by Jim Paine

from Dictionary.com:

stooge (stj)
n.

1. The partner in a comedy team who feeds lines to the other comedian; a straight man.
2. One who allows oneself to be used for another's profit or advantage; a puppet.

One would think that with all the public attention on the actions of CU's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct (SCRM) vis á vis its treatment of the Ward Churchill investigation, SCRM would approach the task of selecting the final investigating committee members with care, nay, with great fear and trembling. One would think SCRM would select professional historians and scholars with impeccable academic credentials, and just as importantly, no obvious predisposition toward Churchill's fate.

One would be oh so very wrong. SCRM announced last Tuesday (and then, only after a Colorado Open Records request from the Denver Post required it; it's interesting that the Post has since then remained silent on the information their request revealed)  the names of the members of the committee charged with conducting a full investigation of charges against Ward Churchill. Of the five, only one—Professor Marjorie McIntosh—appears to meet all of our earlier-noted selection criteria.

Some have said the committee is loaded with Churchill's ringers, but this is to vastly enlarge the meaning of the word ringer. Passing off an unknown but professionally-skilled ball player as a member of your company's baseball team—that would be bringing in a ringer. SCRM's action is more like introducing your company's baseball team—and then having the New York Yankees, in uniform, take the field.

So let's look at the line-up, shall we?


Marjorie McIntosh is a Distinguished Professor of History at CU, and has made no known comments concerning Ward Churchill, or much of anything outside her specialty (early modern English history), for that matter. She may be a rabid Churchill fan, but unlike the other members of the investigating committee, she is smart enough to keep her mouth shut about it. She has signed no petitions, marched in no parades, endorsed no ads supporting Churchill.

Ever the optimist, I prefer to see this as an indication Professor McIntosh will actually review the facts of Churchill's case, expertly examine the various charges of research misconduct, and rule accordingly. Professor McIntosh is the only member of the investigating committee with a right to be there.

On the other hand, judging by Professor McIntosh's fellow committee members, one could not condemn her for resigning out of sheer professional embarrassment.


The committee chairman is Marianne "my friends call me Mimi" Wesson, who teaches law at CU when she's not writing whodunits featuring a lawyer who also serves as director of a women's rape crisis center in Boulder. It would be uncharitable to say her website seems almost desperately intent on showing the visitor what an okay and cool kinda gal Mimi is. According to a Washington Post article from 1999, Wesson is a wannabe flower child of the '60s who stitched a peace symbol to her mortarboard at her Vassar graduation, and "is comfortable in this university city whose politics and culture are so out of whack with most of Colorado that it is often derided as the 'People's Republic of Boulder.' She is a liberal Democrat and a feminist and voted twice for Bill Clinton, the first time watching his election 'with something like joy.'" It's not a far reach to say Wesson is not only a true academic peer of Churchill, but the very prototypical liberal academic from which all other academic liberals are stamped.

Would Wesson vote for Churchill or against him? It's my guess she would vote for him; although as a former federal prosecutor she certainly understands the rules and the law, she may have just enough residual flower child in her to have a strong impulse to "stick it to the Man." Unfortunately, the Man she'll be sticking it to is the Colorado taxpayer and the CU student.


Robert Williams is a law professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and has had the most to say about Ward Churchill—all of it very supportive, practically adulatory. He's also a self-proclaimed Lumbee Indian with a chip on his shoulder about the White Man's legal system, and a devout adherent to Critical Race Theory, which holds race to be the very nexus of American life, the most important aspect of any dispute.

It's virtually impossible that Williams would vote against Churchill.


Michael Radelet is chairman of the Sociology department at CU and a nationally-known death penalty opponent. Although no record of a face-to-face meeting with Churchill is available online, Radelet joined Churchill (and Howard Zinn, Ramsey Clark, et al) in supporting "The International People's Tribunal for Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal." in 1997 (although he hedged his bets on Mumia in an interview with the Colorado Daily in 2001). Like Leonard Peltier, Mumia is a convicted cop-killer and cause célèbre among the nation's academic elite.

It is reasonably safe to predict a pro-Churchill vote from Radelet.


Bruce Johansen is an Indian Studies professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha whose work has been favorably reviewed and defended by Churchill, and who has made supportive statements about Churchill in the past, but who still maintained to a reporter as recent as this past Tuesday "I am going to do my best to be fair." Johansen has also threatened PirateBallerina with "serious legal jeopardy" for observing that there may be a quid pro quo at work here. Johansen's revisionist histories concerning the American form of government and its alleged reliance on the model of the Iroquois League of Five Nations have been thoroughly lambasted by any number of historians—and lauded by Ward Churchill, among others.

To suggest Johansen can be objective or even professional in his deliberation of the Churchill case is ludicrous in the extreme, a fairy tale that would challenge even a child's willful suspension of disbelief.


With at least three of the five safely in his corner, if not his pocket, Churchill stands to walk away from this months-long travesty of justice scot-free. The only hope is that public embarrassment for its obvious stacking of the investigative deck will force CU's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct to replace at least the two most egregiously biased members. Not only do CU's own regulations prohibiting conflict of interest and bias in such cases require replacement, but so does common sense, the abandonment of which is apparently mandatory to achieve a CU professorship.