Posted on 03/12/2005 6:17:18 PM PST by The Loan Arranger
Post columnist nearly alone in probing 'dysfunctional' milieu. For all the ink devoted to the Ward Churchill case, the Denver dailies have done virtually nothing to investigate the dysfunctional campus academic culture which led to the Churchill fiasco.
Here are some of the questions the Denver media have not even attempted to probe: Why did the University of Colorado Arts and Sciences administration continue to promote and laud Churchill after the late-1990s publication of professor Thomas LaVelle's articles alleging extensive academic fraud and plagiarism on Churchill's part? Are there other academic frauds and plagiarists at CU whom the administration has protected? How did CU become such a racist institution that a patently unqualified man was pushed for tenure in three departments because he claimed to be an Indian? How many other poorly-qualified teachers have gotten jobs at CU, based on their ethnicity or their pretended ethnicity? To what extent does the extreme left dominate hiring at CU, so that highly qualified applicants for teaching positions are rejected, whereas politically correct hacks get the job? How often do other CU teachers act like Churchill allegedly did by punishing students for expressing opinions contrary to the teacher? Has CU protected other teachers who have been credibly accused of making violent threats and/or perpetrating on-and off-campus violent crimes against people who disagree with them?
Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi is virtually alone in the Denver media in attempting to examine the reality of academic freedom at CU. His column last Monday detailed the plight of CU instructor Phil Mitchell, who is apparently being pushed out of CU because of political pressure from the far left.
(Excerpt) Read more at rockymountainnews.com ...
You wouldn't see a column like that in a Philly paper.
KHOW and KOA radio have been on top of what has been going on and have gotten military records and some other documents giving this jerk tenure. I forgot the websites but they are not too hard to find.
Only if someone asks the questions. And judging from this article, there are few "journalists" who intend to expose the corruption, intellectual and otherwise, at CU.
Guess it's up to the bloggers...
CU's gotta be on notice that settling with Churchill, while knowing that plagerism, threats, and false military records are "in play" will cost CU more, in the long run, than a Churchill lawsuit.
bump use on page two.
This ethnicity thing is interesting. I've more indian blood in me than Churchill ever did (my great great grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee). However, I'm not registered as one, have no intention of registering as one and consider myself as merely an "american."
They better friggin' care. If the objective is to avoid "a lawsuit" - settling with Churchill will get them a lawsuit just the same, from a pissed off taxpayer group.
The simple answer to the Churchill hiring is easy. The ethics of the people that hired him are the same as Churchills. That is, zero.
One defect in the academic evaluation system is that typically one has no "peers" in departments staffed by specialists.
There's nothing unique about the University of Colorado in this regard. As long as you're politically correct, you can commit plagiarism to your heart's content and no one will trouble you.
There are rare exceptions when someone really steps in it, as Churchill did with his Eichman comment. Otherwise, nobody cares.
Another scholar and I wrote reviews pointing out that a professor working in my field had falsified many of his footnotes, claiming that evidence was there which a look at the original sources proved was simply untrue. There were more than a dozen footnotes of this kind.
This had no public effect at all. I believe everyone in the field is aware of the facts, but since this professor is politically correct, everyone simply ignores the facts. Indeed, he was shortly afterward offered a top professorship at CUNY graduate center. He will retire with honors when he is ready to do so, and not before. His case is far from unique; I know of another instance of plagiarism from one of my own early books, for which the author suffered no penalty.
Colorado is no better, and no worse, than dozens of other formerly prestigious institutions of higher learning. Regretably, higher education in our country is sick, and seemingly getting worse every day.
The more interesting question is whether its limited to CU, and if not, then what are the other universities going to do about this?
Your stories remind me of that Bellesiles cat (from Emory U, IIRC) that wrote the now discredited book on the gun history of America. He was eventually taken down (and taken down hard), but it took a lot of work on the part of a handful of persistent historians. A lot of connected historians were reluctant to look into the charges that Bellesiles was at best a fraud, more likely a propagandist. Persistence and the white-hot spotlight of publicity eventually took him down.
If this kind of activity doesn't prove how the liberals/socialists will take over our country, then what will it take to convince the non-believers? Those "teaching" in our educational institutions have long been denying the right of "personal opinion" and "objective thinking" to those of our younger generations. We had better get a grip and do something soon ... before it is too late.
L
Very true. If you write about race or gender and conclude that the moon is made of green cheese, your job is safe so long as you smooze the left. Lord forbid if you are a military historian, you never even get in the door of most institutions.
You are right on the money. a white, anglo-saxon, protestant, male, conservative has virtually no chance of being hired at any college or university in the US.
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