Who Knows Why Ward Churchill Was Fired?
My employer, the University of Colorado, has finally fired my colleague, tenured professor Ward Churchill. Why? There are lots of explanations. Take your pick.
The University claims that Churchill is guilty of “research misconduct.” That’s debatable. As I’ve pointed out on this site, none of the people doing the investigation had expertise in Churchill’s field of Native American Studies. Several people who are experts in that field have challenged the University’s claim. So who knows for sure?
Churchill and his lawyer say it had nothing to do with his research and everything to do with his infamous words “little Eichmanns,” describing the victims of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The nation’s headline-writers agree. None of the headlines I’ve seen mentioned “research misconduct.” They all mentioned 9/11. Churchill’s sacrilege drove conservatives nuts. Last year, even Colorado’s Republican governor called for Churchill to be fired.
It’s not just conservatives. This year Colorado’s new Democratic governor cheered the decision, too, as did many political centrists and even liberals. But it was the conservatives who launched and persisted in the anti-Churchill attack, outraged by his “anti-American” views.
Then there’s another way to see it, through the lens of the old adage, “Follow the money.” Here’s what CU president (and former right-wing Republican senator) Hank Brown wrote in a letter to the whole university community, just hours after Churchill got the axe: “We are accountable to those who have a stake in the university: the people of Colorado who contribute $200 million annually in tax dollars … the donors who gave us more than $130 million this year.” Like any university president, Brown’s job is to watch the bottom line. Like any public university president, he has to satisfy the state legislature (with a majority of centrist Democrats and a sizeable minority of reactionary Republicans).
But in a state that ranks near the bottom in public funding for higher ed, Brown has to keep a special eye on private donors. So at the same time he released a letter to CU donors, on the letterhead of the CU’s fund-raising arm, the University of Colorado Foundation. “Donors to CU gave a record $130 million this past fiscal year,” he wrote, “and it is incumbent upon us to work to continue to be a place worthy of your investment.”
Once the attack on Churchill began, Brown — and all CU administrators and Regents — had to decide whether to curry favor with the left or the right. If you were in their shoes, which flank would you protect? Where would you see the money coming from? Duh!
However, it’s not fair to blame it simply on pursuit of the almighty dollar. There is some evidence that the administrators who nailed Churchill may genuinely share the outraged conservatives’ views.
Just like Hank Brown (who is president of the whole CU system), the head of the Boulder campus, Chancellor Bud Peterson, sent out a letter justifying the firing. The most important issue is about values, Peterson wrote. “We must now reaffirm our core values. … In a time such as ours, in which the very concept of “truth” is often bracketed by relativism … and reduced by manipulation and “spin,” our students must know that when they enter our classrooms, they occupy sacred territory where truth is always pursued on a foundation of ethics, honor, and integrity.”
In fact, if our students have been paying attention they know that CU administrators have been manipulating and spinning this story hard ever since it broke, trying to placate the right-wingers calling for Churchill’s blood.
Our students also know what makes our classrooms sacred territory. They are supposed to be set apart from the rest of society, protected from political pressure, so that people can explore new, radical, even offensive ideas freely, with no risk of retaliation. That’s what makes them the intellectual laboratories that supply the creative new ideas of the future. The whole system would not work unless truth was considered uncertain, elusive, always open to debate.
That’s why conservatives are so easily enraged by academic scholars. Whenever you hear about the need to reaffirm “core values” against the “relativism” of truth, it’s a good bet that the cultural conservatives are back in town, gunning for some more or less arbitrary target who symbolizes the uncertainty of truth, which frightens conservatives so badly they don’t really care who gets hurt, as long as they can wage another battle on behalf of the absolute truth and absolute certainty they crave.
The conservatives thought they got that certainty on September 11, 2001, when New York’s hero, Rudy Giuliani, announced that “the era of moral relativism … must end. Moral relativism does not have a place in this discussion and debate.” Now, with the warrior-in-chief getting record low approval ratings, conservatives can’t even be sure that the war on terrorism can give them certainty any more. So they need another target, to give them that certainty. Remember, no one paid attention to questions about Churchill’s scholarship until he questioned the conservatives’ cherished belief that America is absolutely good and Osama is absolutely evil.
It’s appropriate that Churchill was fired just after the release of the last Harry Potter book. Both generated huge media circuses, because they are both what the public always craves: stories full of colorful characters, some good and some evil, in a plot that creates nail-biting excitement because there must be a definite winner. There can be no compromise between good and evil. But no one knows which side will win until the very end.
Is Ward Churchill Harry Potter or is he Voldemort? That’s what make it such a great media story. You can have it either way. The mainstream media don’t really care.
But for the right wing, Ward must be Voldemort — and Osama. They all play the same role in the morality play that conservatives want life to be. Now CU administrators and regents have satisfied the right by insisting that they know the absolute truth about the Churchill case, even though they have no expertise in his field, while the many experts in Native American studies who came to Churchill’s defense are just dead wrong. Case closed.
Of course, the case has actually just been opened. That’s the big difference between Harry Potter and Ward Churchill. There will be no more Potter books. But the firing of Churchill was merely the end of book one. No one knows how many more volumes will follow, or who will win in the end.
