Please Fire Ward Churchill
John Calvin Jones
www.virtualcitizens.com
2007-06-23

http://www.virtualcitizens.com/articles/Please_Fire_Ward_Churchill

According to Natsu Saito[1] a grave injustice is about to occur. The Board of Regents for the University of Colorado will vote to dismiss a tenured professor, Ward Churchill. As Saito tells the world how the efforts to fire Prof. Churchill are extreme, unfair, and a witch hunt, a recitation of the record finds that:

Four years after 11 September 2001, Fox news [sic], and chiefly Bill O’Reilly, made Ward Churchill a household name. Complaining about Churchill’s political speeches and inconvenient facts and improper analogies in re American history (after all, the American government was organized around enslaving Africans and peoples of African descents at the same time it sought genocide against the indigenous, Nazi Germany enslaved Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists, Slavs and Catholics, then only sought to kill non-indigenous and it was more like ethnic cleansing, hardly a genocide), the Governor of Colorado announced that Churchill should be fired.[2]

By fall of 2005 the administration at the University of Colorado appointed an ad hoc “Investigative Committee” chaired by a CU law professor, Mimi Wesson.[3] Ms. Wesson was a good choice for she “circulated a memo in February 2005 comparing Prof. Churchill to “charismatic male celebrity wrongdoers” like OJ Simpson, Bill Clinton, and Michael Jackson.”[4] (Apparently Prof. Wesson enjoys the art of hyperbole and non-falsifiable complaints as she finds Ward Churchill uses).

When the Wesson committee ramped up, it made the following observations, in reviewing Churchill’s record of more than 20 books, 100 articles, and over 12,000 footnotes, the selected readers discovered six instances where Prof. Churchill exhibited improper footnoting or improper author attribution.[5]

The list of Prof. Churchill’s sins reads as follows:

(1) he failed to provide sufficient evidence that in the 1837 smallpox epidemic

(a) infected blankets were obtained from an infirmary;

(b) an Army doctor or post surgeon told the Mandans to scatter; and

(c) 400,000 people, as opposed to possibly 300,000, ultimately died;

(2) he cited to material that he has consistently acknowledged as ghostwritten;

(3) he published an article in Z Magazine in which the editors, without telling Prof. Churchill, deleted his attribution of co-authorship of “Dam the Dams;” and

(4) he copy-edited a piece in a book edited by a third party which, unbeknownst to Prof. Churchill, plagiarized Fay Cohen.[6]

Thusly, Saito concludes:

The Bottom Line: Recognizing that they could not fire Prof. Churchill directly for his political speech, CU administrators created a pretext to do so by soliciting … research misconduct allegations. A biased investigation generated a handful of technical charges which the University has falsely labeled “plagiarism” or “fabrication of evidence.” To date, external political and financial pressures have trumped the First Amendment and the principle of academic freedom at the University of Colorado.[7]

Of course, as Saito notes, a host of academics have come out in support of Ward Churchill, both in principal and given the specifics. There have been petitions and now Saito wants thousands, if not millions to contact the Regents at CU directly.[8]

Though I believe that her heart is in the right place, I must disagree with Saito. I believe that to advocate the opposite is in order. We should pray that Ward Churchill is fired. And for reasons I set out below – which I have already shared with the Regents – I hope you encourage them to make the easy decision too.

***

To the esteemed Regents of the University of Colorado:

Please fire Ward Churchill. In the past five plus years, since he spoke publicly about the irony and historicity of 11 September 2001, since Bill O’Reilly and others turned just another academic into an intellectual giant, truth-teller and American historian of epic importance, Ward Churchill has become a face and a voice in a movement.

In the manner of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Gerald Horne and others, because Churchill has been vilified for the sin of not spouting common American mythologies (sputum that constructs present and past American history without racism, without empire, without Smedley Butler, without structural poverty, without genocide, etc.), Prof. Churchill’s commentary, investigation and ideals have been aired through numerous television appearances, public speaking engagements (on injustice, truth, and unreported American atrocities against our ancestors and others), and radio interviews.

As an avid consumer of news and the alternative (non-corporate) press, I have been delighted to learn of Prof. Churchill’s wisdom and transported knowledge (of the past to the present) and more his personal battles within the walls of academia – that which I have suffered first-hand. (For some reason, administrators across the nation do not want their students to read, understand the meaning of legal and moral principles like war crimes, or consider the implications of voter suppression, and or to see links between structural racism, environmental damage, and America’s inefficient health care [sic] system). Through Pacifica radio, Counterpunch and other outlets, I know that due to his new found status, Prof. Churchill has become the symbol of everything that is wrong with academia. That is, for the most part, we professors know that administrators believe that the purpose of the social sciences to push elite-friendly propaganda instead of assisting millions of young people to learn how to think, reason, calculate, and distinguish between a political hegemony that favors what Randolph Bourne called the privileged classes and more democratic and sustainable social practices which promote justice, equity, beauty, and the arts.

So fire Ward Churchill. Make him a martyr. Free him from any future at the University at Colorado. Let him collect speaking fees between $10,000-$20,000 (I know a pittance compared to merchants of misery like Rudolph Giuliani) and reach thousands more people than he would otherwise. Let Prof. Churchill assist us in the revolution of the university (the one that is not centered on the scam of on-line courses and granting degrees to people buy term papers because they cannot write a coherent paragraph).

When he sits in television studios around the globe, enable Prof. Churchill to single you out as people who were on the wrong side of history. A few parallel examples come to mind, recall that in a 2002 interview, Trent Lott said that as late as 1984, Mr. Lott did not appreciate the greatness and importance of Martin Luther King. As well, Howard Zinn was fired from Spellman College in the 1960s for speaking out against the administration and in support of the students. Recently Spellman awarded Prof. Zinn an honorary doctorate.

Following the outrageous treatment of Prof. Finkelstein at DePaul, and the embarrassment of Harvard’s Lawrence Sumner, your plans to out Ward Churchill will help to create a new class for the paparazzi: short-sighted and over-paid, micro-managing university administrators. Perhaps your objectives take a page from the Madonna School of Fame and Media Management? “All press is good press, even when it is bad press.” I think that you recognize two of her students, Britney Spears and Kevin Federline? Rest assured, few teens will actually learn your names.

So please. Take your place in history, like those who burned books in Nazi Germany. Your efforts at censorship will only encourage more young scholars and serious academics to consume the words and knowledge of Ward Churchill. And one day, when a bright professor receives a position as the “Ward Churchill endowed chair of political and indigenous history” at the University of Colorado, no one will mention your names individually – though we will all owe you a great deal of thanks.

John Calvin Jones
www.virtualcitizens.com

According to Ms. Natsu Saito one can reach the CU Regents via e-mail c/o Millie Cortez at Millie.Cortez@cu.edu.

Prof. Saito also gives a list of the individual Regents (I deleted two of the addresses which sent me back a “mailer-daemon” message): Steve.Ludwig@cu.edu, Michael.Carrigan@cu.edu, Tom.Lucero@cu.edu, Steve.Bosley@cu.edu, Kyle.Hybl@cu.edu, Paul.Schauer@cu.edu, Tillie.Bishop@cu.edu

Saito also encourages you to send a note to wcsn@wardchurchill.net.

[1-8] Saito, Natsu. 2007. “Now is the Time to Speak Out! The Regents and Ward Churchill.” Counterpunch, June 21. www.counterpunch.org