More about Churchill at pirateballerina.com
From: salt-list: Society of American Law Teachers [mailto:SALT-LIST@LISTS.UMN.EDU] On Behalf Of Ehrenreich, Nancy
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 2:46 PM
To: SALT-LIST@LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: [SALT] Board Statement on Ward Churchill Case
To SALT Members:
Attached (and reproduced below) is a statement unanimously adopted by the SALT Board at our recent meeting in Boston. The statement condemns the University of Colorado’s politically motivated investigation of Ethnic Studies Professor Ward Churchill, including the CU investigative committee’s recommendation that Professor Churchill be fired. It also calls on the AAUP to investigate this matter. Our plan is to send the statement, along with a list of signers, to the University of Colorado administration, as well as the AAUP, by the end of September.
The Board believes that this case is illustrative of a nationwide effort to silence progressive academics and others who criticize the extreme rightwing policies of the Bush administration. We urge you not only to sign the statement and take whatever preventive action you think appropriate, but also to forward it to others on your faculty (or elsewhere) who you believe might share our concern with stopping these dangerous attacks on academic freedom.
Thanks,
Nancy Ehrenreich
Acting Chair, Academic Freedom Committee
Statement by the Society of American Law Teachers and Other Concerned Law Professors
The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), the largest membership organization of law professors in the United States, issues this statement to condemn the University of Colorado’s ongoing attempt to fire Professor Ward Churchill and to call attention to the campaign against academic freedom and critical thinking of which it is a part.
As discussed below, in 2005 the University of Colorado (CU) bent to political pressure and began a pretextual investigation of Professor Churchill in an effort to pacify those who opposed his expression of dissenting ideas. Professor Churchill’s case is now before the university faculty senate’s committee on promotion and tenure. That committee will soon make a recommendation to the university president regarding how CU should respond to the findings of its investigative committee. At this critical juncture, we urge concerned academics to join us in opposing the University’s politically-based harassment of Professor Churchill as well as its continuing efforts to fire him.
Attacks on dissenters are not new in American history, of course. But, as historian Ellen Schrecker reports, the current attacks on academics are in fact more dangerous than those that occurred during the infamous McCarthy era. According to Schrecker, the McCarthy era witch hunts (in which at least 100 academics lost their jobs) focused only on the outside activities of faculty; people were fired for belonging to the Communist Party or refusing to name names. But, as Churchill’s case shows, the attacks being waged against academics today include dangerous attempts to impose “political controls over core educational functions like personnel decisions, curricula, and teaching methods.” Ellen Schrecker, “Worse Than McCarthy,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb.10, 2006.
Although the investigation of Professor Churchill has ostensibly been about academic misconduct, in truth, it is a politically motivated process – and one of the many politically motivated attempts to silence dissenting voices nationally. This is clear from looking at how the investigation arose, what has happened during the investigation, and the findings of the investigatory committee.
In January, 2005, a few individuals at Hamilton College were upset by the political views of speakers being brought to that campus. They searched the Internet for information about Professor Churchill, an upcoming invited speaker, and unearthed an essay he wrote shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Excerpting, and taking out of context, sentences from that essay, they created a public outcry about Professor Churchill’s views. The uproar, fanned by right-wing media pundits, reached from New York to Colorado. Bowing to political pressure (the Colorado governor called early on for Churchill’s firing), the University of Colorado began an intensive investigation of all of Professor Churchill’s work – work which strongly criticizes the federal government’s policies. Thus, the investigation was clearly motivated by politics, not academic integrity. Politics has also driven the way it has been conducted.
Throughout the investigation, CU has disregarded its stated commitment to academic freedom and blatantly violated its own procedural rules. It conducted an investigation of “every word” published by Professor Churchill, actively solicited allegations of other sorts of sanctionable conduct, publicized personnel matters that were required to be kept confidential, and failed to provide Professor Churchill with funds for attorneys fees as required by University policies. These violations of its own clearly stated rules are further evidence that politics, not concerns about academic integrity, are the driving force behind CU’s actions with regard to Professor Churchill.