One thing is certain. The outcome of the future volumes will be decided in court by judges, and perhaps jurors, who know nothing about Native American Studies or academic research. However they decide, their judgments will be just as debatable as the latest theory any professor teaches. In the end, there will be no end to the debate about the Churchill case. There will still be lots of explanations, and you will still be able to take your pick — which is just as it should be in a great university.
My university can be a great one. But its administration and Regents have made the task a lot harder. They’ve let the university be turned into a media circus tent blown by the political winds, chasing a chimera of certainty more elusive than any wind. It may look like free speech, academic creativity, and the University of Colorado have been dealt a mortal blow. But remember, you’ve only read the first book.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. Email: chernus@colorado.edu
Campus administrators seldom share the mission of the academy; they’re members of the managerial class, and serve the interests of their own adminstrative careers (the case of Larry Summers is intructive), and their job is to demonstrate themselves to be good servants of capital.
And this is always how the right-wing defines and defends ‘freedom’ — the freedom that exists is never to dissent, but always to echo whatever emanates from the minarets of power.
Welcome to the new McCarthyism.
They’ll be going after Prof. Chernus next.
humanities depts, and to a greater or lesser degree, social science depts (sociology, history, etc.) are one of the very few places in amerikkka where military-corporate kapitalist BS is not just routinely accepted. and this is just a tiny sliver of what the modern university actually does, when you consider the bizness, law, medical and other vocational parts. most of the university is now completely in bed w/the corporate state, but it’s not enough. can’t have that 1% of the faculty in the humanities/social sciences not playing ball w/the fascists.
immigrant bashing, emergency powers for the executive in the name of security, illegal preemptives wars…the nazis took on the faculty in german universities, too.
Let’s hope that a better University picks him up.
Who knows why Ward Churchill was fired? All of us do. He was fired because he was an obnoxious lefty, and for no other reason. To pretend otherwise is sheerest pretense.
It is time that somebody pointed out that America is killing foriegn natives and others so that we can get our fix to oil. Yes the world is pissed at us, and for good reason, and the false mantra chanted over and over by the right, that we are the greatest country on the earth, does not nesacarily make it so.
Nothing is sacred. What counts as knowledge is for sale. Some of the highest bidders demonized a voice of dissent, and the capitalist institution fired him. God bless our demokkkracy.
Reading the local commentaries in newspapers around here in Colorado has been rather unnerving. The majority seem to hate Churchill with venom. Is this just fear or is it mob mentality? I’m glad they are only expressing themselves electronically or things could get very ugly very fast. Still, the attitudes out there are really discouraging and worrisome as far as the future goes. Nice to see rational people here on CommonDreams at least.
After this fiasco, UofC will only be able to get the likes of Limbaugh, Hanity and O’Reilly to teach there. Creationism, prayer and daily readings of William Kristol will be the entire curriculum.
This was an obviously flimsy trumped up charge to satisfy the moronic right…It will be funny when the courts finally rule, and Churchill winds up owing the University.
When the world was fighting against the Nazi Empire and allied bombs were flattening the German landscape, killing millions, no distinction was made between the Nazi leadeship, and those who merely performed their jobs doing the daily clerical functions (like Eichmann)required to maintain the Nazi machine. The bombs found them all equally guilty.
On 9/11, churchill was merely explaining(not justifying) the same reasoning used by the terorrists in attacking the “American Global Empire” by attacking the civilians in the WTC.
Funny how clear thinking, the ability to see the other sides point of view (while not agreeing with it) and intellectual honesty will surly get you fired the the USA….this is why for all its power, the USA will always be a third rate empire with a third rate mindest. (and will eventually lose, as demonstrated by the Iraq debacle)
Good strategy REQUIRES exploring all points of view and all options, and geting into the opponets head, not inflexible dogmatic thinking.
“Chancellor Bud Peterson,… “We must now reaffirm our core values. … In a time such as ours, in which the very concept of “truth” is often bracketed by relativism … and reduced by manipulation and “spin,” our students must know that when they enter our classrooms, they occupy sacred territory where truth is always pursued on a foundation of ethics, honor, and integrity.”-This guy has his whole foot in his mouth!
I guess I’m going to be a dissenter here. Few things happen for just a single reason, but before anyone rushes to judgement there are a few things to consider. First, the investigation of Churchill lasted more than two years and involved three separate faculty committees, all of which agreed that he had committed breaches of academic integrity. The only disagreement among them seems to have been on what the punishment should be. In many cases, these sorts of things are often punished by a suspension or unpaid leave of absence, but in this case Churchill himself made this impossible by insisting on drawing the spotlight to himself. So, you’re right that Churchill’s controversial opinions contributed to his firing, but it is equally true that his academic behavior is also at fault.
Although I admire Prof. Chernus’ writing very much and quite often share his views, in this case I have to disagree with him. I don’t think that it requires an expert in a field to spot plagiarism — if you copy someone’s ideas without proper attribution, that’s plagiarism. This is what three CU faculty committees found, and I don’t think that they should be dismissed out of hand because their findings don’t support a certain point of view. I’m in the sciences, but I’ve dealt with hearings on plagiarism before outside of my field, and feel confident that I recongized it when I saw it.
