Rocky Mountain News editorial calls for replacement of Williams, Johansen

Another CU-appointed panel to judge Ward Churchill's scholarship lumbered up to the starting line the other day - eight months after Chancellor Phil DiStefano promised a full investigation - and what do you know? Two of its five members were waving Churchill pennants.

Yes, it turns out that two members of the investigating committee are on public record extolling Churchill and his work. "A major scholar and public intellectual," gushed Professor Robert Williams of the University of Arizona. Churchill's books are "well-argued and intensively documented in a scholarly manner," enthused Professor Bruce Johansen of the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Couldn't the University of Colorado have just asked the Ward Churchill fan club - one surely exists in this age of celebrity worship - to rule on the charges of research misconduct that have been leveled against him and saved itself time and trouble?

For that matter, why go through the motions at all? Why not announce the pro-Churchill verdict right now and be done with it? 

Bruce Johansen is the author of several books that postulate that the United States' form of government was strongly influenced by (perhaps even modelled after) the Iroquois League of Five Nations. While some academics—notably Ward Churchill and Vine Deloria—have endorsed, defended, or otherwise supported Johansen's theory, other academics have not been so unskeptical.

Here is a selection of academic comments that somehow failed to make it onto the blurb list for any of Johansen's books:

"...[T]he present essay focuses on these topics--that is to say, on the formulation of the American union. It concentrates on the writings of Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen, who have made the most detailed and authoritative statements of the Iroquois influence thesis. It summarizes their arguments, examines the evidence, and concludes that their position is unfounded." Samuel B. Payne, Jr. "The Iroquois League, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution" in The William and Mary Quarterly.

"In fact, what [Grinde and Johansen] have created is a crazy quilt of inaccurate assessments, free-floating speculations, incorrect or disembodied quotations, and thesis-driven conclusions." Philip Levy, criticizing Grinde and Johansen's co-authored Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy in The William and Mary Quarterly.

"Throughout Exemplar of Liberty, [the words of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams] are misquoted, misattributed, decontextualized,. inaccurately paraphrased. liberally edited, and misinterpreted." Philip Levy, ibid.

"[W]hat Grinde and Johansen have written is an elaborate hoax...Indians were unimportant in shaping events on this continent that led up to the founding of the United States." Elisabeth Tooker in a review of Exemplar of Liberty for Northeast Anthropologist, as quoted by Johansen on this webpage.