Genociding Ward Churchill for over a 20th of a century

CNews 31January06

CNews 28January06

CU's bright-and-shiny Blue Ribbon Diversity Commission struts its stuff

11-22-94, Det. Pontarelli reported that information had been received from the FBI that a CI had information that Glenn Morris, [redacted] would be the target of a 'hit' arranged by the National members of AIM. This is an attempt to get Colorado AIM 'back in the fold' with national Indian agenda. The report indicated that Morris and [redacted] would be killed and that Means would be injured. It was feared that the incident would happen at an Indian convention in Denver the previous week, bkut [sic] none of the persons involved were seen at the convention.

Hard to say whether "Ward Churchill" was one of the redacted 'targets' (or even if the plot was a real one), although it appears his current wife, Natsu Taylor Saito, thinks it was (although she has the assassination plot taking place in 1995). Anyone have a non-redacted version of this document?

CNews 26January06

The Rocky Mountain News' blog prints an email allegedly from Dan Debo, Ward Churchill's half-brother (note to RMN: learn how to edit linebreaks, for crying out loud!)

CNews 25January06

The AP checks in with a non-story: Churchill 'Still Here' As Controversy Simmers

Professor Hu-DeHart encourages Williams [College] to implement the Curriculum Transformation Project, whose “curriculumt [sic] transformation” website describes “the classroom as democratic space in which students can dialogue about and practice new ways of relating across race, class, and gender.” The CTB’s first “resource” is a guide developed by the New York Collective of Radical Educators urging professors to focus on how Hurricane Katrina illustrates “the criminalization of poor people of color”; “the capitalist interests that govern public policy”; “militarism”; and “consumerism and related environmental degradation.” Such analysis, which was last fresh around 1969, is reflective of a site whose intellectual quality falls far below what I would expect from even an introductory Williams class. As with her personnel suggestions, imagine the quandary in which Professor Hu-DeHart's curricular agenda would place the Development Office: "Your generous contribution will hasten the transformation of the Williams curriculum away from its traditional emphasis on the disciplines of the liberal arts and toward classes that create 'democratic space in which students can dialogue about and practice new ways of relating across race, class, and gender' . . ."

CNews 24January06

From our Small World Department: Richard Collins, a CU law professor and one of the members of CU's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct (which is currently investigating allegations of plagiarism, misrepresentation, and historical fabrication on the part of Ward Churchill) is also the director of the Byron White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law, which is sponsoring the upcoming two-day "Horowitz, Churchill, Columbia—What Next for Academic Freedom" conference we noted yesterday.

CNews 23January06

Mildly OT: Marathon Pundit continues to hold DePaul University's feet to the FIRE with 'There They Go Again'

CNews 22January06

From our Quelle Surprise Department: Churchill's Hand-Picked Students Give Him High Marks

CNews 20January06

Not Really OT: David Horowitz examines the heart of academic bias (ht to CattleDog)

Excerpt:

Each of [Ward Churchill's] appointments and promotions required full review by the entire Ethnic Studies Department at Boulder and by the chair who appointed the search committee that hired him originally, and by the dean of his school and perhaps by his provost and university president. All of them would have had to approve the hiring; all of them would have had to approve the rapid upward promotion of this academic impostor. All of them did. So much for Professor [Joan Wallach] Scott’s elaborate system of checks and balances that she claims is a guarantee that professors are hired and promoted solely on the basis of their scholarship and not their political beliefs. If that is so, where is the right-wing Ward Churchill? There is none.

CNews 18January06

Coverage of Ward Churchill's lecture last night at the University of California Santa Barbara

Excerpt:

Churchill said he advocates “any means possible” in order to accomplish the goals of equal rights for groups. “Any means” can include the use of violence, which Churchill said pushed the African American Civil Rights movement forward.

According to AISA Chair Maria Reifel Saltzberg, Churchill’s appearance is not meant to stir up controversy.

“He’s not coming to speak on what all of the hubbub was about,” Saltzberg said. “He’s talking about civil rights and violent versus nonviolent movements, rather than the 9/11 attacks.”

[...]

Saltzberg said the event, staged in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, will center on topics the late civil rights leader advocated.

“He’ll be taking about the civil rights movement and cultural activism, specifically,” Saltzberg said.