On a personal note, I’ll add two more things. First, as an academic, I support the rules of academic integrity. They protect me from having my intellectual property stolen. When someone violates the rules, they should be punished. Second, I’ve had to deal with the presence of Ward Churchill even though I have never met him, am not in his field, and had never heard of him until a couple of years ago. As a slightly left of center professor, I often have to defend myself, and academia in general, from those who would prefer that everyone who disagrees with them be muzzled. What Churchill did was provide those people with the perfect weapon to use in these arguments — a corrupt, left wing professor. So, even though I actually agree with the essence of what he said (the United States IS responsible for many of the problems it now faces in the Middle East and elsewhere) the messenger has no credibility and that hurts the message. I cannot believe that anyone would pick such a boneheaded way of expressing himself. I feel very little sympathy for the man.
Having seen Mr. Churchill speak twice, I can say that he came across to me as a bullying, racist, egomaniac. I have a brother who is a college professor and a confirmed progressive and he couldn’t stand him either. Mr. Churchill owed at least part of his fast track advancement to the head of Ethnic Studies to his claimed Native American heritage. Turns out, he is only a Native American because he says he is, there is not proof of ANY Native American ancestors. My wife also benefited from affirmative action, the difference is that she had to Prove Indian ancestry. In addition, the tribes that he says that he represents have totally disavowed any relation to him, but this doesn’t stop him from claiming to speak for them. As far as his academic research, many of the sources that he cites either don’t say what he says they do, or his citations are completly taken out of context.
I am all for academic freedom but Ward Churchill is certainly no poster child for this. He is a white guy from Illinois masquerading as a native american, he boasts of military achievements that he didn’t have, he refers to sources for his research that either don’t exist or refute him, and he tries to deny others their 1st amendment rights by claiming that they are trumped by his 9th amendment rights. All this while hypocriticly pulling in a large salary from the same government that he loaths.
Don’t worry about Ward however, He will continue to make speeches at $20,000 a pop and will probably be awarded a large settlement.
I should tell my brother to quit trying to solve human parasite problems in the third world and be more controversial. The pay is better and you get treated like a Rock Star.
I wonder why dgoodin takes the CU committee’s claims at face value? Unless he reads both the original report and the detailed critiques of them, how can he know that the original report is accurate? It’s surprising how many people assume that just because a bunch of professors wrote a report and some other professors agreed with it, it must be accurate.
Boy, it is sure easy to spot the SHILLS on this thread!
lykinsg –
That’s a fair question. I have read as much of the reports as are available to the public. Here’s one site where these can be found:
http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/churchillreport051606.html
There are some others but I don’t have them at hand.
I’ve also read many of the counterclaims, including those of Prof. Churchill himself:
www.wardchurchill.net
So, I don’t claim to know everything, but I do claim to know some things.
I would ask a similar question of those here who support Prof. Churchill; why are they automatically assuming the dismissal is ONLY political, given the large amount of evidence against him (7 separate instances of misconduct, according to the 2006 report)? In this case, due process occurred and a decision was reached. If the courts decide differently, a lot of people, including myself will owe Prof. Churchill an apology. Until then, I continue to believe his dismissal was justifiable, and something he could have avoided through some evidence of contrition.
the bottom line is Moonraven–it says it all.what do we all know since we were not invited!the careful comments from Ira underline the fact that he still wants to keep his job.And finally sometimes”obnoxious” people do speak the truth as they see it.
Moonraven- “its easy to spot the Shills on this thread”
I hope your definition of shill is not “whoever disagrees with me”. If Im a shill for not supporting Ward Churchill, then UC can send me a check.
The thing I have noticed about the folks who are shills on all these commentary sites–whether on the left or on the right–is that they are stupid enough to do their shilling for free.
Sure, I have a certain inclination towards Churchill, since I am also a Native American (Mohawk) professor who has seen that most of the university administrations have no respect for “academic freedom”.
In 1970, at Northern Illinois University, when my very large department met early one morning to decide our position on striking in support of the folks at Kent State my department chair indicated that there was only one person in our department who actually insisted on having academic freedom: ME.
He supported me, of course, because I was on the Executive Board of the AFT union–and negotiated the money for his contract.
moonraven- great story.thanks.
Ward Churchill may have been a plagiarist. He may have been guilty of multiple instances of misconduct per the UC committee that gave him his pink slip. If so, however, one wonders why they waited until now to act against him. His firing was a right wing hit job, no doubt. If he had not made his palpably stupid and hurtful “Eichmanns” comment he would probably still be at UC, pissing people off, but without national, MSM and right wing talk radio attention. But he did. Churchill’s case is a poor test of academic freedom and free speech rights, both under severe attack around the country, because who wants to stand up for a guy who calls the 3000 men, women and children who died horrifically on 9/11/01 “Eichmanns”? Who wants to argue a point of principle, no matter how lofty, over such an egregious and gratuitous remark? Nobody deserves to die in a cold-blooded massacre, not the 9/11 victims, not Churchill’s native ancestors (if he has them, depending on who you believe), not Iraqis under a rain of US cluster bombs. And nobody deserves to have Churchill or anybody else spit on their graves. Of course, the very right wing who made Churchill walk the plank spews the same, hateful “You’re just like the Nazis” shit every day vs. just about anybody who publicly disagrees with their beloved leader. Just the same, Churchill didn’t have to stoop to that. Having shoved a stick into a hornet’s nest, he can’t complain too much about getting stung.
