CNews 27February09
We've posted about this before, but it bears repeating: Professor Thomas Brown's "Ward Churchill’s Twelve Excuses for Plagiarism" (pdf; ht a tiny little birdy)
We've come into possession of a copy of Ward Churchill's chapter, "The Myth of Academic Freedom", from the book What Is Wrong with Academia Today?: Essays on the Politicization of American Education (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008) We're reading it now; our first impression is that for $119.95 (list price), one would expect much better proof-reading (seriously, the chapter is as overwrought with typos as it is with Churchill's compulsive footnoting). We'll post further impressions as we encounter them. BTW: with a nary a hint of irony, the book is subtitled "Essays on the Politicization of American Education."
Update: Sadly, throughout nearly 70 pages (pp. 135-204, all overwrought with footnotes, as usual [for the record, there are 268 footnotes to this chapter]) recounting his version of the debacle, Churchill repeats what he's said before, adding no new embellishments to his already fantastic version of events. Churchill repeats, for example (and almost verbatim), a claim he made a couple of years ago concerning his portrayal of the 1837 Mandan smallpox epidemic, to whit:
"[...] I've obtained the satisfaction of confirming not only that was I right in every essential of what I wrote/said about the "Fort Clark Episode," but that the reality of what happened there was actually much worse than I've contended."
And in the obligatory footnote to this assertion, he further claims:
"I am currently preparing a major essay rebutting each of the points raised by my critics and setting forth the new evidence I've uncovered."
Since The Perfesser thus far has failed to deliver on a single promise, we may be excused if we decline to hold our breath.
This iteration, however, does have a new tone to it—it reads like the sulky tirade of a bitter old drunk, featuring The Perfesser wrapt in the regalia of the August & Impeccably-Degreed Scholar who proceeds to impugn lesser academics (we assume he considers all academics lesser, but Churchill singles out professors Thomas Brown and John LaVelle as the primary recipients of his petty snides) who have dared to disagree with him. We also got some chuckles out of his characterization of us as "a conspicuously unscholarly Colorado horse-breeder" (pp. 183), which we'll guess is a step up from "two bloggers and a New Jersey cop." Another (ironic) chuckle is in the footnotes accompanying his spittle-flecked rant on PB: the tryworks blog is cited several times; tryworks, of course, has been disappeared by its author (a former CU adjunct professor) at least twice, and the pages Churchill cites no longer exist.
Update II: For background (and responses to most of the assertions Churchill continues to make with this new book chapter), see our "Footnoted Fallacies," and our compendium of links to "Scholarly (and Not So Scholarly) Refutations."
Update III: Okay, we've finished reading the chapter, and here's a synopsis [you're welcome] of what The Perfesser says: "Some of the stuff I wrote isn't as naughty as some have made it out to be; those guys are knuckleheads, anyway; lots of people have done the same or worse, and been rewarded."
CNews 26February09
Update: For those who just can't get enough Ayers, here's zombie's pictorial of Ayers and his wife, Bernadette Dorhn, in San Francisco to hawk their new book, Race Course Against White Supremacy.
DrunkaBoogieWoogie holds CU's eFeet to the eFire on the university's much abused (by DBAB) event recording policies.
CNews 25February09
Colorado Daily talks to Bill "I don’t regret setting bombs" Ayers, in town to defend a spiritual brother. Ayers also comments on his own detractors: "That wasn’t an honest portrait of either me or our relationship, and yet it was serving a very small and very disgusting political purpose." Interesting turn of phrase, there, Bill. That's precisely the phrase we'd use to describe building bombs to kill innocent people. (ht Leah)
CNews 24February09
Maximilian C. Forte over on his "Open Anthropology" blog flogs the same tired refutations to protest
Forte's main point seems to be that Professor Thomas Brown (who, if we remember correctly, was not on CU's committee investigating Churchill) in a comment to a blog post over at the Chronicle of Higher Education accuses Churchill of habitual fabrication; Forte goes on to define "habitual" for those third-graders following the case, and then dismisses this straw man with a Cheyfitzian "[a]nd yet, the CU Report only came up with seven select instances, with reference to over 12,000 footnotes." Well, once they discovered the bodies of two or three boy scouts under John Wayne Gacy's house, did they really need to find another 11,997 to know what he was? (Making Forte's argument even more specious is the fact that he doesn't even bother to confirm that the author of the CHE blog comment is actually Brown.)
Astonishingly, Forte later equates Churchill's invention of people who never existed in order to bolster his historical fabrication to Brown's use (in one of his refutations of Churchill's defense) of an imaginary college student to demonstrate the immorality of Churchill's historical misdeeds. It's hard to believe that even Team Teabag doesn't snicker at the inanity of Churchill's "defenders." One of our rotating quotes is from Friedrich Nietzsche: "'The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it with faulty arguments." Mission accomplished, Forte.
