Colorado is all atwitter tonight – Hank Brown, former U.S. senator, former president of the University of Northern Colorado (my alma mater) and now president of the University of Colorado, has brushed aside a recommendation from an investigative committee at the university and fired Prof. Ward Churchill. The committee recommended that Churchill be demoted and suspended without pay for a year. Here’s a background article from last fall. A lot of pseudo-First Amendment advocates are screaming bloody murder, claiming that Churchill’s firing, which Brown and CU claim is for plagarism and fabrication of materials for his doctoral disertation, is really for his stupid comments in which he insulted the victims of the World Trade Center attacks.
My take: If you’ve fabricated your PhD disertation, don’t go calling attention to yourself with noxious effluviating. As a graduate student, liberal, and sympathizer of American Indians, I find Churchill a disgusting gasbag. But seriously, is this guy really on anybody’s radar outside of Colorado? Has he been treated fairly or railroaded?
Screw Churchill. The university wouldn’t have the balls to fire him if they didn’t have solid evidence of plagiarism. He’s a non-entity and needs to slink back to his obscurity while we deal with more important affairs, like when is Joe Torre gonna get fired?
If it is true that he plagarized and fabricated materials for his dissertation, then I guess it doesn’t matter if the “real” reason he was fired was for his 9/11 comments. He gave them a perfectly legitimate reason for them to fire him, so the world will never know for sure.
Any academic who is found to have committed fraud in their writings should immediately be dismissed. I can’t imagine in a million years why an institution would do otherwise. It would reflect very, very badly on them, IMO.
Churchill doesn’t have a doctorate except for an honorary PhD issued by Alfred University. He is noted for multiple incidences of alleged plagerism, misrepresenting both his military service and his ethnic background, and generally being a hyperbolic hosebag. Many of these claims aren’t suspiciously recent but actually extend back a couple of decades; the university doubtless kept him on because he was the self-described leading scholor on American Indian studies.
I’d have at least some amount of sympathy for Churchill if his work and statements, however unpopular they may be, had even a vague semblence of intellectual value or integrity but in fact he’s the academic equivilent of a radio shock jock. Be gone with him so we can go back to detailing Linsday Lohan’s spiraling descent into drug-induced psychosis, which is as equally relevent to world affairs as whatever nonsense is issuing from Churchill’s pen.
I think the larger importance is that other universities are instituting ‘post-tenure review’ in order to avoid the same PR problem that CU has had with Churchill. Tenure as we know it is soon to be a thing of the past.
Whether that’s bad or good is a debate we’ve had before I think.
Honestly, I have mixed feelings about Churchill. I’m a hard-liner about plagiarism, but the whole 9/11 thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth (I think people have the right to say stupid things about 9/11). I also think it’s a little nervy of Brown to go against the faculty committee’s recommendation - but that is showing my own biases because I would probably not feel as strongly about that if Brown were an academic himself.
Yep, Brown is still getting mixed reviews for his performance at UNC, although to be fair I think he’s sometimes unfairly blamed for things Kay Norton has done since he left. He’s part of the “anti-academic” movement Colorado’s government began under Gov. Bill Owens; post-secondary education still finds itself on the short end of the funding stick, but that’s another subject altogether.
The thing is, though, that this particular issue need have no effect either way on issues of tenure. Most tenure agreements allow for firing the professor if he or she is found to have committed crimes related to the job, gross professional misconduct, or severe breaches of academic ethics. Now, the frequency with which such conditions are enforced is another matter, but firing a plagiarist does not require any alteration to the system.
In many ways, this is a great example of how academic freedom works. The ability to freely express ideas is one that I, like many academics, love about the professorate.
But only the most naive think that there’s no risk. Productive and brilliant scholars will be able to speak provocatively on a topic, but if you’re unproductive, in a field that garners little respect, and your work is of questionable quality… I wouldn’t expect a lot of support.
And it goes without saying that you’d better have your professional house in order if you’re attracting this kind of attention. Without a doubt, his 9/11 comments attracted scrutiny, but being called a plagiarist by your peers is about the worst thing that can happen to you professionally.
My institution revokes degrees if it’s shown that any part of a thesis is not original (and not cited). If he keeps his degree I’ll say he got off easy.
I don’t know how much of the plagarized/fabricated work was actually for his master’s degree (I stand corrected on my earlier assertion that he’d done a doctoral disertation) and how much was other writing after he’d earned the master’s. My understanding is that his post-graduate writings (one assumes for peer-reviewed journals) were where most of the fabrication was. A lot of people outside fo academia don’t understand how important it is for working faculty to adhere to the strictest standards of research and citation when writing for journals, publishing books, and so on.
I’m sure you’re right, but nonetheless tenure is being eroded. I guess it’s a perception vs. reality thing. Plus, trustees/regents (who seem to be exercising the pressure on this issue) are normally political appointees who may not have much/any experience in academia. These people are positively mortified of people like Churchill.
Oops I was going to edit because I didn’t like my driveby post. I swear it was less than five minutes. Here it is.
Anyone with half a brain should be mortified of him. He is an embarassment.
To clarify here are some of the things in his wiki article. I have read the same things elsewhere but wiki has them condensed nicely.
That isn’t even touching on the plagerism and fraud allegations. He is a pathological liar and a fraud. This is not about acedemic freedom. It is about maintaining the integrity of the school.
I think Hippy Hollow pretty much summed up my feelings on it.
Like delphica, I think he has as much right as any other American to say ridiculous, offensive shit about 9/11 if he so chooses. I support the idea that he shouldn’t be fired for that. But to the extent that he seems to have violated a number of tenets of academic integrity, I think he should be unemployed in higher ed. The chickens are coming home to roost, and I hope he won’t embarrass himself by making false claims about his academic freedom being violated, or his being discriminated against, or whatever else.