Bring us a real academic freedom case! What about the college republicans who spy on teachers and report their “anti-American” views to David Horowitz? How about the right wingers who are actually bring legal and academic actions against professors and high school teachers who dare to express anti-war or anti-Bush opinions Or teachers who dare to teach the dark and sordid history of the US Empire’s “overseas entanglements”? Churchill’s tantrums just take attention away from those more stealthy, more dangerous attacks.
Okay, I’ll admit I like most of what i hav heard from Ward Churchill–including his characterization of many who worked in the WTC s so many little Eichman’s, including his characterization of teh relatioons between Native
Americans and European settlers as being genocidal on the part of the europeans.
That being said Ward Churchill’s personal style is that of a first calss obnoxious ass-hole. Having controversial views is no excuse and being unconventional in your analysis for being as dislikable and disgusting a persoanlity as Wared has become. It’s a shame that such a fine mind is housed in the sppirit and body of a bratty adolescent.
I suspect than when you have a mind like Churchill’s, you have to develop any number of less than desirable defense mechanisms in order to preserve it amid the almost insurmountable pressures our society constantly imposes on each and every one of us to conform. Yeah, it would be great to get it all in a perfect package..not bloodly likely.
People are so just mortally afraid to hear what Churchill was actually saying that they twist it (and anything else he has ever done, said or stood for) all around and make him into a demon. It’s that powerful.
jareilly said: “If he had not made his palpably stupid and hurtful “Eichmanns” comment he would probably still be at UC, pissing people off, but without national, MSM and right wing talk radio attention. But he did. ”
People should have the ability to speak with passion about topics they feel passionately about, without getting axed. I don’t agree with Mr. Churchill. In fact, I don’t think that HE agrees with him, about those who worked at the WTC being ‘Eichmann’s’. He’s just too proud to say he goofed. Just like the Dixie Chicks goofed by saying they were ashamed that Bush was from Texas.
Liberals goof up. In their passion, against a war that’s just killed 800,000 people; against the horror of 9-11, they say stupid things. It doesn’t become national news BECAUSE they goof up. It becomes national news because there’s a well-financed set of right-wing monitors, like the Ann Coulter TEAM, who are just WAITING to blow comments like these out of proportion. It is THEY who make it national news.
George Bush just killed 800,000 people in Iraq. Cindi Sheehan is an ‘attention whore’. The American people are confused about which is worse.
THAT is what is so terrifying about what has been happening to the goof-balls of the left. It’s not what Churchill said out of blind, stupid anger. It’s what the rest of us are NOT saying, so scared are we of being called (gosh-almighty) an ‘attention whore’ on national TV.
For those who are ready to be real, conscious, postmodern adult humans about this matter, this is all i have to say:
This country has always been under the perpetual push, assault, domination, and control of European Tribalism (White Supremacy), subtle, or blatant. When will the New World wake up and push back?
New World in name only - like a wish or a dream. There is a whole entire collective (un)consciousness that’ll have to die and be reborn first and we have barely begun the initial death throes…but all the screaming is actually a good sign that we are on our way! Could happen in an instant, but I wouldn’t count on it.
A genocide is committed against native American people.
Many others are also committed by our govenment throughout its history.
Nowadays, according to a John Hopkins study published in a British medical journal in October 2006, about 650,000 Iraqis are dead as a result of our invasion.
Who knows how many are dead as a result of our invasion of Afghanistan? No one so far has bothered to count. I guess this is because invading and bombing Afghanistan seems to accepted by most of the people in our country even though it was a clear act of aggression.
Instead of steadfastly supporting Ward Churchill, a clear thinker who sees America for what it is, we worry about whether his presentation style is “obnoxious” or not.
What in the world is the problem?
