The Try-Works

Most people I’ve talked to are willing to concede that Ward Churchill’s been the target of a smear campaign. Most understand that while his views on 9/11 ain’t exactly popular, he’s well within his rights to express them. Most people, likewise, are confused about the charges of academic fraud leveled at Churchill by CU.

Before we even start looking at the charges, however, we need to remember where they came from. As Churchill himself reminded us in his initial response to the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct’s full report, the entire procedure has been weighted to reach a pre-determined guilty verdict from the get go.

The May 9, 2006 Report of the University of Colorado (CU) Investigative Committee is but the latest step in CU’s ongoing attempt to fire me for political speech and, more fundamentally, for scholarship which challenges the orthodox “canon” of historical truth.

The investigative committee abandoned all semblance of due process and equal protection mandated by both the Constitution and the University’s own rules, in the process betraying the most basic principles of academic freedom.

Rather than assessing my work in terms of the methods and procedures of my discipline, the committee – which included no one with expertise in American Indian Studies – chose to determine for itself the “historical truth” about disputed matters. Unable to condemn my substantive conclusions, it engaged in a detailed post hoc critique of my citations.

The committee’s recommendation of harsh sanctions appears to have been driven primarily by my “attitude,” not by the specific conduct at issue. I was presented with the “Catch-22” option of apologizing for things I did not do or being condemned for being insufficiently contrite.

In this process, the investigative committee abandoned its mandate to serve as a nonadversarial information-seeking body, instead taking upon itself the role of both prosecutor and judge. It then did exactly what it accuses me of doing: it tailored its report to fit its conclusions. As a result, the document contains numerous false statements, misrepresentations of fact, and internal contradictions; it suppresses evidence and employs faulty logic to conclude that I engaged in research misconduct.

Keep reading.

The fact is, CU engaged in a number of dirty tricks, which have been openly questioned by even right-wing critics. The best of these can be found on the Ward Churchill Solidarity Network’s timeline of the Ward Churchill scandal.

For example? How’s about the committee deliberately stacking the deck against Ward Churchill, making a member of CU’s Law School — a hotbed of anti-Churchill sentiment which Churchill had specifically requested be precluded from the Committee — the Chair.

And not just any member, Mimi Wesson, who is in tight enough with the most vocal anti-Churchill member of the CU faculty, Rocky Mountain News columnist, FrontPage Magazine writer, and Bill O’Reilly guest, Paul Campos, that she actually helped prep his last book for publication (search “Wesson”).

And the one before that.

That’d be the same Paul Campos that caused Churchill to object to CU’s inclusion of any member of the Law School in the first place. In his own words:

Given the pervasive bias of CU administrators, I requested an outside committee and, because of bias exhibited by law school dean Getches as well as law professor cum columnist Paul Campos, I specifically objected to the inclusion of CU law faculty. The committee, however, was composed of three CU insiders, chaired by law professor (and former prosecutor) Mimi Wesson.

Or, how’s about CU publically releasing information about what is, by CU’s own rules, a sealed investigation — deliberately pandering to the openly hostile media.

More damning, however, is that it was the Interim Chancellor of CU who solicited the charges — from a few low-level academics who’ve been after Churchill for years. And only because — and he all but stated this openly — he couldn’t fire him for the actual essay. Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT summarized it best in an email to a CU employee:

Without reservations, I support Churchill’s right to free speech and academic freedom, and regard the attack on him as scurrilous - and by now craven cowardice as well, as the state authorities and other critics pretend that the issue is (suddenly) his academic credentials and ethnic origins. That’s a real disgrace.

As for his work, I’ve never read this article [on 9/11] and have no interest in doing so–in fact, would not do so as a matter of principle in the present context, for reasons that go back to the Enlightenment origins of defense of freedom of speech. I was interviewed by Colorado newspapers, and told them basically what I’ve just written. I was then asked what I thought of his earlier work, and told the truth: that I found it serious and important, stressing again that these comments have precisely nothing to do with the outrageous events now underway.

I have no idea what the plagiarism and other issues are, [but] if the charges were serious, they would have been brought up before. For what it’s worth, there’s no indication of that in anything of his I read–that is, nothing more than is standard in scholarship. . . . . Such matters are sometimes raised in the context of political persecution, by cowards who are desperately seeking to conceal what they are really doing. Seems pretty transparent in this case. Why now and not before?

Nor is Chomsky alone. In fact there have been several petitions featuring the signatures of hundreds of academics who concur. (Here, here, and here, for example.) There have also been full page ads in newspapers and academic conferences saying the same.

And, as a sidenote, it might be worth considering why, with literally hundreds of statements of support pouring in from around the globe, not one of them has appeared in a single MSM media outlet?

