Last Thursday,
a jury in Denver ruled
that the termination of activist-teacher Ward Churchill by the
University of Colorado had been wrongful (a term of art) even though a
committee of his faculty peers had found him guilty of a variety of
sins.
The verdict did not surprise me because I had
read the committee’s report and found it less an indictment of
Churchill than an example of a perfectly ordinary squabble about
research methods and the handling of evidence. The accusations that fill
its pages are the kind scholars regularly hurl at their polemical
opponents. It’s part of the game. But in most cases, after you’ve
trashed the guy’s work in a book or a review, you don’t get to fire
him. Which is good, because if the standards for dismissal adopted by
the Churchill committee were generally in force, hardly any of us
professors would have jobs.
At least two reviewers of my 2001 book
“How Milton Works”
declared that my reading of “Paradise Lost” rests on an unproven
assumption that Milton repeatedly and designedly punned on the
homonyms “raised” (elevated), “razed” (destroyed) and “rased” (erased).
I was accused of having fabricated these puns out of thin air and of
building on the fabrication an interpretive house of cards that fell
apart at the slightest touch of rationality and evidence.
I use the criticism of my own work as an
example because to talk about the many others who have been accused of
incompetence, ignorance, falsification, plagiarism and worse would be
bad form. And it wouldn’t prove anything much except that when
academics assess one another they routinely say things like, “Professor A
obviously has not read the primary sources”; “Professor B draws
conclusions the evidence does not support”; “Professor C engages in
fanciful speculations and then pretends to build a solid case; he’s
just making it up”; “Professor D does not acknowledge that he stole his
argument from Professor E who was his teacher (or his student).”
The scholars who are the objects of these
strictures do not seem to suffer much on account of them, in part
because they can almost always point to positive reviews on the other
side, in part because harsh and even scabrous judgments are understood
to be more or less par for the course. And I won’t even go into the
roster of big-time historians who in recent years have been charged with
(and in some instances confessed to) plagiarism, distortion and
downright lying. With the exception of one, these academic malfeasants
are still plying their trades, receiving awards and even pontificating
on television.
Why, given these examples of crimes or errors
apparently forgiven, did Ward Churchill lose his job (he may now regain
it) when all he was accused of was playing fast and loose with the
facts, fudging his sources and going from A to D in his arguments
without bothering to stop at B and C? In short, standard stuff.
The answer Churchill’s partisans would give
(and in the end it may be the right answer) is “politics.” After all,
they say, there wouldn’t have been any special investigative committee
poring over Churchill’s 12 single-author books, many edited
collections and 100-plus articles had he not published an Internet
essay on Sept. 12, 2001, saying that the attacks on the World Trade
towers and the Pentagon were instances of “the chickens coming home to
roost” and that those who worked and died in the towers were willing
agents of the United States’ “global empire” and its malign policies and
could therefore be thought of as “little Eichmanns.”
These incendiary remarks were not widely
broadcast until four years later, when Bill O’Reilly and other
conservative commentators brought them to the public’s attention. The
reaction was immediate. Bill Owens, governor of Colorado, called
university president Elizabeth Hoffman and ordered her to fire
Churchill. She replied, “You know I can’t do that.” (Not long after, she
was forced to resign.)
The reason she couldn’t do it is simple. A
public employee cannot be fired for extramural speech of which the
government (in this case Gov. Owens) disapproves. It’s unconstitutional.
A public employee can be fired, however, for activities that indicate
unfitness for the position he or she holds; and after flirting with the
idea of a buyout, the university, aware that questions had been raised
about Churchill’s scholarship, appointed a committee to review and
assess his work, no doubt in the hope that something appropriately
damning would be found.
It was, or so the committee said. It found
inaccuracies in Churchill’s account of the General Allotment Act of
1887, a piece of legislation generally considered to be a part of an
extended effort to weaken the force of Native American culture. In his
discussion of the act, Churchill described it as a “eugenics code”
that uses the “Indian blood quantum requirement” to achieve its end.
But there is no mention of any “blood quantum” requirement in the
text. Indeed, the act “contained no definition of Indian whatsoever.”
But then, after having established what could
possibly be classified as a misrepresentation, the committee turned back
in Churchill’s direction, and allowed that while the blood quantum
requirement was not “expressly” stated, there was some force to
Churchill’s contention that it is “somehow implied.” “In this
respect,” the committee continued, there “is more truth to part of
Professor Churchill’s claim” than his critics are “prepared to credit.”
Still Churchill, the committee went on to say,
was factually wrong when he says of the Act that it introduced “for
the first time” the “federal imposition of racial Indian ancestry” as a
device designed to force assimilation. That happened, the committee
reported, 40 years earlier. So that while Churchill gets “the general
point correct,” he “gets the historical details wrong.” Moreover, when
his errors were pointed out by another researcher in the field,
Churchill simply ceased making the erroneous claims and “offered no
public retraction or correction.” The conclusion? “Professor Churchill
deliberately embellished his broad, and otherwise accurate or, at least
reasonable, historic claims regarding the Allotment Act of 1887 with
details for which he offered no reliable independent support.”
That’s it? He didn’t verify some details and
he didn’t denounce himself? There must be something else and there is.
Churchill, the committee noted, argues that the U.S. army, among
others, “intentionally introduced the smallpox virus to Native American
tribes,” and he claims also that circumstantial evidence implicates
John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) in this outrage.