I am disgusted at the ignorance and complacency of a community that I claim to identify with at the responses to this posts. Ward Churchill, before we even get to the issue of why he was fired, should not be ‘embraced’ by the progressive community. He is a priveleged white male masquerading as a native american to garner notoriety that allows him to get media attention (and surprisingly speaking gigs at all white ‘liberal’ institutions). When asked by the American Indian Movement, and the tribe that he claimed descendency from to discuss with them the validity of his claims to be related, Churchill brushed them off and used his academic bullshit argument of the ‘native American ethic’ to justify blatantly claiming to speak for a people of which he has no affiliation. When Ward Churchill makes demands of the US government to do things like “give back the land!” and calls the people who died in 9/11 “little Eichmann’s” he is not simply speaking as an American citizen, he speaks, based on his own claims to identity , as a liaison to the white world . These claims reinforce negative stereotypes of native Americans as irrational, angry savages wearing feathers (which he ignorantly and insultingly does on a regular basis) who make ridiculous demands of the country that once wronged them. I am so sad to see people who I assumed would be intelligent enough to realize the problems in supporting this man. Furthermore, Churchill has been criticized by So many sections of the Native American community (My grandmother is part of that section). Furthermore, Ward Churchill has been associated with CIA operations designed to cause rifts within the native american community. The best source for researching this would be the American Indian movement Website. There are also articles in the Indian Country newspaper. Churchill in many of his ‘academic’ publications creates conspiracies with no factual basis. There is evidence for every single one of the harms of the US government against Native American peoples, but by creating scenarios and defending them, churchill further relishes in the attention he gets as ‘radical’ native American. The University doesn’t need the ‘little Eichmann’s’ comment to fire him, the list of reasons goes on and on -http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/000430.html. I spent a month researching Churchill for a research paper I was doing after hearing him speak at my college, and initially was very fond of him. Upon further research, this man is doing nothing but trying to relinquish his white privilege and speak for a people who’s reputation and relations with the US government he continues to taint. Please think outside of your knee-jerk responses and try to approach this from an informed perspective. Oppression works in many different ways, and can be reinforced even in the most subversive of manners. This is not the cause to take up. Actually doing something to help the people Ward Churchill claims to fucking speak for would be doing something productive. And, if nothing else, you can ‘embrace the native american ethic’ and relinquish your privilege . . . we all know that works out for the better.
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096410293
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16911
http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/churchill05.html
Hi jletton. From what you say in your post, you are asking me to believe you and not Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky who support him. I am sorry but I have to go with Zinn and Chomsky. I hope you do not also think they are CIA agents who are trying to divide “the left”.
3 links with out any documentation of academic wrongdoing is not necessarily ‘evidence’. Regardless - I will say that I am an immigrant and was astounded between the difference (in terms of native people as part of the general population) when going to countries like Mexico, Chile etc. I think in all the time I have been in the US (30+ years) I have met like 5 American Indians -at most.
The efficiency of the genocide that occured in the United States is astounding -especially when compared to Mexico.
I was reviewing Ann Coulter’s scathing comments regarding the 9/11 widows.
“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzies. I have never seen people enjoying their husbands’ death so much.”
She got a lot of flack for that.. yet… has she really ever been “fired”? More folks see her face and she is still out there making mean comments that are totally ignorant.
Yet Ward Churchill writes a well thought out paper ( I listened to the entire paper he had wrote about 9/11) and the comment regarding “Little Eichmanns” got press becuase of the predicable knee jerk reaction of the Holocaust ((which was a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE thing but whenever someone compares what happened during WW2 to anything else in our current history folks can sometimes get irrational about the comparison)..
Ward Churchill NEVER made a PERSONAL attack on any specific person in those buildings on 9/11. He was making a very generalized observation regarding the concept of blowback and societal responsibility.
To observe that our current banking/investment system HAS contributed by making money off of people in foriegn countries or has helped implement bad foriegn policy abroad to benefit their pockets.. I think that is a FAIR assessment. If someone is not allowed to make that level of analyzation regarding a historical event then we do have a problem. We will not be able to evolve in our society.
Ann Coulter, however, got a MAJOR pass because she is a celebrity.. while Ward Churchill was a professor at a University. Ann Coulter is an entertainment figure (a skinny blond “chick”) that looks good in the media.. while Ward Churchill is a man. She got ratings for the news outlets for HER comments.. while Ward Churchill wasn’t as “attractive”…
I know many liberals who hate Ward Churchill just as much as Conservatives… I think personally.. it is because he brought up a sore fairly recent painful issue in our history and compared it with a more recent painful issue… and folks didn’t know how to process that information. Folks can’t handle the truth about our economic system, Globalization, blowback… none of it… THey are too scared…and too brainwashed.
Peace
Caelidh
I don’t think much of Ann Coulter either, but she HAS been fired before for her views. She was fired from MSN, National Review Online, and USA Today. Unlike Churchill, she is not a State Employee. I believe that Churchill WAS subjected to a thorough review based on his “Eichman” remarks, but it was his misrepresentations exposed during this review that has resulted in his dismissal.
As far as his “some people push back” essay written while people were still trapped in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, It is one of the most loathsome things I have ever read. Adolph Eichmann arranged the country by country deportation of Jews and Gypsies to the Death Camps. He arrainged the deportation of 400,000 jews from Hungary to Auschwitz even AFTER Himmler told him to desist. He commented at the end of the war that he would “jump laughing into my grave knowing that I have sent 5 1/2 million enemies of the reich to their death”
To equate the people working in the towers to eichmann is not clever, it is wrong and it is evil. When given a chance to say that he really didn’t mean that all the workers in the trade towers deserved to die, he allowed that he didn’t mean the janitors and secretaries but the rest DID deserve their fate. To suggest that some clerk at DeutschBank or a financial consultant at Morgan Stanley deserved what the got because they worked in the financial industry was wrong then and is wrong now. Following Churchill’s logic, maybe the suicide bombers should have flown their jets through the front door of HIS office. He, unlike the workers in the Trade Center, works for the government. What a piece of Crap.
well sigma, NO ONE, not even people we may violently disagree with, deserves that kind of horror, but most of us still dance with the devil and claim ignorance after the fact due to an as yet undeveloped capacity to discern the deeper nuances of rank or degree in light of the actual consequences of any actions we may take under our particularly fortunate circumstances (especially those actions that seem to be especailly beneficial to us and ours)-kinda like perpetual spiritual drunken driving.
