April 3, 2009, 9:04 am
On several occasions, I have (unpopularly) argued that Ward Churchill’s firing from his tenured faculty position at the University of Colorado was unjustified, as the termination seemed to pretty clearly be due to his remarks about 9/11 rather than any academic mis-conduct.
While Colorado has tried to argue that they fired him because his academic work was weak, I have argued that it is no weaker than much of the work done by any number of high-profile racial and gender studies departments (Duke University being just one recent example). Racial and gender studies professors are generally evaluated based on their political activism, not their scholarship, so firing Churchill was both wrong on a first amendment basis and wrong because his statements on 9/11 were merely conforming to the standards of his chosen academic discipline.
A jury seems to agree:
A jury found on Thursday that the University of Colorado had wrongfully dismissed a professor who drew national attention for an essay in which he called some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks “little Eichmanns.”…
The jurors found that Mr. Churchill’s political views had been a “substantial or motivating” factor in his dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been dismissed anyway.
If you don’t believe me about activism trumping scholarship as a criteria for hiring racial and gender studies professors, just listen to Churchill’s lawyer:
Mr. Lane, Mr. Churchill’s lawyer, said his client had been a spokesman throughout his academic career for disempowered people and causes — a trait, Mr. Lane said, that never made Mr. Churchill popular with people in power. “For 30 years, he’s been telling the other side of the story,” Mr. Lane said.
Missing are terms like study, research, investigation, etc — this is activism, pure and simple. And Colorado knew it and wanted it when they hired him, so it was wrong for them to fire him for it.
March 27, 2009, 12:25 pm
Ward Churchill’s civil suit to be reinstated to his teaching post is apparently in court. Churchill is arguing that the nominal reasons for his termination (mostly shoddy academic work) were not alone enough to have normally justified his termination, and that he was in fact fired for his remarks about 9/11. This is an important distinction, because tenured professors can generally not be fired for exercise of first amendment rights, no matter how wacky their statements.
In a post that spawned a number of angry emails, I actually said I thought Churchill was fired improperly. There is plenty of evidence that the Native American studies department at Colorado, and gender/racial studies departments in general, have never enforced any sort of academic rigor, and it is hypocritical to suddenly discover such rigor for this case. Churchill has been rewarded and promoted historically for much of the same work he is nominally getting fired for now. Further, examples are legion of heads of various elite university racial and gender studies departments who exercise the same or less academic rigor as Churchill but whom no one is criticizing. As I mention in my earlier post, Cal State Long Beach hired a paranoid schizophrenic who had served prison time for beating and torturing two women as the head of their Black Studies department.
Frankly, Colorado is getting exactly what they hired. They weren’t looking for a research mastermind. They were looking for a politically correct hire to fill a void and create a department that made them look nice and progressive on paper. And that is exactly what they got.
Update: Here is a good example of the academic standards in many racial and gender studies departments, where political activism substitutes for scholarship. Churchill, by being slack on his research work and publishing but making high-profile and incendiary statements in public, was merely following the template of many such department heads.
