Comments on The Footnote Police vs. Ward Churchill

• churchill as a political target
• Posted by Anthony DiMaggio on March 1, 2008 at 12:05pm EST

• After having read many of these comments, I am amazed at how easy it is for readers to deceive themselves that the Churchill incident is somehow about plagiarism, first and foremost. Anyone who thinks this guy was investigated because he did not properly cite himself in a piece or made a few unsupported claims , or did ghostwriting occasionally, is living in a fantasy world. This guy was investigated and expelled for one simple reason: because of the comments he made regarding September 11th and the roosting of chickens. Without those comments, this whole inquiry does not happen, plain and simple. Conceding that the investigation arose precisely because he said something so politically controversial (and I would claim, ridiculous) is the first step in understanding this war on higher education John Wilson warns against. If people can be fired for making controversial claims, no matter how stupid or ridiculous they are, then there are truly no legitimate standards for American scholarship. This is politicized, arbitrary scholarship at its height.

• standards for tenure
• Posted by Anthony DiMaggio on March 1, 2008 at 12:05pm EST

• I should also add to my previous comments, the ridiculousness of some of the misconduct charges against Churchill, purely from an academic point of view. After looking at the dossier against Churchill, it is apparent that many of the pieces in question are popular, rather than scholarly publications. Generally speaking, these kinds of publications do not count in the tenure process. I can say from personal experience, for example, that an article from Z Magazine (which was one of Churchill's pieces disputed by the Univ. Colorado committee) is not considered a legitimate publication for consideration of tenure. It may be something you do in your spare time to contribute to progressive causes, but it's certainly not of importance for other scholars, who generally are not interested in considering these publications in when granting their peers tenure (since such pieces are considered "polemics" rather than "objective scholarship").
  Fellow professors do not look at how many z magazine stories or pamphlets you have printed when deciding whether you should receive tenure as an academic professional. Such publications are not considered professional or scholarly in the least. At best, they are a very very small part of a tenure process; at worst, they are irrelevant to the process, and can even hurt you since they're seen as non-scholarly.
  Conversely, journal articles and books ARE considered the criteria for tenure. That these popular sources (now in question) were not seriously examined prior to his tenure is hardly surprising; they almost certainly were not deemed of real importance at that point. It's hardly suprising, though, that they became the center of attention later on, when the witchhunt against him was in full swing. Any and every piece of writing he made was simply considered one more piece of ammunition to be used to throw him into the fire. This is classic politicization, pure and simple.

• Wow
• Posted by JBM on May 19, 2006 at 6:35am EDT

• Horowitz is right after all. No reform of the universities can come from within if even theft and lies are now considered acceptable.

  Amazing.

• The best defense?
• Posted by Chicken Little on May 19, 2006 at 7:00am EDT

• Between Mr. Wilson and attorney Lane, the strategy seems to be to ignore the findings of a fair and painstaking inquiry and instead cook up a defense consisting of two parts scaremongering about David Horowitz and one part intellectual nihilism, heavily seasoned with the suggestion with a straight face that Churchill is a modern day Galileo.

• The 'truth' finally comes out
• Posted by Art D. on May 19, 2006 at 7:00am EDT

• " .. In an era when the right-wing is already targeting college professors .."

  Darn .. had to read all the way to the last paragraph, to find the left-wing spin. How tedious.

  Mr. Churchill and his supporters remind me of your average felon in prison -- prisons are also filled with "innocent people 'wrongly' convicted."

  The Churchill mess is just the tip of the iceberg, making the case to charter public higher education. Chartering HE would let Churchill, Shortell, Furr, et al., find their authentic value in the world.

• Right and Wrong
• Posted by JBM on May 19, 2006 at 7:50am EDT

• "Mr. Churchill and his supporters remind me of your average felon in prison — prisons are also filled with “innocent people ‘wrongly’ convicted.”

  I know what you mean, but there's a huge difference. Every felon I've defended on a post-conviction basis disputed the charges with contrary facts and logic, while Churchill is refusing to even address charges against him. He's banking on academic hysteria to save his hide. There are excellent reasons that he's not looking to facts or logic to save himself.

• Further Thoughts on Plagiarism
• Posted by John K. Wilson on May 19, 2006 at 8:05am EDT

• In my essay here, I focused on the troubling definition of research misconduct by the committee. I would be equally troubled if David Horowitz took a massive pay cut and became a tenured professor, and his errors in “The Professors” were used to justify his dismissal. Bad research isn’t misconduct.