So, bearing all that in mind, let’s turn to the charges themselves. As it stands, they’re pretty meagre, consisting of about a half dozen footnotes and some ghost-writing — about a dozen paragraphs in a body of work that runs to 20+ volumes at this point. In fact, the aforemention committee assigned to investigate his work, has even admitted as such:

The seven allegations considered by this Committee refer to only a small fraction of Professor Churchill’s extensive body of academic work. Allegations A, B, C, and D cite no more than a few paragraphs within much longer essays (though the accounts at issue are repeated in multiple publications). Allegations E, F, and G deal with questions of authorship concerning essays written by Professor Churchill that appear to reproduce passages from one printed pamphlet and two essays written by other scholars without appropriate acknowledgment.

However, as they made perfectly clear later in the report, it wasn’t the actual substance of the charges that ultimately lead them to condemn him, it was his attitude (page 98).

So, bearing the above in mind, let’s turn to the allegations question. Now, I don’t have any idea what Churchill’s defense will be, but some rather obvious problems with some of the charges jump out at me.

Allegation #1. John LaVelle’s charge that Professor Churchill has repeatedly attributed a “blood quantum” standard of Indianness to the General Allotment Act that doesn’t exist.

You need look at no further source than Mr. LaVelle’s own work to dismiss this one. After all, not once in any of Mr. LaVelle’s quotations that purport to prove his case, does Professor Churchill claim the blood quantum standard was contained explicitly in the General Allotment Act. Not once. His argument was, is, and as far as I can tell, has always been, that the blood quantum was defined in ancillary material, but by its enforcing of degrees of Indianess, the General Allotment Act necessarily enforced a blood quantum.

I understand that there’s a certain amount of subtlety there which shoddy readers of the sort seemingly found in abundance in the local media can’t seem to grasp, but some might call connecting those kind of dots, well, scholarship.

Allegation #2. That Churchill has lifted passages from several authors whom were included in a fifteen-year-old book called The State of Native America.

This one also originates from John LaVelle. Sort of. What Mr. LaVelle actually alleges is that Professor Churchill actually ghost-wrote several of the essays included therein.

Which he did. And which he admits. And which is pretty hard to argue otherwise, in that a brain-damaged six-year-old could look at the essays, all of which written in Professor Churchill’s signature style, and come to one of two conclusions: either (1) Churchill wrote the essays, or (2) the people he ghost-wrote them for wrote his other 25+ books.

People can get exercised about ghost-writing all they want. But the fact is, it’s hardly an uncommon practice. Hell, there are classes on the subject at major universities, and many, if not most, textbooks appearing in your local university classes are substantially ghost-written. Unsavory, perhaps. But it’s the norm, and to out Ward Churchill for it is impressively disingenuous — not to mention fairly good evidence of selective prosecution.

Y’know, in the interest of curtailing his protected free speech.

Allegation #3. The much touted Dalhousie Report, alleging that Professor Churchill plagiarized work by Fay Cohen for inclusion in the aforementioned The State of Native America.

The hitch? He didn’t write the essay included in The State of Native America. Nor is he listed as the author of the essay. He is given attribution as the essay’s compiler, but as he explains it, that came from his serving as a glorified copy-editor to the piece when the editor of the book handed it to him, already written. Furthermore, the Dalhousie Report never directly accuses Professor Churchill of plagiarism. In Professor Churchill’s own words, from an interview with Joshua Frank:

Cohen took an essay she contributed to a book in 1991 and the piece in Jaimes’ book to the legal counsel at her university - she’s at Dalhousie, in Nova Scotia- asking him to do a comparison and render a legal opinion as to whether plagiarism was involved. He then wrote up an internal report concluding that there was. It’s important to note, I think, that although it’s implied on the first page of the “Dalhousie Report,” as the document’s been called in the press, it’s nowhere stated therein that I myself actually plagiarized anything. If it did say that, Fay Cohen would presently be the named defendant in a defamation suit brought in the Queen’s Court of Nova Scotia. But it doesn’t.

In any event, that was the end of it for quite a long while. Cohen used the report internally, at Dalhousie, for whatever purpose, and never said another word. Not to me, not to Jaimes, not to the publisher. Nobody. Hell, she didn’t even forward a copy to the granting agency to which she was applying when the report was written in 1997. It wasn’t until the campaign against me was kicked off in late January 2005-that is, eight years after the report, thirteen after the supposed plagiarism-that she suddenly felt “obliged to come forward.” Actually, I can document the fact that she felt no such “need” even then. Not until John LaVelle and Dan Caplis from Denver’s Clear Channel KHOW radio went to work on her.

Allegation #4: Ward Churchill invented a genocide.

This is my favorite. It comes from a Sociology professor, with no expertise in history, let alone American Indian history. After about ten years of maintaining as a blog entry on his personal web site, he finally got it published six months or so ago.

His conclusion is as follows: “While there was a smallpox epidemic on the Plains in 1837—historians agree, and all evidence points to the fact—that it was accidental, and the Army wasn’t involved.”