The committee found that with respect to
Smith, Churchill “did not connect the dots in his proposed set of
circumstantial evidence.” As for the allegation that that the army
spread smallpox by knowingly distributing infected blankets, the
committee found no support in written records, but notes that Native
American oral traditions rehearse and pass down this story, which has
at least one documented source in British General Jeffrey Amherst’s
suggestion in 1763 that infected blankets be given to hostile Indians.
The conclusion? “We do not find academic
misconduct with respect to his general claim that the U.S. Army
deliberately spread smallpox.” In addition, the committee acknowledges
that “early accounts of what was said by Indians involved in that
situation and certain native oral traditions provide some basis for
[Churchill’s] interpretation.”
In short, it seems for an instant that
Churchill is going to be declared (relatively) innocent of the most
serious charges against him. But after noting that he cited sources that
do not support his argument and failed to document his assertion that
up to 400,000 Indians died in the smallpox epidemic, the committee
turned severe and declared, “We therefore find by a preponderance of
the evidence a pattern of deliberate academic misconduct involving
falsification, fabrication, and serious deviation from accepted
practices.” On the evidence of its own account the committee does not
seem to have earned its “therefore.”
The question of “accepted practices” is raised
again in a particularly focused form when the committee considers the
issue of Churchill’s “ghostwriting.” On several occasions Churchill
wrote essays to which others put their names and then, at a later date,
he cited those essays in support of an argument he was making. The
committee decided that a charge of plagiarism could not be sustained
since it is not plagiarism to cite ones own work (even if it bears
another’s name). That does not dispose of the issue, however, because in
the committee’s view “ghostwriting” is itself a “form of misconduct”
that fails “to comply with established practices” and deceives readers
into thinking that an author has independent authority for his
assertions, when in reality the only authority he has is his own.
Churchill’s response came in two parts. First
he pointed out that university regulations (Colorado’s or anyone else’s)
do not contain guidelines relating to ghostwriting. There seems,
therefore, to be no “established” practice for him to violate. Second,
he challenged the assertion that a text he wrote cannot be properly
cited as independent support for something he is writing in the present.
He argued (during the committee hearing and in
Works and Days,
2009) that what ghostwriters do in the academy and elsewhere is give
voice to the views and conclusions of others. All the ghostwriter does
is supply the prose; the ideas and contentions belong to the third
party, who, if she did not agree to “own” the sentiments, would decline
to affix her name to them. Thus when the ghostwriter subsequently cites
to the text of which he has been merely the midwife, he is citing not to
himself but to the person to whose ideas he gave expression. “It
follows that ghostwriters are under no obligation . . . to attribute
authorship to themselves when quoting/citing material they’ve
ghostwritten.”
Well, that’s a little tricky, but it is an
argument, and one that committee members, no doubt, would have a
response to. But all that means is that there would be another round of
the academic back-and-forth one finds in innumerable, books, essays,
symposiums, panel discussions — all of which are routinely marked by
accusations of shoddy practices and distortions of evidence, but none of
which is marked by the demand that the person on the other side of the
question from you be fired and drummed out of the academy.
There is, as I think I’ve shown, a disconnect
in the report between its often nuanced considerations of the questions
raised in and by Churchill’s work, and the conclusion, announced in a
parody of a judicial verdict, that he has committed crimes worthy of
dismissal, if not of flogging. It is almost as if the committee members
were going along happily doing what they usually do in their academic
work — considering , parsing and evaluating arguments — and then
suddenly remembering that they were there for another purpose to which
they hastily turn. Oh, yes, we’re supposed to judge him; let’s say
he’s guilty.
I can easily imagine the entire affair being
made into a teaching aid — a casebook containing Churchill’s “little
Eichmanns” essay, the responses to it by politicians, columnists and
fellow academics, assessments of Churchill’s other writings by friends
and foes, the investigative committee’s report, responses to the report
(one group of academics led by Eric Cheyfitz, a chaired professor at
Cornell, has formally charged the committee itself with research
misconduct), the trial record, the verdict, reactions to the verdict,
etc.
You could teach a whole course — probably more
than one — from such a compilation and one of the questions raised in
such a course would be the question I have been asking: How did a
garden-variety academic quarrel about sources,evidence and documentation
complete with a lot of huffing and puffing by everyone get elevated
first into a review of the entire life of a tenured academic and then
into a court case when that academic was terminated. How and why did it
get that far?
I said earlier that the answer Churchill
partisans would give is “politics.” It is also the answer the jury
gave. It was the jury’s task to determine whether Churchill’s dismissal
would have occurred independently of the adverse political response to
his constitutionally protected statements. In the ordinary academic
course of things would his writings have been subject to the extended
and minute scrutiny that led to the committee’s recommendations? Had
the governor not called Hoffman, had state representatives not appeared
on TV to call for Churchill’s head, had commentators all over the
country not vilified Churchill for his 9/11 views, would any of this
have happened.? The answer seems obvious to me and it has now been given
authoritative form in the jury’s verdict.
Let me add (I hope it would be unnecessary)
that nothing I have said should be taken either as a judgment (positive
or negative) on Churchill’s work or as a questioning of the committee’s
motives. I am not competent to judge Churchill’s writings and I express
no view of them. And I have no doubts at all about the integrity of
the committee members. They just got caught up in a circus that should
have never come to town.
