Genociding Ward Churchill for over a 20th of a century

CNews 28August09

It's no longer enough to protect the tenure of frauds; AAUP President Cary Nelson labors to ensure second-hand frauds like Churchill's dog Benjie will have a protected sinecure, too:

From: Cary Nelson and Gary Rhoades <aaupnewsletters@aaup.org>
Subject: Working to end at-whim employment of contingent faculty

Date: Thursday, August 27, 2009, 9:59 AM

Most of the academic workforce is employed in full and part-time contingent positions.  Although there are exceptions, particularly in unionized settings, many contingent faculty members work under the threat of administrators acting to dismiss them without notice, with no review by fellow academics, no stated reasons, and no process for appeal.  They work at the whim of administrators.  Such conditions undermine educational quality and effectiveness. The AAUP serves notice that we are working to end “at-whimâ€� employment for contingent faculty.  At its June 2009 annual meeting the AAUP put Nicholls State University and North Idaho College on censure for terminating the services of contingent faculty members who had been teaching in good standing for many years: one had taught as a full-time contingent faculty member for twelve years; the other had taught for thirteen consecutive semesters as a part-time faculty member.  The North Idaho College case was the first in which the AAUP has censured an administration for violating Regulation 13 of the Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure (“Part-time Faculty Appointmentsâ€�), which draws on some procedural safeguards embedded in tenure to extend stronger due process rights for contingent faculty in part-time positions.  At the 2009 annual meeting the delegates also voted to remove the University of New Haven from the censure list.  Sanctioned for its dismissal of a full-time contingent faculty member, the university has now adopted procedures that provide full-time non-tenure-track faculty members after seven years of service with protections against involuntary nonretention that accrue with faculty tenure.  Again, the fulcrum for these efforts on behalf of contingent faculty is the due- process rights established for tenure track faculty.  The University of New Haven case points to the feasibility of institutions adopting policies for contingent faculty consistent with AAUP principles, to the benefit of their students’ education and the institution's effectiveness.  The rationale for these recent actions is clearly articulated by a 2005 investigating committee’s report on the University of the Cumberlands, which had this to say about “at-willâ€� employment practices: “Employment-at-will contracts are by definition inimical to academic freedom and academic due process, because their contractual provisions permit infringements on what academic freedom is designed to protect. Since faculty members under at-will contracts serve at the administration's pleasure, their services can be terminated at any point because an administrator objects to any aspect of their academic performance, communications as a citizen, or positions on academic governance-or simply to their personalities. Should this happen, these faculty members have no recourse, since the conditions of their appointment leave them without the procedural safeguards of academic due process. Moreover, the mere presence of at-will conditions has a chilling effect on the exercise of academic freedom. Faculty members placed at constant risk of losing their position by incurring the displeasure of the administration must always be on guard against doing so.â€� The AAUP is working to end “at-whimâ€� employment of faculty, and to extend substantially the due-process rights of contingent faculty members, in the interests of our students and society.  For the working conditions of these faculty members directly affect the learning outcomes of students.  We encourage you to support our fight for contingent faculty rights by joining the AAUP. Cary Nelson, AAUP President Gary Rhoades, General Secretary

CNews 25August09

CNews 21August09

CU has filed its response to Professor Doctor Indian Ward Churchill's Bombast Calculated To Get Judge Larry Naves To Change His Mind (actual title may vary); the introductory paragraph gives you an idea of the rest:

In his Motion to Amend, Professor Churchill provides no new or compelling arguments demonstrating that the Court's ruling was improper, choosing instead to repackage the same arguments the Court already rejected. The Motion to Amend amounts to little more than a publicity stunt where Professor Churchill claims that the Court's Order somehow amounts to a "crucifixion" and that "this country is less free as a result of this Court's holding." Stripped of its exaggerations and insults designed to provoke the Court toward an emotional response, the Motion to Amend is an empty pleading.

Under the rules, the trial court then has a period of 90 days to forward the record of the case, but that deadline can be extended.  My guess is that the deadline will probably be extended in this case because the court reporters need to transcribe and certify about 5000 pages of testimony.  It’s a big job, so I wouldn’t expect the record to be forwarded to the Court of Appeals until approximately late 2009.
 
After the record is transmitted, David Lane will have 40 days to file his Opening Brief.  Given that he’s going to need to review the 5000 page record as part of the briefing process, he may need to request additional time, but he may not.
 
After receiving David Lane’s brief, I have a period of 30 days to file an Answer Brief.  I normally try to complete my briefs in the 30 day period, but may need additional time depending upon whether I have other trials during the briefing cycle.
 
David Lane then has 14 days to file a reply brief. 
 
My guess is that this briefing process will probably last until at least February of 2010, but could extend by a month or two if either of the parties needs an extension on the briefs.
 