Because we are always right and always good and always blessed and always superior and always well-intentioned and when we “arrange” our bombs and our weapons and our torture prisions we do so never even dreaming that one day we may have to answer for those things ourselves, even though we didn’t laugh all the way to our graves… we just laughed (innocently, I swear it) all the way to the bank.
To understand Churchill’s “Eichmann” comment it is neccessary to understand Eichmann. Not his reputation and the enormity of what he did but, rather, his person.
Unlike Heydrich, Himmler, Hess, and other luminaries in the Nazi constellation, Eichmann was a most ordinary, quiet, totally nondescript little bookkeeper of an administrator who approached his job with the same kind of thorough efficiency as a machine.
He didn’t oversee genocide, he worked on “the Jewish problem” or “the final solution”. The switching from firing squads (too demoralizing on the Vaterland’s storm troopers) to mobile hermetically sealed trucks whose exhaust was fed into compartments in which all those designated for execution were placed (used too much precious petrol needed for the war effort)to xyklon-B gas chambers disguised as delousing showers) was aimed at cost per liquidation efficiency and never intended in any way to be torture.
In similar manner many of those who labor for most of the “defense”, “intel”, “law-enforcement”, “international finance” and “develpoment” establishment couch their activities in sterile, sanitized gobbldy-gook to make them seem something other than what they actually are.
From their confortable offices or control centers in otherwise non-descript buildings spread promicuosly all over the country they arrange the major and mionor intricatre details for “low intensity conflict”, “regime change” and “ethnic cleansing” all over the world. (See John Perkins “Cofessions of an Economic Hitman”)
Eichmann would stand in awe of both their efficiency and thoroughness. They are rightfully his “children” and thus “little Eichmanns”
*********************
But Ward Churchill (vis-a-vis his personality) is still an ass-hole who needed either a more thorough spanking sa a small child or someone to give him a thorough ass-kicking when he popped off once too often as an adolescent.
Lacking that he has become a mal-adjusted, anti-social,(though quite intelligent and clear thinking) boor with a big chip on his shoulder just waiting to be knocked off.
Well, If everyone on this post thinks that the margin clerk at Morgan Stanley got what he deserved by being immolated by a passenger liner driven into his building, all I can say is i’m appalled.If this is the thinking,I hold out little hope for progressives to ever attract broad support. If you can’t denounce THIS, I don’t want to occupy the same discussion page any longer. Good luck to you all, I hope you never work for a company or a government and attract your “just” retribution.
I, for one will stand up for Ward Churchill’s right to call 9/11 as he saw it.
I will also defend absolutely his right to call genocide the settlement of “the Americas”–as that’s what it WAS!
There are some historically-challenged folks posting on this site who would do well to read Howard Zinn–who is NOT a Native American–before shooting off their ignorant keyboards in Internet.
If what Chuchill said in his article about 9/11 was so horrific, why did it take SEVERAL YEARS for a hue and cry to be raised in the conservative media? Answer that one and I will give you a gold star on your forehead.
This is a political case of the Sacrificial Goat–as Chuchill is not the only Native American–nor non-native American–who has publically held the same views.
I am one of those folks.
No one, not even Churchill, thinks the margin clerk at the World Trade Center “got what he deserved.” There is no person on this earth that “deserved” that.
Try to grasp this: When you dance with the devil, no matter how tightly those blinders have been secured or how low (or high) on the totem pole you may be - sometimes you get caught, even if you are a God fearing, innocent American and everything that you do should be beyond question, even in your own mind.
The thing that scares you is that those victims may have been more like an unfortuanate sacrificial advant guard…
usrcjp, referencing two names doesn’t at all take away the legitimacy of any of the claims i’m making. the point is not to say “this is right, believe me”, but to question the issues at hand before taking the easy ‘liberal stance’ (like what you do by saying since two prominent thinkers back him, so should I! And thats being said without going into the multiple criticisms of chompsky’s political views). And patronizing my commentary for the CIA remarks is an immature and easy way of not taking the topic seriously. My goal is to bring a perspective that i feel is not really being addressed. The debate should not, yet again, be about the ‘crazy antics’ of ward churhill, but should be about productive solutions to addressing the oppression of native american people.
And please don’t throw around the names of white academics as if their intelligence frees them from the restrictions of their privilege. If the people who died in 9/11 are ‘little Eichmanns’, then the professors you mentioned are equally tools in a system of exploitation.
“If the people who died in 9/11 are ‘little Eichmanns’, then the professors you mentioned are equally tools in a system of exploitation.”
Anyone who goes along with the US government–which is illegitimate–is a tool in the exploitative system.