Not only do the procedural violations point to politically motivated suppression of dissent, but so, too, does the report of the CU investigative committee. The committee itself expressed “disquiet” about the political motivations behind the investigation. Yet it continued the inquiry, concluding with a recommendation that Professor Churchill be fired. Clothed in 120 pages of footnoted materials, upon close reading, the report shows itself to be a well-polished pretext for a political decision. A careful critique of the University’s report written by Professor Tom Mayer (found at: http://www.swans.com/library/art12/zig094.html) details the many ways in which the text of the report simply fails to justify its conclusions of academic misconduct.
Moreover, as an Open Letter From Concerned Academics (available at www.defendcriticalthinking.org) noted over a year ago, “The issues here have nothing to do with the quality of Ward Churchill’s scholarship or his professional credentials.” However one views Professor Churchill’s footnoting practices or his conclusions about particular historic events, it is clear that the University’s dissection of his work would not have occurred but for his political notoriety. Although the rallying cry was his essay about 9/11, Professor Churchill’s entire academic career has involved strong critiques of U.S. policies regarding American Indians and the government’s suppression of politically unpopular viewpoints. The irony here is inescapable.
The Churchill case is important not only on its own merits but also because it is part of a systematic effort to silence the voices of dissent and protest against the extreme right-wing policies of the current U.S. administration and its supporters. The attack on Churchill is just one of a number of attempts to silence critical teachers in schools around the country. Similar efforts have been directed at faculty members in California, Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Lynn Cheney’s American Council of Trustees and Alumni (formerly the National Alumni Forum) has attempted to target individual professors it thinks should be monitored. Right-wing groups send student “spies” into professors’ classes to record what they say. A high school teacher in Colorado was suspended for criticizing U.S. foreign policy and President Bush’s state of the union speech in his high school geography class. And right-wing activist David Horowitz has written a book identifying 100 professors whom he sees as “dangerous” for their left-wing views.
As the Teachers for a Democratic Society, a group formed by the professors listed in Horowitz’s book, has said:
The actions of the University of Colorado in [the Churchill] case constitute a serious threat to academic freedom. They indicate that public controversy is dangerous and potentially lethal to the careers of those who engage in it. They suggest that professors – tenured and untenured alike – serve at the pleasure of politicians and pundits. They call into question standards of scholarship and peer review at Colorado’s flagship institution. They endanger not only those scholars working in that area where historical inquiry, critical social commentary, and political activism intersect – an area that defines the true locus of academic freedom in an open and democratic society – but also those historically disenfranchised “others” who are struggling to have their perspectives and programs represented in, and legitimized by, the academic mainstream. (www.teachersfordemocracy.org)
It’s not only the progressive professoriate, however, that sees the importance of protecting academic freedom. Academic freedom is a core principle of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the leading voice for university faculty around the country. The U.S. Supreme Court itself has emphasized the centrality of free thought in our universities to the well-being of the nation:
[A]cademic freedom … is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom. “The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.” The classroom is peculiarly the “marketplace of ideas.” The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth “out of a multitude of tongues, (rather) than through any kind of authoritative selection.” Keyishian v. Board of Regents of University of State of N.Y., 385 U.S. 589, 603 (1967) (citations omitted).
If the University succeeds in its quest to fire Professor Churchill, any other university professor tempted to use his or her academic position to engage in controversial, constitutionally-protected speech about current affairs will think twice before doing so in the future.
Thus, we call on the University of Colorado not to fire Professor Churchill, but instead to reinstate him – and to publicly confirm its commitment to our most precious freedom, the ability to express dissenting views without fear of reprisal. We also urge the AAUP to investigate CU’s handling of the entire Churchill matter.