The briefs are then done and the judges at the Court of Appeals begin working on the case.  The case is assigned to a three-judge panel.  In a case with a large record, one of the judges is generally tasked with reviewing the record in detail to verify the citations within the parties’ briefs. The same judge normally prepares a bench memorandum that discusses the issues in the case and identifies potential issues for oral argument  With a record of this size, that review and drafting process could take several months, and it’s a task that the court generally likes to complete before holding oral argument.
 
The parties will have oral argument, which is 30 minutes of pure legal argument (no witnesses), that will probably occur between three and six months after the parties complete the briefing cycle. My best estimate is that the oral argument would likely occur sometime in the late-summer/early-fall of 2010.
 
After that, the judges will vote on the case and begin to prepare a written order.  Given the number and complexity of the legal issues in this case, that’s probably going to take a while.  My guess is that the Court of Appeals won’t issue an order until late 2010.

In short, it looks like CU students will have to obtain their Adult Minimum Daily Requirement of Fraud from some other source for at least another year.

Update: DrunkaBlob has more.

One of Churchill's fetishes is to pirate the identities of jailed felons and pump out pseudo-leftist screeds under their names. He did this in the '80s when he and nutcase wife #2, Annette Jaimes, colonized a freakish periodical called "Issues in Radical Therapy: New Studies on the Left." Churchill published bizarro pieces in that rag under the name of an imprisoned convict, one who just happened to have a knack for planting lies in footnotes.

CNews 18August09

[...] What if it is civilization itself—the very thing [Al] Gore and friends are saving—that is the cause of ecological catastrophe?“For the first time in more than three billion years of life, a living system is relentlessly creating the means not of self-preservation, but self-destruction” (Schmookler 175); that “living system is civilization. In the proper historical context, civilization is revealed to be a fascist system of control, a ten thousand-year genocide against sustainable ways of life that pushes humanity toward extinction.

Later, the author, Sean Swain, quotes scholar Doctor Professor Indian Ward Churchill to support his thesis:

Ward Churchill, a fierce opponent to European colonization of the Americas, contends that, for Europe to colonize the Americas, it had to colonize and de-tribalize Europe:

…In order for Europe to do what it has done to us—in fact, for Europe to become “Europe” at all—it first had to do the same thing to all of you. In other words, to become a colonizing culture, Europe had to first colonize itself. To the extent that this is true, I find it fair to say that if our struggle must be explicitly anticolonial…yours must be even more so. You have, after all, been colonized for far longer than we, and therefore much more completely. In fact, your colonization has by now been consolidated to such an extent that….you no longer even see yourselves as having been colonized. The result is that you’ve become self-colonizing, conditioned to be so self-identified with your own oppression that you’ve lost your ability to see it for what it is, much less to resist it in any coherent way.(“Indians” 236)

While this perspective is much less comfortable to face than the one presented by Al Gore, civilization—as it has for the duration of its ten thousand years of fascism and genocide—offers only two options: Collective resistance or death. How the colonized captives of civilization respond does not just determine the trajectory of this planet’s future. It determines whether there will be one.

CNews 16August09

Controversial American Indian scholar Ward Churchill contends that University of New Mexico officials tried to keep him from speaking at a nuclear disarmament youth conference being held at the law school this week.

A founding member of the Rainbow Council of Elders, Churchill wrote an essay after the 2001 terrorist attacks comparing World Trade Center victims to "little Eichmanns," a reference to a Nazi who helped orchestrate the Holocaust.

"It's good to be here, which, as I understand it, we almost weren't because of me," Churchill on Friday told about 50 youths attending the so-called Think Outside the Bomb 2009 National Conference in Albuquerque.

After his speech, in which he contended that American Indians had been colonized, he accused the university of using security concerns to try to keep him from speaking on campus. He said conference organizers were initially told they needed to pay for armed security if he was going to speak.

Ward's attorney and university officials hashed the matter out, and in the end, UNM paid for the unarmed security officers posted outside the lecture hall during his speech. His UNM visit occurred without incident.

CNews 11August09

CNews 7August09

CNews 6August09

Cynthia Franklin, professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, gives an email interview to Inside Higher Education to plug a book and takes a moment to confirm her active membership in Ward Churchill's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. (ht Leah)
Pertinent Excerpt:

Memoirs also can seem frivolous in the current academic climate. In addition to the draconian cuts to higher education, the humanities has taken a more serious turn in response to post-9/11 human rights violations, and the related crackdown on academics' rights to freedom of speech. Recent developments in the Ward Churchill controversy, which was set in motion by politicians' and pundits' reactions against Churchill's essay on the World Trade Center bombings, are instructive in this regard. This July, Judge Larry Naves upheld the University of Colorado regents' refusal to reinstate Professor Ward Churchill after the jury found that the university fired him in violation of his First Amendment rights. This ruling suggests the lack of protection afforded to and the intolerance for academics who speak out against the dominant political currents. At the same time, because the personal remains as popular as it is political, memoir might very well remain a viable source for academics to reach a broad liberal readership in a non-threatening — and uncensored — way during a time when overtly political departments and programs as well as faculty members are under siege in the name of "academic freedom."