The Ward Churchill Saga Continues

In another episode, our hero (and I use the term loosely) stands accused of academic fraud, in addition to falsely representing himself as a Native American.  Links via Instapundit.

University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos relates the story in the Rocky Mountain News.

The deeper one digs into the Ward Churchill scandal, the more amazing the story becomes.

Clearly Mr. Campos has a flair for understatement.

Consider: Churchill has constructed his entire academic career around the claim that he is a Native American, yet it turns out there is no evidence, other than his own statements, that this is the case.

Churchill has said at various times that he is either one-sixteenth or three-sixteenths Cherokee, yet genealogical reporting by the Rocky Mountain News and others has failed to turn up any Cherokee ancestors - or any other Native Americans - in Churchill's family tree.

Why should we care one way or another? We should care because Churchill has used his supposed Indian heritage to bully his way into academia. Indeed Churchill lacks what are normally considered the minimum requirements for a tenure-track job at a research university: he never earned a doctorate, and his only degrees are a bachelor's and a master's from a then-obscure Illinois college.

Churchill's lack of conventional academic credentials was apparently compensated for, at least in part in the eyes of those who hired him at the University of Colorado, by the "fact" that he contributed to the ethnic diversity of the school's tenure-track faculty.

To the extent that Churchill was hired because he claimed to be a Native American, he would seem to be guilty of academic fraud.

That pretty much covers it, as far as Native American credentials are concerned.  Now as for those academic writings...

Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar University, has written a paper that outlines what looks like a more conventional form of academic fraud on Churchill's part. According to Brown, Churchill fabricated a story about the U.S. Army intentionally creating a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan tribe in 1837, by simply inventing almost all of the story's most crucial facts, and then attributing these "facts" to sources that say nothing of the kind.

You can read Thomas Brown's research into into these claims of biological warfare against the Mandan tribe.  Brown states that:

We are not dealing with a few minor errors here. We are dealing with a story that Churchill has fabricated almost entirely from scratch. The lack of rationality on Churchill’s part is mind-boggling. Why would a tenured professor decide to make up data—perhaps the most scandalous possible abuse of the academy’s norms—especially when in the Amherst affair, Churchill had a verified example of precisely the type of incident he wanted to invoke for his polemic purposes? How did Churchill expect to get away with a fraud that is so easily detected simply by reading the sources he cites in his own footnotes?

The answer comes into focus when you consider that Churchill is not writing for a scholarly audience. He originally wrote this story to inflame the emotions of a jury. Churchill publishes the bulk of his essays in small left-wing presses or in obscure journals that lack a rigorous peer review. He is writing for a non-specialist audience that takes him at his word. Mainly, Churchill is writing for other Indian activists, and for the broader reading population of leftists.

It concludes with this interesting passage:

The fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” comes to mind here. True historical instances of genocide may well become delegitimated by the promiscuous promulgation of mythical genocides such as Churchill’s. The triviality of Churchill’s falsifications comes into sharper focus when you consider that he originally invented his story of the Mandan genocide in order to evade an indictment that carried a maximum penalty of a $1500 fine and six months in jail.

Mr. Campos cites work done by University of New Mexico law professor John Lavelle as uncovering yet another instance of this sort of thing.  He concludes:

The saddest aspect of Churchill's case is that, in regard to his identity, he might not be guilty of fraud in the narrowest legal sense. According to the News, Churchill has been claiming to be a Native American since his high school days in Illinois. It may well be that by this point he has genuinely convinced himself that he actually is an Indian.

Of course some people believe they're Napoleon. But that's not a good reason for giving them professorships in French history.

Good point.

UPDATE: Noted also on Power Line.

Comments

[Karen]

The More I learn about this madman the angrier I get. Some of my grandkids are going to college, now I guess I am going to have to get my skillet out and defend them from the idiots that are supposed to be so durn smart

[Susan]

The issues surrounding Ward Churchill are more important and complicated than anything this shake-and-bake leftist has said. As an academic myself, I'm concerned that this situation will serve as an opportunity for right-wing attacks on, and wild assertions about, all of Academe and especially the institution of tenure.

Tenure does serve a crucial role in ensuring that faculty feel comfortable in pursuing and speaking the Truth -- lofty as that sounds. But there's a two-way commitment. The faculty member in turn is assumed to be a professional who deeply and passionately loves a discipline, loves it enough to stay current in it, loves to talk about it and teach it, and to contribute in meaningful ways to it -- and this includes contributing work that can stand up to scholarly scrutiny from colleagues in the discipline. One certainly does have to wonder how Ward Churchill ever achieved tenure at a flagship state university. Given the very real possibilities being bruited about that he isn't even who he says he is, and hasn't done what he claims to have done in his life, you have to wonder as well if the hiring process broke down. The hiring committee was probably made up primarily of other ethnic studies faculty. But there had to be administrative approval up the line (been there and done that myself for several years). Did no one thoroughly check his references? And again, during the tenure process over a few years, probably no one but his own department was reviewing his work. And for the life of me, I can't figure out how a unversity hired a guy into a tenure-track position, and not only tenured him but allowed him to chair a department, without his having a doctorate. Curioser and curioser. Bringing politics into the classroom...hard to judge in a "discipline" like ethnic studies, which is usually an advocacy bull session rather than a serious research/teaching unit. Many colleges and universities have language in their faculty personnel policies about using instructional time appropriately, or something to that effect. Advocating for certain political viewpoints or actions rather than teaching about a subject would seem to pass beyond what a professor is hired to do and how classroom time is being spent. That may be one way to get at grounds for his dismissal. And if he in any way misrepresented himself as a minorty or lied about his credentials in employment forms, there is usually language on some of the personnel forms that would allow the institution to fire him for lying.

But let's not jump to damning conclusions about all of American higher education. One university for whatever reasons dropped the ball in its duty to hire, evaluate, and supervise a faculty member appropriately. Letting the sunshine in on Churchill hasn't actually been so bad. Let his irresponsible rants be publicized. Let it be pointed out that he's a hypocrite for taking good pay from the very democratic, capitalist system he would like to see destroyed, while cloaking himself in one of its noblest concepts, freedom of speech. Better yet, do what the universities did well for centuries: set up a series of debates at the Colorado campus -- or anywhere else -- between Churchill and scholars in real disciplines who can take him apart on the illogic and historical inaccuracy of his assertions.

[Harry Forbes]

"One university for whatever reasons dropped the ball in its duty to hire, evaluate, and supervise a faculty member appropriately."

I am supposed to believe this is just an isolated case, when every university proudly bangs the gong about its efforts to "diversify" its faculty in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity, and while ideologically they become more and more uniform? No way. He is a bad example, but the practice of preferential hiring by race and gender has undoubtedly been elevated to an art form in most colleges.

I would call such behavior, when pervasive, racism.