“moonraven —- Sure, I have a certain inclination towards Churchill, since I am also a Native American (Mohawk) professor”
See that isn’t true. Churchill is NOT a native american unless his being born in the US makes him one. He has NO ancestry in any of the original peoples of this continent. He states he does, but the tribal affiliation he lists insists that his membership in their tribe was “honorary” and granted by a former leader that gave out hundreds of such memberships in the tribe for money or favors of various sorts. Churchill is NOT a native american. That bit of fraud is the start of a long chain of lies.
You need to read the refutations of his work by the very people he quotes. Churchill simply lied or used information out of context on several occasions.
I DO think though that the scrutiny on him is due to his political views, but what that scrutiny found is real and damning.
Moral of the story is that if you want to be outspoken, you need to be right and everything you have ever done has to be supportable.
“I, for one will stand up for Ward Churchill’s right to call 9/11 as he saw it.”
And so will I. What I won’t support is his theft of other people’s work. If he were not a plagiarist, I would be agreeing with everything you said. But if he is (and the current evidence suggests that he is) then he doesn’t deserve support. Like I said earlier, if the courts vindicate him, I’ll say my mea culpas. But for now, I continue to think he’s responsible for his own predicament.
I guess I am old fashioned–I tend to hold people to be innocent until PROVEN guilty.
Even if Ward Churchill is ONLY an honorary tribal member–so what? Does that mean that he doesn’t see the genocide upon which the nation of the US was based?
I have several friends who are honorary members of tribes. Their choice to identify themselves culturally as Native Americans beats the hell out of the other options available.
As to the issue of plagiarism, I have seen a lot of it in academia–and I consider it my responsibility to point it out when it occurs.
If Churchill was granted tenure on the basis of work that he plagiarized, several levels of faculty committees supposedly read the work in question–and they should have bothered to investigate if it was really his work.
If they didn’t, then they are also guilty–and they should be canned right along with him.
I do not see that happening, however.
In this case–either the guilt is collective, and must be treated as such–or Churchill is innocent and the dismissal is merely to placate the folks that created 9/11–and other horrors since then.
“I guess I am old fashioned–I tend to hold people to be innocent until PROVEN guilty.”
He received due process and was ruled against.
“If Churchill was granted tenure on the basis of work that he plagiarized, several levels of faculty committees supposedly read the work in question–and they should have bothered to investigate if it was really his work.”
Yes. More oversight would have prevented all of this from happening. Generally, though, tenure reviewers only consider the quality and quantity of work. They don’t investigate whether it’s truly original. Perhaps that should change?
In this case, some of the plagiarism happened after he received tenure, or at least that’s how I interpreted the reports.
“So far, there is only one fact: Ward Churchill did not toe the ideological line and has been fired.”
The second assertion is a fact, the first assertion is an opinion. The connection between the two is speculative.
“I’m betting that Dr. Churchill will offer to hand UC its institutional head, and they will quickly respond with a substantial settlement”
He might, and if so he deserves his vindication. However, courts have generally not been willing to overturn decisions made by universities regarding dismissal for cause. Their have been two cases at CU — both lost in court. There have been others elsewhere, but I can’t think of any where the plaintiffs won.
What, may I ask is your understanding of due process?
I don’t see any evidence that he is guilty.
There are plenty of folks–especially minorities–who have been railroaded to guilty verdicts in the courts, too.
US history, in fact, is largely the list of unjust treatment of folks of minority ethnicities or minority affiliations.
“What, may I ask is your understanding of due process?”
Due process is when a person is informed of their fundamental rights, notified of charges or proceedings, and given the opportunity to be heard in those proceedings. All of these occurred in this case. I think this is technically called procedural due process (I’m not a lawyer…).
“I don’t see any evidence that he is guilty.”
A committee of five investigators (two of who were external, and not from CU) did see such evidence. I respect your opinion, but I don’t agree with it.
“There are plenty of folks–especially minorities–who have been railroaded to guilty verdicts in the courts, too.”
You are absolutely correct about this. There are also of plenty of folks who have received completely fair trials. Neither of these facts mean anything for this particular case.
“US history, in fact, is largely the list of unjust treatment of folks of minority ethnicities or minority affiliations.”
Again, it’s hard to disagree with this. In fact, I would generalize your statement to say that history is very largely the record of unjust treatment of various minorities. However, Ward Churchill is not a minority.
I’m honestly not trying to be a pain and I hope this does not come across as personal. I would probably agree with you on many things. One of the reasons why this means so much to me is that I see the Ward Churchill’s of the world as damaging the very causes he claims to support. He has certainly damaged the reputation of his university and his profession. Since it’s also my profession, it matters to me very much.
Ah-ha, just what i thought. No guts, no vision, no imagination, no ability to think outside of the square, and no confidence in exploring with thaumaturgical abandon. All of you are locked in the momentum of the same predictable patterns of putrid, recycled, regurgitated rhetoric given through the traditional lessons of thought passed on to you from the dungeons of the dead. Grow up. Lose your fears, egos, and addictions to the crumbs of privilege and take a quantum leap from your stagnant mind games of repetition. This IS the NEW WORLD, you are just to blind and complacent to see it! You have all been fired!
