Whaaaat?
Maybe I missed a meeting, but I thought it was clear that a) WC has been the subject of a genealogy which showed no native ancestry, and b) he never had a tribe. His only membership was an honorary cardholder type thing and that was stripped from him after his 9/11 spazfest. The guy’s a total poser. Not sure where you’re getting this warrior and chief stuff, because he’s 100% fruitbat. Not even AIM will talk to this guy anymore, they’ve outed him as a fake.
I knew that he had fraudulently represented himself as a member of AIM, but I didn’t know that an official genealogy had been done. (Googling, I see that a newspaper did one.) In any case, it is very easy to determine whether unenrolled claimants do in fact have Indian ancestry by DNA testing. This is what he has refused to do. (I never used “chief” to apply to Churchill.)
Pitting Ward Churchill is a futile exercise.
I just read the Wikipedia bio on him and it is my opinion that the acedemic establishment should be pitted. They bent over backwards to promote his career even after he was proven to be a liar.
Like mhendo, I first heard of Churchill in Z Magazine. I don’t keep in touch with the radical left any more, not since some disillusioning experiences in the mid nineties, but he was pretty well respected back then. I suspect that now, not so much, and his support is limited to naive college students. The pitting here, IMO, should be of human biology, which mandates that kids of a certain age lack perspective and nuance in their thinking.
Daniel
I definitely agree with the second part. It’s certainly true that plenty of subjects that get discussed in detail on this board don’t make many waves in the wider world.
As for the first part, you might be right that elucidator was talking about the broader awareness of the general public. I can certainly see how that meaning could be taken from his post. But it also seemed to me that he was talking about Churchill’s appearances on this board. Anyway, it’s not a big deal to me; i just thought i’d make a little trip into Board history.
Definitely true. Z is a small circulation monthly (about 25,000, i think) that’s celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. As i noted above, it is considerably to the left of publications like The Nation and Mother Jones, although they also have article by authors who are closer to mainstream progressivism and left-liberalism.
And now a shameless plug: for anyone who considers themselves “left,” even if you normally read nothing more left than Mother Jones, i recommend taking a look at the ZMag website. You won’t agree with everything there (i certainly don’t), but some very smart people write for it, and it’s an excellent resource, with articles about a huge variety of topics, from local to global. Plug over.
I certainly agree with this.
In fact, that’s one of the reasons that i, and others on the left, have had misgivings about the firing of Churchill. The scholarly and academic deceptions for which he was investigated (and ultimately fired) by UC Boulder had been brought to public attention as early as 1996, and yet no-one apparently thought they were egregious enough to warrant any official sanction. The university ONLY began to make any moves against him after his 9/11 speech.
Another thing is, while i think that there was probably sufficient evidence of misconduct to fire Churchill, it’s not as clear-cut and certainly nowhere near as large a part of his work as you would assume from reading media reports about the case. In at least a couple of the cases, where the charge was “misrepresentation” rather than plagiarism, the disputes were, it seems to me, as much about differences of interpretation as anything else.
I agree with the investigating committee that Churchill drew unjustifiable inferences and conclusions from his sources, and that the evidentiary burden that he placed on them was far to heavy for them to bear. But if every scholar who overstated his or her case, and who pushed the evidence too hard, was fired for academic misconduct, the universities of America would be empty. It was, i think, the great American historian Richard Hofstadter who said that if a new and heterodox interpretation is worth anything, it’s worth a forceful overstatement, because that is the sort of thing that gets scholarly debates going.
The plagiarism issues are more worrisome. I’ve had to examine my own feelings about plagiarism very closely in assessing my response to this particular issue, because as someone who teaches college kids, i have an obligation to prevent plagiarism whenever possible, and to deal with it when it raises its head. There is no doubt that segments of other works appear in Churchill’s work. The problem here, though, is that even the investigating committee conceded that there were doubts about questions of joint authorship in at least one of the cases.
In at least two of the cases, also, the amount of plagiarised material was small enough that it could constitute an honest mistake. Anyone who has written long pieces of research knows that it note-taking is subject to human error, not just in the transcription but in the attribution. In the process of putting my research into written form, i’ve often had to stop and read my notes very closely to try and determine whether a particular paragraph is my own interpretation, of if i copied it from another source to use as a reference later. If i were perfect, and labelled every single note i took completely accurately, this wouldn’t be a problem, but i’m not perfect. I just have to hope that i haven’t, somewhere in my dissertation, inadvertently inserted a paragraph that wasn’t mine, only to have it thrown back in my face years later.
I think the historian Lawrence Stone put it quite well, writing about a controversy over academic ethics in the 1980s. Defending a historian, David Abraham, whose work had been criticized for errors and omissions and misrepresentation, Sotne said:
This doesn’t mean that we ignore errors, or fail to correct them. It does mean, i think, that some scholarly failings are truly the result of human error, rather than malice or dishonesty.