Perhaps Saltzberg is unfamiliar with a book Churchill wrote highly critical of nonviolence called, appropriately enough, Pacifism As Pathology.

From that book, one of Churchill's many comments re: Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Even the title of King's last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Bantam, 1967), suggests he was consciously using the existence of an armed or "violent" trend among politicized American blacks as a foil against which to further the objectives of his own nonviolent movement. In other words, without a number of his ostensible constituents "picking up the gun," King was rendered rather less effective in pursuit of his own pacifist politics.

Ward's Christmas Gift from CU

by Jim Paine

Does CU honestly believe it has convened a "fair and balanced" investigating committee? After being caught slipping pro-Churchill ringers into the process, does CU's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct (SCRM) actually believe it has put together an impartial and informed panel?

First of all, the current composition of the Ward Churchill Investigating Committee (formed of three CU professors and two outside academics by SCRM) is sadly but unsurprisingly comprised of the same proportion of leftists as academia itself—at least one of the panel may be a Marxist; at least three are radical leftists. This hardly seems impartial.

More importantly, however—and apparently overlooked in the selection process—is the fact that with one exception, none of the five committee members knows diddly-squat (a technical term meaning zippo, nada, zilch) about Indian history or Indian law. CU's SCRM apparently decided Indian scholarship was inconsequential to one of the most important allegations: Whether Churchill bent (or simply made up) history to support his argument.

Here's the current membership of SCRM's Churchill Investigating Committee:

• José E. Limón, professor of English, Mexican-American Studies, and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
• Robert N. Clinton, professor of law at Arizona State University.
• Marianne Wesson, professor of law at CU.
• Marjorie McIntosh, distinguished professor of history at CU.
• Michael Radelet, chairman of the department of sociology.

Missing from the qualifications of these professors is any hint of knowlege or even casual awareness of Indian history (with the aforementioned exception of Professor Clinton, whose expertise in Indian law theoretically, at least, requires a knowlege of Indian history). The allegations against Churchill are serious and require of the panelists a serious knowlege of academic plagiarism and/or Indian history to properly discharge their duty. Is it that hard to find an academic who A) has a scholarly expertise in one of the areas pertaining to the allegations against Churchill, and B) hasn't come out in a very public manner as pro-Churchill? 

It's not as though no such experts exist. We've found a solid list of academics and experts who, while some (or all) of whom may share academia's leftist tilt, at least bring to the investigation some expertise in Indian history (we'll look at plagiarism experts at a later date). In no particular order:

• Charles Wilkinson, University of Colorado - Boulder. Professor Wilkinson has published extensively on Indian sovereignty and law.
• Joseph McGeshick, Fort Peck Community College. Fort Peck is the tribal college for the Assiniboin tribe, who were greatly affected by the 1837 smallpox epidemic. Professor McGeshick has the added cache of being an enrolled Chippewa, and is an expert on the history of the local Plains Indians.
• Shepard Krech, Brown University. Professor Krech is the author of a book on the ecological aspects of Indian life.
• Elizabeth Fenn, Duke University. Professor Fenn has published an award-winning book on American Indian smallpox epidemics, as well as an award-winning article on biological warfare in American history (including deliberate smallpox infection).
• C. Adrian Heidenreich, Professor of Native American Studies at Montana State University-Billings. Professor Heidenreich is an expert on Plains Indians history.
• Michael K. Trimble, Ph.D. Dr. Trimble is the chief curator for the Army Corps of Engineers; he served as the lead forensic archeologist on the team that investigated the mass graves found in northern Iraq. He also happens to have written his dissertation on the Mandan smallpox epidemic of 1837.
• Michael O’Brien, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Professor O’Brien led the excavation of Fort Clark, the site of the 1837 smallpox outbreak among the Mandans. He also supervised the above-mentioned Michael Trimble’s dissertation on the 1837 epidemic.
• W. Raymond Wood, University of Missouri-Columbia. Professor Wood is an expert on Plains Indians.
• Barton H. Barbour, Boise State University. Professor Barbour is the author of Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade, in which he examines the Mandan smallpox epidemic.