Which sounds good. But as you might expect, he’s missed a couple major points, which it took me all of about fifteen minutes skimming the bookshelf to locate.

Like that no less a historian than Francis Jennings has made a nearly identical allegation to Professor Churchill’s in his The Founders of America.

The Mandan commercial reign came to an abrupt end in 1837 when the American Fur Company’s steamboat brought smallpox up the Missouri. By spring of 1838, the Mandan population of about 1,500 was reduced to 130, and the survivors had been assimilated among other peoples. Their picturesque culture as an integrated whole has disappeared.

In the sequel, the American Fur Company’s men picked up the pieces of Mandan commerce. Sometimes disease struck Indians too conveniently for an inquirer’s peace of mind. The present writer cannot forget the deliberate infection of smallpox that occurred at Fort Pitt in 1763. Whether the Mandan epidemic occurred innocently or by design has been the subject of local rumors.

Not to mention that far from being invented by Professor Churchill, the Mandan smallpox theory had been around for about a hundred and fifty years before the big guy ever put pen to paper.

It started with the principle leader of the Mandan, Four Bears, a gentleman known for his friendliness to whites.

Right up until the smallpox epidemic in question.

Which killed him.

His last words:

I have never called a White Man a dog, but today, I do pronounce them to be a set of black-hearted dogs . . . I have been in many battles, and often wounded, but the wounds of my enemies I exalt in . . . I do not fear Death, my friends. You know it, but to die with my face rotten, that even wolves will shrink with horror at seeing me . . . Listen well what I have to say, as it will be the last time you will hear me. Think of your wives, children, brothers, sisters, friends, and in fact all that you hold dear—all are dead, or dying, with their faces all rotten, caused by those dogs—the whites. Think of all that, my friends, and rise all together and not leave one of them alive.

Not that I necessarily needed to even go to the little trouble I went to. You see, as Teachers for a Democratic Society member Reggie Dylan noted, the CU Investigative Committee themselves actually conceded the point:

Our investigation has found that there is some evidence in written accounts of Indian reactions in 1837 and in native oral traditions that would allow a reasonable scholar who relies heavily on such sources to reach Professor Churchill’s interpretation that small pox was introduced deliberately among Mandan Indians near Fort Clark by the U.S. Army, using infected blankets. We therefore do not conclude that he fabricated his account.” (pp. 67-68 of the Report of the Investigative Committee)

Which begs the rather obvious question that Dylan also posed: then why the hell is he getting fired?

Just asking.

There’s an even broader question at play than each of these allegations, however, and that’s the Committee’s definition of research misconduct itself, which seems to include any usage of footnote they don’t like. (There’s a certain irony here, by the way, in that the Chair of said Committee hasn’t published a single scholarly piece in over a decade that I can locate, devoting herself entirely to her second career as a mystery novelist.) As Joshua K. Wilson pointed out in an article posted at Inside Higher Ed:

By stretching the meaning of “research misconduct” far beyond its true definition, and by supporting the suspension and even dismissal of a tenured professor for his use of footnotes, the Colorado committee is opening the door to a vast new right-wing witch hunt on college campuses that conservatives could easily exploit across the country.

If you don’t like a professor’s politics, simply file a complaint of “research misconduct.” According to the Colorado committee, if you can find a factual error made by the professor with a footnote that fails to prove the contention, that scholar is guilty of “research misconduct” and can be suspended or fired.

Regardless, it’s rather impressive that this is the best CU could do, if you think about it. They unleashed every right-wing neo-connish blogger, scholar and media source on the planet, and the best evidence of academic fraud they could cull out of Professor Churchill’s 20+ volume body of work is a handful of controversial paragraphs, most of them from a fifteen-year-old collection of essays which he didn’t even edit.

Leading to the natural question: given the amount of alleged wrongdoing that took place in said book, how’s come no one’s going after M. Annette Jaimes’ job? She’s listed as the editor, after all.

The answer’s fairly obvious. The CU administration could care less about the state of academia. What they care about is purging Professor Churchill. Not for any wrongdoing, but for expressing an opinion they don’t like. Most of Churchill’s so-called academic fraud is nothing more than a interpretation of historical evidence that differs from the mainstream (which, again, seems the very point of historical scholarship), and they want nothing but the mainstream taught.

Would anyone claim that Professor Churchill has never made a factual error, misattributed a source, or provided a sloppy footnote? Of course not. Go through any comparable body of work, and you’ll sift out dozens of errors. Trolling for errata ain’t difficult, especially in a prolific author.

But that’s a far cry from proving academic fraud. And the CU administration and right-wing media know it. They’re just not interested. What they are interested in is controlling discourse; in ensuring nothing like an oppositional viewpoint is ever espoused. They’re a neo-Stalinist hit squad, out to expunge the public arena of dissent.