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.
