The results are in from the Ward Churchill witch hunt and here’s the conclusion:
The University of Colorado ethnic studies professor got his due. Now, if only his employers would get theirs.
On Tuesday, a five-person subcommittee of CU’s academic misconduct committee issued a stinging 125-page rebuke of Churchill’s research and published works. But the Churchill Problem can be boiled down to a single sentence: “If there is one crucial pattern that most affects our assessment … it is a pattern of failure to understand the difference between scholarship and polemic …”
Truer words can not be spoken of a guy who invited every skeleton in his closet to rattle by comparing some victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to “little Eichmanns.”
The comparison is the perfect polemic, which one dictionary defines as “a controversial argument, especially one that attempts to refute an accepted opinion or doctrine.”
The subcommittee report does not focus on the “little Eichmanns” line. What it does suggest is that no one who knew Churchill should have been surprised by it.
The 9/11 essay merely empowered people who had academic axes to grind against the often-obnoxious Churchill. Once they complained to the university, the school had to investigate, CU spokesman Barrie Hartman correctly noted at a university news conference.
What no one at the news conference would talk about was this:
If Ward Churchill deserves to be fired, or given time off without pay, what should happen to the CU administrators who hired and promoted him?
CU hired Churchill long before he wrote about “little Eichmanns,” but he never owed his job to much more than an ability to provoke.
Even the subcommittee calling for his paycheck recognized that.
“We believe that the University of Colorado may have made the extraordinary decision to hire Professor Churchill, a charismatic public intellectual with no doctorate and no history of regular faculty membership at a university, to a tenured position without any probationary period in part because at that moment in the institution’s history, it desired the favorable attention his notoriety and following were expected to bring.”
Live by polemics, die by them.
Except, the only guy on the gallows at this point is Churchill. And the process is not ever going to turn to those who aided and abetted him.
I asked subcommittee chairwoman Mimi Wesson if the group felt CU administrators who hired Churchill understood the difference between scholarship and polemic. She refused to answer beyond what the report said.
You don’t even have to read between the lines. CU, the report says, wanted Churchill because of “some of the very essays that have now come under scrutiny because of their scholarly shortcomings.”
This irony seems lost on those who will almost surely recommend that Churchill get time off without pay. Among those who will decide the professor’s fate, there seems a self-imposed ignorance about how they got in this mess.
And a mess it is. As a colleague joked Thursday, given Churchill’s feisty nature, CU will probably still be in court a decade from now. The state also will eventually pay Churchill a decent pension based on his current six-figure salary.
When all that happens, anyone at the University of Colorado who acts shocked is doing just that – acting.
Yeah, the subcommittee of the standing committee on academic misconduct found “repeated instances” of “falsification” and “fabrication” by Churchill. But it also exposed a bad case of institutional self-delusion.
As the subcommittee wrote: “The university has perhaps gotten more than it bargained for when it made its high-risk decisions about Professor Churchill in the early 1990’s, but there is very little about the present situation that is not foreshadowed by developments across the last fifteen years.”
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
