made that the US army had intentionally created ‘smallpox blankets’, infected with the disease, for the purpose of distributing amongst Native Americans with the intention of killing them (a claim which Churchill defends on the grounds of Native American oral history); and
- “ghost-writing” an article for another academic and then citing that article in support of a subsequent claim in an article written under his own name (which Churchill defends as acceptable academic practice)
The views on each side are pretty predictable. The right-wing press is using Churchill as a whipping boy for the lack of rigour in the pinko academic world. Defenders of Churchill are claiming the attacks on his scholarship were only cover for the real intention, which was silencing him for his dissenting politics. Since no-one denies that the furore was driven by both his 9-11 essay and doubts about his academic integrity, this polarisation can hardly be surprising.
My view, for the little it’s worth, is based on the fact that few academics worth their salt would not have approached Churchill’s work without a healthy degree of scepticism even before 2001. I have only read a couple of pieces by Churchill – some of his stuff on COINTELPRO and an article on the American Indian Movement. I’m not sufficiently expert in either area to comment extensively on their scholastic foundations, but there was no doubt to me upon immediate reading that Churchill’s work is very ideologically-driven, and essentially stuck in the 1960s, though equally not without merit and certainly thought-provoking. He offered little in terms of the natural cautiousness most academics have beaten into them at grad school, and included few warnings about the inherently risky nature of oral history when he used it (a point raised by non-specialist grad students I discussed one article with during a class a year or so ago); and certainly ghost-writing articles for other academics does not sound like normal academic practice to me. I just found out reading about the case today that Churchill’s qualifications only include an MA in communications theory and no doctorate; I can’t say I’m especially surprised.
That a healthy suspicion of his more outlandish claims was the norm in academia, I have no doubt. Concerns about his academic credentials and suggestions of plagiarism had already circulated in academic venues in the 1990s, and I’m sure than most experts in his field would be well aware of his ideological background. If they weren’t, a brief reading of some of his work (as in my case) is enough to reveal it. In this sense, the academic community was doing its job.
But the case does unfortunately play into a broader debate about intellectualism in American life. The danger of letting informal mechanisms of referencing and scholastic debate alone determine the place of Churchill’s work is that it helps to perpetuate the idea that academia is unable to police itself according to its own standards of rigour: a claim that’s untrue, but not surprising if one considers the perspective of a non-academic outsider given the bare facts about the case. It’s not hard to see how critics of Churchill among the Campus Watch fraternity could argue that it was only when public outrage was brought to bear that the academic world stepped into action to censure Churchill and uncovered these issues of misconduct.
In this sense, Churchill’s dismissal is not so much about purging and purifying the academic world, which was already pretty well able to cope with such challenges (certainly able to approach such questions with more nuance than the media), as it is about academics engaging in contentious public debates. Rightly or wrongly, the University of Colorado concluded that failing to act against Churchill ran the risk of discrediting the entire discipline of Ethnic Studies, and this was a conclusion that only followed from the fact that Churchill had established himself as a radical dissenter over the past few decades.
It’s a shame that such disciplinary mechanisms might occasionally prove necessary, especially when in academic terms it probably wasn't - but perhaps this is the price of leaving the ivory tower? No wonder so many fine academics prefer to debate their work with each other and veer away from the risks of engaging with the public... leaving the role of public intellectual open to iconoclastic, dogmatic, and self-promoting ‘scholars’ - scholars like Churchill.
Sources for more information:
UC’s page on the case
Debate on Chronicle of Higher Education
Wikipedia Entry on Ward Churchill (with some good links)
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