Information
Action
[end email]
Various Responses to the SALT
email
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Dear SALT Members:
Who among us does not have things - advertant and mostly inadvertant and some manufactured - that cannot be compiled against us? David Horowitz' book on the 101 Most Dangerous Professors should serve as warning about those who have had "substantial documentation being written" before some outrageous pretext for the blood thrust. There are a lot of sloppy and questionable [exploitable] things being done all the time -- the spotlight on Churchill "tolls for thee" if we do not protest.
Blessings,
Emily Albrink Hartigan, J.D., PhD.
Professor of Law
St. Mary's University School of Law, San Antonio
P.S. I wouldn't know Churchill's wife if I fell over her, God forbid.
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TO: My brethren SALT members and the Privilege and Tenure Committee of the University of Colorado, Boulder Campus
When SALT board members prepare a statement identifying themselves in that capacity, I submit that they have a responsibility to assess the issues and express themselves with the level of objectivity and reasonableness expected of law teachers. It should not be a mirror image of the careless, overstated polemics of the sort they (and I) criticize when penned by political extremists such as David Horowitz.
Unfortunately, the letter sent by the SALT Board to the University of Colorado's Privilege and Tenure Committee is no less a political document than were many of the initial attacks on Professor Ward Churchill. Waiving red herrings that have no relation to the charges against Churchill or the procedures or work product of the Investigative Committee that examined the charges, the SALT board members' statement unjustifiably condemns the committee's work as "one of the many politically motivated attempts to silence dissenting voices nationally" and implicitly further defames the academic investigators by asserting that "the report shows itself to be a well-polished pretext for a political decision." Instead of a careful analysis of the committee report, the operative thesis of the SALT board members' statement appears to be that if a professor makes controversial pronouncements in a manner that greatly offends the sensibilities of others, we must rally to his defense regardless of the merits since he cannot be held to account for his breaches of standards of academic integrity. (Would the board equally rally to David Horowitz' defense were he a university professor?) If we are to be governed by sound principles of conduct, justice requires that those principles be applied equally to the rich and poor, the famous and the infamous, the liberal and the conservative. Hence, we should be examining the merits of the charges against Prof. Churchill, not the demerits of some of his detractors.
The University of Colorado resisted the demands of the political lynch mob that were heard when the Hamilton College speaking invitation focused attention on Professor Churchill's outlandish (and racist) statements in his post 9-11 essay. However, that attention generated a variety of misconduct charges concerning Ward Churchill including some involving alleged breaches of standards of academic integrity. Rejecting as inappropriate the calls for punishment based on Churchill's expression of unpopular views, the University set about carefully examining the matters that are pertinent to maintaining the integrity of an academic institution*the charges of academic misconduct. The first stage of that procedure was referral of the charges to the university's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct which initiated an investigation by a committee of highly qualified professors from within and from outside the University of Colorado. That investigation is now complete and its report will be reviewed by the campus' Privilege and Tenure Committee.
Before SALT members sign onto the statement sent by the SALT Board to the University of Colorado's Privilege and Tenure Committee, they will be well advised to examine the Report of the Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder concerning Allegations of Academic Misconduct against Professor Ward Churchill. It is available at http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/download/WardChurchillReport.pdf What you will find there is that the investigating committee consisted of five distinguished scholars, including two law professors, with a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds that provided appropriate expertise to collectively examine the charges of academic misconduct filed against Professor Churchill. My reading of their report reveals an objective, thorough, unbiased investigation of the charges and a careful assessment of the merits and demerits of the work products whose integrity has been questioned. With respect to some of the charges, the committee exonerated Prof. Churchill based not on any evidence he presented or ever cited, but rather based on evidence discovered by the committee in its effort to discern whether there was any support for his challenged scholarly assertions. With respect to other charges it found him guilty of clear misrepresentation of referenced sources; of failure to properly reference sources he now claims to have relied on in some of his writings even though the nature of those sources (oral) would materially affect a reader's evaluation of the reliability of his historic accounts; of falsification and fabrication of purportedly historic events leading to a "myth" that was a significant assertion in many of his publications; of misappropriation of the work of another; and of placing another scholar's
name on his own work and then, in his own writings, citing to that work as though it was an independent source of authority. The committee's findings also reflect a concern that Prof. Churchill has done little to assure them that his methodological approach to scholarship will be significantly altered in the future. This despite the fact that Prof. Churchill himself has at times published statements reflecting an understanding of the core principles of academic integrity.