CNews 13January06

Mildly OT: Speaking of self-identification, four University of Hawaii at Manoa professors have helpfully identified themselves as idiots

"Ironically, the very people who support Churchill's rhetoric would deny the right that he so freely uses to Conservative voices on campus." Aldrich said. "Freedom of speech was a right held sacred by Patrick Henry himself. As the saying goes, 'I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.' Those who don't believe the liberal ideology espoused by their professors and peers should never be afraid, or prohibited, from raising their voices."

Aldrich's visit to CU-Boulder kicks off the nonprofit's 2006 "Raise your Hand, Raise your Voice" tour. The tour will address the importance of college students speaking up for what they believe inside and outside the classroom and will encourage students to begin a partnership effort to build lasting alliances among minority conservatives.

Aldrich will be speaking in The Hellems Art and Sciences Building, Room 201 at 7:00pm.

CNews 12January06

According to Yahoo:

Conservative author and activist Gary Aldrich will be coming to CU-Boulder on January 18th 2006 to defend embattled Professor Ward Churchill. Aldrich is the president of the Patrick Henry Center, a non-profit group that believes in the fundamental right of free speech, even for those who do not share its conservative beliefs.

Funny, we don't recall anyone anywhere trying to limit Churchill's free speech. This smacks more of a 'Gary Aldrich Self-Promotion Tour' than it does anything else—particularly when, just eleven months ago, Aldrich had this to say about Churchill:

The recent flap about tenured University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, the wacky white man pretending to be of American Indian heritage, may not seem to have much in common with federal employees or federal judges. Upon closer examination, we see that all three suffer from the same mindset: Arrogance and insolence as a result of a failed system of lifetime tenure, a system that also guarantees plush retirement benefits.

Tenure ensures that professors can never be fired for incompetence, and the retirement benefits ensure that only a few will leave the profession on their own. Not coincidentally, the good professors are the ones who leave.  It is past time to rethink our old-fashioned belief that granting these excessive privileges and benefits to classes of citizens somehow ensures a desirable outcome.

CNews 11January06

We just noticed that Ward Churchill is listed as a "Chancellor" for Colorado in something called "International Association of Educators for World Peace." Rather than reprint any of their screed here, we challenge anyone to find a significant difference between the group's various documents and those of any other Marxist organization.

According to this article, Ward Churchill will be speaking at UC-Santa Barbara January 17th at least partially paid-for by the student body of UCSB.

Excerpt:

Churchill’s lecture is slated for Jan. 17 at 7:30 p.m. in Campbell Hall. Tickets are available at the A.S. Ticket Office, with prices of $10 for the general public and $2 for UCSB students.

[The Associated Students] Finance Board unanimously awarded [the American Indian Student Association] $350 for all expenses except talent costs, as the student group was ineligible to receive talent funding. To pay for a speaker’s contract costs, student groups must present the contract to A.S. at least two weeks before the event.

CNews 9January06

John over at Marathon Pundit smacks around some would-be Ward Churchill supporters and posts some interesting details about Churchill's ancient criminal record in Peoria.

While no academic program can promise its graduates will find a job in their profession immediately upon leaving school, graduates of our program have had a high rate of success, both inside and outside of academia. As graduates of an anthropology program that emphasizes interdisciplinary training, cultural studies, folklore and public culture students are in the fortunate position of entering a job market where interdisciplinary skills and academic breadth are highly valued. In addition to academic positions, our graduates may also work for the local, state, and federal government in museum work, cultural preservation, and public arts programs.

CNews 6January06

CHICAGO, January 6, 2006—Under pressure from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), DePaul University has lifted a vague ban on “propaganda” that it used last fall to silence student protest of a campus appearance by controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill.

“The revocation of the ‘propaganda’ ban is a step in the right direction for DePaul,” said FIRE Interim President Greg Lukianoff. “Yet DePaul’s disregard for freedom of expression reaches far beyond this one policy. The true test will be how DePaul reacts the next time students attempt to express dissenting opinions.”

CNews 5January06

From Bill Baar's West Side (via MarathonPundit), an Out-of-Context, Nonviolent Ward Churchill Quote of the Day:

"The Weather Underground is another thing that I will completely defend. Of the spectrum of responses mounted by the white left at the time, Weather was the most valid response of all, which does not mean that it actually had a viable strategy. But the response pattern was entirely legitimate. But ultimately, they got boxed into symbolic actions, and that is explicitly the case now as well.