“I really don’t care anymore about all you Jim Jims in
this town
and everybody puttin’ everybody else down
and all the politicians makin’ crazy sounds
and all the dead bodies piled up in mounds”
- Lou Reed
Peace and One Love
Oh, well. Maybe my dreams are not so common!
“Even if Ward Churchill is ONLY an honorary tribal member–so what? Does that mean that he doesn’t see the genocide upon which the nation of the US was based?”
What it means is that he lied on his resume and used that fact, that he was “Native American” to get his position. If he lied there, where else did he lie?
I don’t think that his opinions are a reason to fire him, but they are a reason to cerefully review his work which is what was done. If you want to come out swinging, then you have to be right and have to have the credentials to do so. Churchill doesn’t. He can be a great activist, but he is not a good historian or academic and shouldn’t be in that role.
Why was he fired? Maybe we can call it the revenge of the (little) Eichmans. Or maybe just because he is a lying scumbag.
geeze if this Churchill guy was fired and pilloried for what he said (and yes it was careless in the least, hateful in the worst), and for plaigerizing (lying/cheating), then what can be done to about Dubya, Cheney, Rice, Clintons, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Blair, Sharon, et al… for ALL THAT THEY HAVE DONE???? for their massive crimes against humanity????
How many innocent people has Churchill killed lately? Or ever? How many lives has he actually destroyed?
My bottom line on this one? I see it primarily as another in a long list of outrageous distractions/diversions.
Gooze wrote:
“I don’t think that his opinions are a reason to fire him, but they are a reason to cerefully review his work which is what was done.”
That is really an outrageous statement.
What you are saying is that if someone exposes the genocide committed against Native Americans and also comments that 9/11 was a crock, he or she should be held to a different standard in academia, and should be hauled in for the third degree and his work subjected to unusual scrutiny with the clear intention of firing him.
Sorry, pal, but that’s TOTALITARIAN thinking–and if you don’t see that, you are a BIG part of the problem.
To the poster who said that academia was also his profession–or hers–it is also mine. Moreover, it has been mine since 1968–back in the era when some of us fought like gladiators so that Native American studies, Black Studies (the PC term then), Chicano Studies and Women’s Studies could be included in the programs of studies of universities.
Since that time, with the radical shift to the right in the US, those programs have been eroded and attacked and in many cases eliminated from universities. By giving the axe to Ward Churchill by de-legitimizing HIM, UC–and other universities around the US–now will trot out the excuse that Native American Studies is now illegitimate to get rid of the program entirely.
Mark my words–this is where this is going.
Ward Churchill is just a patsy in all this.
If you are truly an academic, you should be able to see the implication of what I just said is a hell of a lot more worrisome than whether Ward Churchill plagiarized something.
So much for academic freedom if they can strip someone of tenure. It’s gone. Good luck trying to get it back.
There was no child molestation or wars of aggression done by the guy violating the sovereignty and thusly self-determination of either of the above, or even charges of that extent.
But, most of you profs never actually challenge the administration (of your college) or anything like that anyway. So why does it matter? You’re just there to pass on information. Open the lid, dump in the information. Great job.
gogohoip,
Unfortunately, you are right about what Paulo Freire called the “Banking Model” of pedagogy–where information is “deposited” and then later withdrawn without interest using the ATM card of an exam–it is all too common.
One of the reasons for that is (Freire again) all education is political.
Given that premise, critical thinking is not encouraged.
Pardon my earlier comment, it was late, and I should not have sounded so cavalier. Though I stand by the gist of what I said about how this situation serves as a distraction from larger issues and how we need to develop way more perspective, I still feel that Ward Churchill was made a scapegoat.
moonraven,
I hope that you’re not right in your predictions. Though I fear that you may be.
And that Banking Model of pedagogy (Freire) is brilliant and accurate, albeit creepy. Though I’d say instead that ‘all teaching is political’ rather than ‘all education…’. Especially given the root differences between the words *education* and *teaching*. Almost polar opposites in fact.
The devil’s in the details, as they say. And we ought to get to the root. How’s that for *radical*?
;)
Not trying to be nitpicky here, btw. Hope that my meaning is not misconstrued. I do appreciate your perspective, and your posts.
———————-
Finally, thanks to Professor Chernus for his essay which initiated this conversation.
Ward Churchill was talking on too high a level for most Americans to understand - especially univercity presidents who got to their position for their non-positions on anything that really matters. Academic Freedom: Gone.
Ward is not gone. I expect that CU would have been better served to keep someone like Ward near - instead now he is free as a bird.
All teaching doesn’t have to be political. If one realizes that all education is political–in that a government entity decides what students should learn–one can work against it by student-centered methods of critical analysis.
The problem with most teachers (I am a teacher trainer at this stage of the game) is that they TALK TOO MUCH–instead of respecting students’ rights to a space and time to learn.
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moonraven July 31st, 2007 1:45 pm
…The problem with most teachers (I am a teacher trainer at this stage of the game) is that they TALK TOO MUCH–instead of respecting students’ rights to a space and time to learn.
———–
Hear! Hear! hallelujah