If you examine the report, you will also find that the committee was divided in its expression of views concerning the appropriate penalty. Two would suspend him for two years, two would suspend him for five years and one expressed the view that dismissal would be appropriate. In fairness, those judgments, which are not recommendations, can be criticized as unduly harsh since they do not, I think, give sufficient weight to: a) The possibility that some of the deficiencies in Churchill's work are the product of carelessness and oversight resulting from an exceptionally high level of publication, a not uncommon problem too often generated by the pressures of what has become an unsound basis for achieving academic status and rewards. b) The university's failure to provide obviously needed academic mentoring for someone who was hired without a probationary period into a tenured position and where, in the committee's words, the university was knowingly hiring: "a charismatic public intellectual with no doctorate and no history of regular faculty membership at a university . . . in part because at that moment in the institution's history, it desired the favorable attention his notoriety and following were expected to bring." c) The more than a decade over which the academic deficiencies in Churchill's work went unchallenged by the university, allowing him to perpetuate his errors rather than recognize his need to apply himself to such tasks with greater care. In my unsolicited personal view (guided by over three decades of experience as a labor-management arbitrator and over forty years experience as a full-time academician), weighing both his revealed academic misconduct and the mitigating considerations, a one semester suspension and reprimand would be at the outermost limit of the degree of harshness of a sanction to be imposed in this case.
Alvin L. Goldman
Professor of Law
University of Kentucky
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Dear SALT Members:
I would also like to point out that the failure of the Board to consult scholars in the field of Indian law is a grave oversight.
Carole Goldberg
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From: "Kevin Gover" <Kevin.Gover@asu.edu>
To: SALT-LIST@LISTS.UMN.EDU, mahmud@SEATTLEU.EDU
Date: Friday - September 22, 2006 11:16 PM
You can't seriously believe this addresses satisfactorily the dishonesty inherent in failing to reveal that Churchill's wife is a member of the
Board.
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From: "Monroe Freedman" <Monroe.H.Freedman@hofstra.edu>
To: SALT-LIST@LISTS.UMN.EDU
Date: Saturday - September 23, 2006 10:46 AM
Having been the subject of a concocted disbarment procedure as well as an effort to revoke my tenure, and having represented several other
lawyers who have been similarly victimized (including at least one prominent member of SALT), I am very sympathetic with problems of
selective prosecution. Nevertheless, there comes a point at which the wrongdoing is serious enough that it should not be overlooked even
though the person charged has originally been targeted for improper reasons. I expect that we can all think of various kinds of wrongdoing
that fall in that category, and, for my part, that applies to the present case.
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Dear SALT members,
I appreciate Alvin Goldman's effort to view this issue in a measured way. However, this imbroglio is not about errors in Ward Churchill's scholarship. We all understand that Churchill never would have been investigated, much less disciplined, if he had not made highly
controversial statements about the World Trade Center victims. This is a case of selective prosecution. If there are a hundred suspected plagiarists out there, and the forces of righteousness suddenly come crashing down on only one, and they come crashing down on her not
because of any plagiarism she might have committed, but because she said something that is viewed as subversive, then in my opinion, it is time for us all to stand together in her defense. If you were to
substitute "murder" for "plagiarism," then we would have an urgent obligation to
protect against a recurrence, and that obligation might outweigh the concern about political retaliation. I doubt, however, that Churchill will get away with any
questionable scholarly practice in the future. In fact, I just hope that those who do have time to read and assess all
the charges will somehow manage to arrive at a conclusion that screens out the witch-hunt frenzy and remedies any damage to Churchill's reputation stemming from that frenzy.
Sincerely,
James G. Pope
Professor of Law
Rutgers-Newark