Quick Takes: Scholars Back Churchill, Stem Cell Patents Questioned, Compromise Proposed at Eastern Mich., Murder-Suicide at U. of Wash., Norfolk State Student Charged in Stabbing, Dartmouth Sued for $20M, Westfield State Incorrectly Accepts Applicants

Round up the usual suspects

A few highly paid tenured radicals who wouldn’t even pony up the money to pay for the publication of their letter to preach to the converted. Is this the best Friends of Ward can do?

Publius, at 6:45 am EDT on April 3, 2007

Churchill letter

The letter is an exercise in uncritical thinking. Among other things, it mounts a free-wheeling and assertion-filled attack on the process that led to the review of his research, while ignoring the findings of that review, findings that were fully explained and carefully documented. BTW, if “circumstances marked by constant inflammatory, ad hominem, and even obscene attacks” upon a person invalidate the results of any inquiry, even one which strives to remain free of them, at least two results follow: a) professors must assume that they cannot make any valid inquiry into any public acts of any President, and b) opponents of any inquiry have a fool-proof strategy.

Douglas Lewis, at 11:10 am EDT on April 3, 2007

Hmm...maybe I was imagining things after all. Senator Edwards debated Vice President Cheney in 2004, not Senator Lieberman.

Jack Olson, at 1:55 pm EDT on April 3, 2007

Not dishonest to call out a political attack

I am not a huge fan of Churchill’s scholarship, but have seen many, many worse breaches of academic standards among tenured professors and administrators. The point is that this question of ethics and standards is beside the point. The timing and content of the attack on Churchill reveal it to be an opportunistic prosecution of an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq and the rest of the history of U.S. imperialism and genocide.

One clue that this drive to fire Churchill is politically motivated comes from the report by the American Council of Alumni and Trustees (a right wing hack group otherwise known as ACTA) called “How Many Ward Churchills?” Their conclusions are ominous—Churchill is the “low hanging fruit"—just an easy appetizer for the forces of academic unfreedom.

ACTA’s report states, “Is there really only one Ward Churchill? Or are there many? Do professors in their classrooms ensure a robust exchange of ideas designed to help students to think for themselves? Or do they use their classrooms as platforms for propaganda, sites of sensitivity training, and launching pads for political activism? Do our college and university professors foster intellectual diversity or must students toe the party line? To answer these questions, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni went to publicly available resources—college and university websites, electronic syllabi, and faculty web pages. And what we found is profoundly troubling. Ward Churchill is not only not alone—he is quite common. By this, we do not mean to suggest that issues of alleged plagiarism, dubious claims of ethnicity, or inadequate credentials—problems specific to Ward Churchill—apply broadly to all academics. What we do mean to suggest is that the extremist rhetoric and tendentious opinion for which Churchill is infamous can be found on campuses across America. In published course descriptions and online course materials, professors are openly and unapologetically declaring that they use their positions to push political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically.”

This passage admits freely what the attack on Churchill is about—not academic transgressions but political ones. I may not love everything Churchill has written, but I recognize this attack on him as a dangerous precedent for the harassment, surveillance, and disciplining of left/critical faculty—most of whom are not at all engaged in indoctrination. I stand with Ward Churchill—it is a classic case of an injury to one being potentially an injury to all.

I invite you to take a look at my blog at txcommie.wordpress.com for many other articles and correspondence about this issue.

Dana Cloud, at 8:50 pm EDT on April 5, 2007

April Fools?

” .. the ad warns scholars to “be wary of opportunistic attacks on scholarship that are disguised means .. (of) stifling the free expression of ideas ..”

TXCOMMIE should go into comedy. The Berlin Wall fell 17 years ago and Beijing talks of “Market-Leninism.”

As a Catholic victim of Communism, I find it utterly laughable that his kind, Mr. Churchill, the chump who got stiffed on the ad’s bill near April Fool’s Day, and Churchill’s minions act in ways that in China and Russia would get them thrown in a gulag faster than a speeding bullet (to the head).

Oh, yes — it is terrible in the USA. Anyone trying to sneak in should turn around, now. Try France — just don’t be non-Catholic, non-white, and born outside of France.

http://www.victimsofcommunism.org/

V.C., at 1:55 pm EDT on April 8, 2007