CNews 23February09
For those handicapping the grudge match of Churchill v. The Civilized World, Churchil's dog, Benjie, claims it will be held in district courtroom #6, which PB reader Leah (@sspats be upon her!) tells us is presided over by District Court judge Larry J. Naves.
CNews 21February09
From our Nope, Nothing Wrong Here department:
CNews 19February09
A liar's work is never done:
Drunkasansabelt had this first; he even has the poster promoting the liatribe (copyright 2009 PirateBallerina, all rights reserved). And natch, funnieresque commentary.
CNews 18February09
Speaking of willful ignorance: in a column in Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Bousquet ignores entire mountain ranges of evidence in order to baldly assert Professor Ward Churchill's innocence. This serves as an excuse to thump the tub for the latest issue of Works and Days, to which both Churchill and Bousquet are contributors.
Excerpt:
Churchill’s campus process was wrongly decided in the fallout of a political witch hunt, featuring a faculty committee that generated spurious charges of “plagiarism” and “research misconduct” that will not bear the scrutiny of history (nor, one hopes, the district court).
Well, Bousquet, the findings of that committee have held up well for many months now, despite the comic efforts of every shitpot academic on Churchill's Facebook friends list. Disgusting; self-delusion in an academic should be a capital offense.
(ht PB reader Orson Buggeigh, who notes the odd—though probably justified—disappearing of several of Snapple's comments to Bousquet's column)
Update: In the CHE comments section Professor Thomas Brown eats Bousquet's lunch. Someone calling himself "Marc" (who may or may not be Bousquet) responds with the following:
Churchill is a fraud and a fool in my view, and his termination was the result of full review by faculty and he had all the protections of due process. But his offenses were investigated as a result of a political firestorm. I don’t think that negates the legitimacy of his termination, but it is at least an interesting situation.
CNews 17February09
There's now a trial blog for the upcoming festivities. (via DrunkaJiffypop, who also comments on a particularly thickheaded op-ed piece by a clueless self-proclaimed conservative)
Mildly OT: Not that it hasn't been said a thousand times already, but de Tocqueville was freakin' prescient (as quoted in Michael Ledeen's "We Are All Fascists Now II" via lgf)
"That [Federal] power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?"Update: Speaking of prescience, after he signed the Biggest Hot Check In History today, President Obama said "it's the beginning of the end." Sure, the context in which he said it shows his prescience is—if it exists at all—serendipitous. But still.
Update II: Obama, keep the change.
 | The Perfesser demonstrates the sacred reach-around awaiting all who would forsake reason and follow Him. (ht Wm T Sherman, over at DrunkaSwiffer) |
Offensive and Controversial Speech for me, but not for thee.
CNews 16February09
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CNews 14February09
Not even remotely OT: Yesterday, politicians—elected by a nation educated by Ward Churchill, et alia—wrote the biggest hot check in history. Guess there is such a thing as a free lunch. If you're a cannibal.
Update: DrunkaWetnap notes that The One has chosen Denver as the location where he will sign that check. As Colorado Governor Bill Ritter notes, we are fucked. Sorry, did we say fucked? We meant to say so very fucked.
CNews 12February09
According to this article,
Update: PB reader Leah says: "The unnamed English professor in the article is David Downing, who is the editor of the obscure journal Works and Days. Works and Days is publishing a special double issue devoted to academic freedom, which includes an article by Churchill, and is holding the event as a tie-in with the journal's publication." We first observed this incredibly self-important publication here.
CNews 6February09
Courtesy PB reader Leah, a link to former Colorado Governor Bill Owens' deposition (pdf) taken January 30, 2009, regarding the upcoming civil trial to decide the case of
The depo peters out, but not before Lane utters our favorite quote (in response to Owens' "And incidentally, David, lots of people ignore my advice as well."):
"Okay. So, really what you're saying is — well, okay. I mean, you're conceding that — well, never mind. You've just blown about an hour's worth of cross-examination here."Incidentally, toward the end, Owens' counsel notes an interesting case, Jeffries versus Harleston, which may or may not be relevant.
If there's any legal gold for Churchill's case in this deposition, it certainly isn't obvious to the layman, but perhaps one or two of the lawyers in PB's vast readership might point them out to us.
CNews 3February09
This page over at the Ward Worship site suggests the upcoming trial of the century is scheduled to run from March 9th to the 27th, making it as lengthy as the Western Stock Show. Another similarity, regardless of outcome, will be the amount of bullshit Colorado taxpayers have to clean up afterward.
CNews 1February09
Not All That OT: Noam "Smartest Guy In The Room" Chomsky utters the year's first example of Academic Stupidity Syndrome (A.S.S.): "[Israel] has a right to defend itself. It doesn’t follow that it has a right to defend itself by force." (via lgf)