"Brian Flanagan and Mark Rudd, who are in this new film about the Weathermen, are saying you know, we made a conscious decision to do only property actions,which was not the original impulse and not the original understanding. It was a sort of wounded response to having three people killed in the Greenwich townhouse explosion*. Well, in human terms I understand that these were their friends and all that, but if you are actually serious about engaging in an armed struggle and plan on testing the capacity of the United States, you have to anticipate that you're going to incur casualties. And three is hardly an insurmountable toll that's been taken. So again, you had middle class kids who were posturing as something else, and legitimately wanted to be something else and tried to transcend their origins. But they couldn't do it in and of themselves, and they didn't really have an interactive relationship with other movements, organisations, or people coming from a different experiential background and temper. They were a sort of bourgeois response. So you're saying you're going to do one thing, but actually you're unprepared to do it. I can understand that, but I don't accept that as being a model."

CNews 4January06

Two New Members Named to Churchill Investigative Panel

• José E. Limón, professor of English, Mexican-American Studies, and Anthropology (and Director of the Center for Mexican-American Studies) at the University of Texas at Austin
• Robert N. Clinton, professor of law at Arizona State University (he has a blog — or had one; it hasn't been updated since December 2004)
  

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose—as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"—as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now.

Excerpt (emphasis ours):

The UCB policy contains the University’s current definition of diversity. It also clarifies that race and ethnicity may be considered only when ethnically neutral criteria would fail to achieve a student population with a critical mass of historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups. There is little doubt that UCB has yet to attain a critical mass of such groups.  Therefore, the diversity initiatives described in A Blueprint for Action should be understood to refer to initiatives to achieve a critical mass of historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups.

A "critical mass" of students is defined as a sufficient number to represent a variety of points of view and to avoid such small numbers that might create a sense of isolation.

Excerpt (original in pdf, this from page 18):

El mundo tiene para todos, pues, pero resulta que unas minorías, los descendientes de los mismos que crucificaron a Cristo, los descendientes de los mismos que echaron a Bolívar de aquí y también lo crucificaron a su manera en Santa Marta, allá en Colombia. Una minoría se adueñó de las riquezas del mundo, una minoría se adueñó del oro del planeta, de la plata, de los minerales, de las aguas, de las tierras buenas, del petróleo, de las riquezas, pues, y han concentrado las riquezas en pocas manos: menos del diez por ciento de la población del mundo es dueña de más de la mitad de la riqueza de todo el mundo y a la... más de la mitad de los pobladores del planeta son pobres y cada día hay más pobres en el mundo entero.

The world has [plenty] for all, then, but it is certain minorities, the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the descendants of those who opposed [Simón] Bolivar here and also crucified [him] in their manner in Santa Marta in Colombia. A minority that has appropriated the wealth of the world, a minority that has appropriated the gold of the planet, the silver, minerals, waters, good earth, petroleum, the wealth, then, and have concentrated the wealth in few hands: less than ten percent of the population of the world is owner of more than half of the wealth worldwide and to... more than half of the settlers of the planet are poor and every day there are more poor men throughout the world.

Despite its massive military and economic power, it is very likely for America to be defeated in Iraq. The world’s only superpower has a history of cut and run.

It also has a legacy of injustice right from the very beginning of its history which is based on the extermination of the Red Indians who, from time immemorial, had for themselves the plateaus, the mountains, the rivers and the falls of the land.

CNews 3January06

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an overview of CU's tenure-review process. The big surprise? Ward Churchill doesn't think much of the process:

"There is absolutely no need for a review of tenure," which represents a concession to people who don't value the principles of academic freedom, he says. He also questions the competence of [retired Air Force general Howell M. Estes III] to do the review. "He's devoted a career to a completely different purpose," Mr. Churchill points out. "This is not a military enterprise."

CNews 2January06

As we mentioned here (although the date appears to have changed), Ward Churchill will be in Washington, DC, this Wednesday for the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) Robert Cover Workshop "Academic Freedom Under Assault" at the Association of American Law Schools' annual conference. (ht to reader TDR for reminding us)

CNews 1January06

You can vote for Ward Churchill (from among a vast array of worthy candidates) for Idiotarian of the Year here (and in true democratic fashion, you can vote up to three times)