Anyway, if Churchill had been investigated for his breaches of academic ethics when they first surfaced, and had been found guilty and fired, i probably wouldn’t have had a complaint. While i think that some of the charges were not sustained at the level found by the committee, they were sustained sufficiently (and were probably bad enough) to warrant a discharge. It just seemed so problematic to me that this issue came up only after Churchill said some controversial stuff about 9/11.
His plagiarism, also, was far, far less egregious than the plagiarism committed by prominent historians like Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns-Goodwin. Admittedly these historians were not university academics, so they couldn’t be fired for their dishonesty, but the general willingness of the press and the public to overlook their indiscretions is an interesting contrast with the way Churchill was treated.
If you want to read the Investigating Committee report on Churchill, which discusses all the complaints against him, and goes into considerable detail about each charge and the evidence used to investigate the allegations, you can download it from here (pdf).
And if you want to debate about his firing, then you really need to do that, and you really need to read all of it. Reading the much shorter Standing Committee report is no use at all, as it has virtually no details about the incidents themselves, or about the substantive scholarly issues. And the media reports of the issue also give none of the details that are so important in making an adjudication in a case like this.
Both, actually, in a vague and general sort of way, I didn’t give it enough thought to make the distinction, though perhaps I should have. That said, doesn’t seem to me that a review of threads started has any reliability, I’m pretty sure (but cannot prove) that WC has been spoken of a whole lot more than a thread count might indicate.
Meh. Feh. No heh.
Taking another look at the OP . . . You know, although there are of course deep and important differences between American Manifest Destiny, the Nazi ambition for Lebensraum, and Zionism, drawing parallels or comparisons between them is not, in and of itself, a patently moronic exercise.
Just putting it in perspective.
Churchill remains a very silly person, of course.
But is that relevant? If CS was saying “All military families want the war to end as soon as possible and oppose Bush”, then your rebuttal makes sense. But if she says “my son died and I don’t know why and I’m sad and I never get to hug him any more”, then how is what you are saying relevant at all?
But is that relevant? If CS was saying “All military families want the war to end as soon as possible and oppose Bush”, then your rebuttal makes sense. But if she says “my son died and I don’t know why and I’m sad and I never get to hug him any more”, then how is what you are saying relevant at all?
What it “patently” is, is 1) a method of deeply polarizing attitudes such as to preclude rational debate*, 2) grotesquely exaggerated and historically inaccurate, and 3) as the false comparisons tend to minimize the dimensions of Nazi atrocities, it demeans their victims (a considerable number of whom are still alive).
This has all been emphasized repeatedly, but some people never learn.
*the alternate problem for Godwinizers is that the tactic is used often enough to diminish its intended effect.
It’s relevant solely because during her protest, some people like Maureen Dowd were proclaiming her to have absolute moral authority because she lost her son in the war. Now, that claim is pretty ridiculous, but it was out there, and that was what was being responded to.
Funny, but nobody seems to talk about her moral authority anymore, which points to how silly that argument was in the first place.
Hell, Maureen Dowd is pretty ridiculous. She reduces all political issues to personalities, trivialities, and inanities. She doesn’t make ridiculous claims as often as you do, but remember that she suffers under the limitation of only posting twice a week.
That’s pretty good there, boss.
And remember, she collects a salary for her nonsense, while I enlighten you all on a volunteer basis. 
Hey, can I just amen you on this? I really like reading NYT pointyhead pundits, but Dowd inevitably pisses me off; she’s one of the few columnists that I skip reading these days given the vapid quality of her comments.
Daniel
Yes, Maureen Dowd’s argument (as relayed by you… I have never read anything of hers in my life) is silly and idiotic. I mean, surely there is at least one mother who lost a son in Iraq and still supports Bush and the war. So she would ALSO have absolute moral authority. Paradox!
None of which makes Cindy Sheehan irrelevant.
Let me take a step back and attempt to define the terms of what I’m trying to talk about. Suppose the pro-war and anti-war faction in this country agreed that what we needed was a 10-hour-long televised debate on the issue, in which pro- and anti- war people would make arguments for or against the war, then rebut each other’s arguments, etc.
There are certain things that either side could do (cherry-pick statistics, get testimony from people that was grossly unrepresentative of the group that person was claimed to represent, etc.) which, were I judging the debate based on “fairness” and “relevance”, I would call “foul” on. As part of a larger argument, having a grieving mother stand up and talk about her son, and how she feels she doesn’t know why he died, would not be something I would call “foul” on, at least, not prima facie. Now, the anti-war side would need to actually come up with a cohesive overall framework for their argument, with this mom being one point in it (as opposed to 10 straight hours of grieving moms), and it should be clear that the point was not “this mom lost a son, therefore we should give her opninion lots and lots of weight”, rather, “this mom lost a son… she emblemizes the human cost of this war that we should not trivialize”. To rephrase slightly, I think grieving mom’s are valid and “fair” data points, at least in moderation, but are not arguments, in and of themselves.
(There is one additional factor that would need to be met, which is that this mom would have to represent a non-trivial subset of moms… if there were 3000 grieving moms in the US and 2950 of them were still strongly pro-War and pro-Bush, it would be pretty underhanded to track down one of the other 50 and parade them around.)