The Genocide That Wasn’t: Ward Churchill’s Research Fraud

Lamar University Sociology Dept ^ | Thomas Brown

[Helms]

Best of the Web Today - February 7, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO


Great Moments in Higher Education
A second college has canceled a planned appearance by Ward Churchill, the pro-fascist University of Colorado professor of "ethnic studies" who cheered on the Sept. 11 attacks. Like upstate New York's Hamilton College, Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Wash., is citing "safety and security" as an excuse rather than forthrightly admitting it was a mistake to invite Churchill in the first place. Stephen Jordan, EWU's president, issued a statement Friday:

Two speakers invited to the EWU campus, Ward Churchill and Ron Jeremy, provide this university with a difficult challenge. . . .

We do not see this cancellation as a curtailment of Mr. Churchill's free speech right. Indeed, Supreme Court decisions raise legitimate question as to whether speech that incites panic or an immediate breach of the peace is protected by the First Amendment.

We are canceling an event, not an idea.

Mr. Churchill still has multiple venues for the outlet of his ideas. Neither this University nor the state's taxpayers are under any obligation to provide an appearance venue for Mr. Churchill if his presence threatens the safety and security of this campus.

Mr. Jeremy's appearance is not a security or safety issue, but we did recognize that the program, in its initial conception, inadequately served what the title Eastern Dialogues denotes, as a single viewpoint presentation is not dialogue.

With that in mind, Eastern has enhanced the discussion by providing a more comprehensive discussion of the issues at hand by giving a forum for alternate views before, during and after Mr. Jeremy's program.

With that in mind, Eastern has enhanced the discussion by providing a more comprehensive discussion of the issues at hand by giving a forum for alternate views before, during and after Mr. Jeremy's program.

So who is this Ron Jeremy fellow? The press release doesn't say, but you may remember him from such films as "Buttman at Nudes a Poppin' 7" and "What's the Lesbian Doing in My Pirate Movie?" That's right, EWU is standing up for "free speech" by bringing a porn star to campus.

Blogger Richard Posner (who sunlights as a federal judge and a University of Chicago law professor) has a comment on the Larry Summers kerfuffle that seems apt here:

No one who has spent much time around universities thinks they've ever "encourage[d] uncircumscribed intellectual explorations." The degree of self-censorship in universities, as in all institutions, is considerable. Today in the United States, most of the leading research universities are dominated by persons well to the left of Larry Summers, and they don't take kindly to having their ideology challenged, as Summers has now learned to his grief.

There is nothing to be done about this, and thoughtful conservatives should actually be pleased. As John Stuart Mill pointed out in On Liberty, when one's ideas are not challenged, one's ability to defend them weakens. Not being pressed to come up with arguments or evidence to support them, one forgets the arguments and fails to obtain the evidence. One's position becomes increasingly flaccid, producing the paradox of thought that is at once rigid and flabby. And thus the academic left today.

Or as reader Jay Lesseig puts it, "Freedom of speech makes it much easier to spot the idiots."

[freespirited]

This paper of Mr. Brown is very powerful.

That's what I love about real scholarship. When you put it side by side with the schlock that Nancy Rabinowitz calls scholarship, there is no contest.

[Lee'sGhost]

Hey, I'm 1/128ths Cherokee. Seriously.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

In her suit she claimed she was unjustly fired because she is actually 1/23 indian.

Uh... What?

1/23?

What kind of combination could come up with this number?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

and I wondered how it was possible for the US army to know that diseases spread this way.

It was known. You find methods for dealing with the positions and housing of people with leprosy for example as far back as the Torah.

They did not know why but with diseases that spread from physical contact either direct or indirect they did know how they spread.

The puzzlers were the diseases that did not do so.

[murdoog]

Maybe she was 89/2048th Indian and was just approximating.

[murdoog]

I don't feel the need to go back in time and read his past works to find more thinks to sound outraged against and in turn make this man a counter culture super star.

It's more useful than that. The story about smallpox-infected blankets has been around for a long time and a lot of people believed it. It's good that it is being debunked.

Also, this makes a case that Churchill is not only an offensive anti-American lunatic, but also a fraud. As other posters have pointed out, academia will tolerate offensive opinions from the left but take a very dim view of academic fraud. So this will turn people against him who might have been in his corner before.

[nicollo]

Did you see this? Bob Paquette to the rescue, and in the Washington Times:

Of liberty and license

His term for practitioners of oppositional identity is "infantile transgressives and unabashed cultural subversives."

Lol!

[Destro]

Like any of us needed to be told that here on FR? Preaching to the choir - I for one don't want to increase his speaking fees by turning him into a counter culture free speach martyr - ignoring is sometimes the best punishment.

[freespirited]

Yes thanks, I did see that. Did you see the one by Stephen Goldberg? There is a link to it here:

http://hoopla.modblog.com/

Warning: this guy has an opinion or two about the state of things.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I think I am, too.

[Helms]

"infantile transgressives and unabashed cultural subversives."

This is right on. Some garlic for the vampires. Transgression and subversion.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Some voices you can ignore. Others deserve to have their throat stepped on.

[Destro]

In America that leads to riches.

[AmishDude]

Wait! Was Ward Churchill the source of this? This "infected blankets" stuff was referenced in a South Park episode!

[nicollo]

Thanks for the link to the Hoopla blog. I like that image of Ward Churchill trying to get through the Denver airport with his AK-47.

Btw, I see from the Hamilton website that there exists a Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professorship. I wish I could say I was surprised by this. The friggin school just doesn't know the word "disgrace."

Got plagiarism?

Rather than ramble on here, if you want, my latest thoughts on the Hamilton thing are here (including an unprintable classic regarding one of the Kirkland feminazis as uttered by an old school Hamilton professor):

Nicollo unmasked: Bromleyisms here

[EveningStar]

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

Calling a Leftist "mentally unstable" is...what's that term...redundant?

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

Excellent article. Thanks for posting it.

Even if everything Ward claimed (I won't sully Winston's last name) is true, how does that justify him interrupting a Columbus Day parade? How can he equate a Columbus Day parade with a genocide he alleges occurred over 150 years ago?

His intellectual dishonesty is so ingrained, he ought never hold a teaching profession again.

And yet, sadly, he is not alone. I have met many Leftists who have such misconstrued thinking ingrained in their reasoning.

[bvw]

Thank you for those informative web sites. I think we all can thank that 1940 original 1970 revised "Tenure and Academic Freedom" professional assoication guide for the mono-cropped (idea wise) tyrannically politically correct play-pen-like institutions that our Univerisities have become today. That and Brennan's 1967 ruling -- yet another egregious, no-basis fiat judicial overreach.

These kind of things just get me so upset I empty my jar of adjectives right out spilling them all over.