  I didn’t address the plagiarism charges, which are somewhat different. Churchill is found guilty of plagiarism for using material from an article he co-wrote without crediting the original organization that was the co-author. In another case, he is found guilty of misconduct for ghostwriting an article. In the final case, the Colorado committee finds him guilty of plagiarism for an essay which does not bear his name and which the committee acknowledges it cannot prove that he wrote. None of these is a classic definition of plagiarism. The question is, what is the common academic penalty for this?

  I believe that many tenured professors should be fired for research misconduct. I was outraged in 1996 when the University of Chicago refused to fire history professor Julius Kirshner who had taken a book review written by a graduate student, and had it published solely under his own name, word for word, in a scholarly journal. The University of Chicago accepted Kirshner’s explanation that he assumed he owned the ideas of his graduate assistant. The professor’s punishment was that he would only be allowed to teach undergraduates, not graduate students, for five years.(see http://eh.net/pipermail/eh.teach/1996-August/000104.html)

  Compared to Kirshner, Churchill’s crimes are minor. Churchill deserves condemnation for his shoddy scholarship and unethical practice of ghostwriting. And perhaps stronger evidence might prove a claim of plagiarism. And this report would certainly justify a refusal to hire or give tenure or promotion to a professor. But suspending or firing a tenured professor based on the shaky logic and inadequate evidence provided by the committee is difficult to justify, and it is doubtful that a less controversial professor in similar circumstances would receive the same treatment.

• The "Truth" of Citation and Research is Tricky...
• Posted by Steven D. Krause , Associate Professor, English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University on May 19, 2006 at 8:15am EDT

• I'm not interested in defending Churchill anymore and because I am not willing to read the U of Colorado's report on him (I just have much better things to do with my time), I'll have to defer to Wilson's interpretation of what's going on there. Still, I would like to think that even this committee at U of Colorado wouldn't find Wilson's footnote example guilty of "research misconduct" because, at face value, it clearly is not. In other words, and perhaps this is just naive, I like to think there is some middle-ground here.

  However, I think the important point that Wilson is raising here (and what the previous commentators either ignore or misunderstand) is that what "counts" as a citation and even research data itself varies quite a bit. Things regarding the "truth" of proper and improper research just aren't quite as "right" and "wrong" as politically conservative critics of academia would like.

  I could get very nitty-gritty about the rules of citation here, but that's about as exciting as drying paint. But as a brief example: the "rules" of MLA versus APA style (the most common style sheets in my field) each suggest a subtly different approach to what should or shouldn't be cited, and they emphasize different kinds of data in their citation formats. MLA, for example, has an emphasis (IMO) on exact quotes and pagination; APA, on the other hand, has a greater emphasis on overall summary of previous research and on the date of publication, particularly the year. And don't even get me started on the works cited/bibliography part of things. Further, most presses have their own idiosyncratic rules for citing things.

  So, where's the "true" and "right" citation there?

  Further, what counts as data/reasearch/a "fact" that deserves being cited varies quite a bit, depending on the nature of the field. This is just obvious, but I'll say it anyway: the kinds of research they do in biology is different than the kinds of research we do in English studies, so what counts as a data point is, again obviously, quite different.

  And again, this is what I think Wilson's key point: it won't work for these "investigative committees" to apply the standards of "truth" used by biologists (and really, the sciences in general) to English studies researchers (and really, the humanities in general). It is comparing oranges and bedknobs.

  I'm not happy about Churchill's role as the posterboy for this kind of thing, but I do appreciate Wilson's efforts at trying to point out the problems of investigating "the truth."

• Posted by WF on May 19, 2006 at 8:15am EDT

• In recent writings, it seems that many have forgotten that academic freedom doesn't stand alone... it's academic freedom AND responsibility. Conveniently, many seem to want nothing to do with responsibility and it is rarely mentioned in the same sentence.

  The play book mantra of the "evil right wing" works well for Enquirer level press; however, I expect more than this from the academic community.

• Read the report
• Posted by JBM on May 19, 2006 at 8:15am EDT

• "But suspending or firing a tenured professor based on the shaky logic and inadequate evidence provided by the committee is difficult to justify"

  There is nothing "shaky" about the report's logic or "inadequate" about its evidence.

• Ward Churchill and academic lying
• Posted by feudi pandola on May 19, 2006 at 8:40am EDT

• John Wilson wrote this in defending Ward Churchill's erroneous use of footnotes in academic writing: "In my forthcoming book, Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies, I include a quote by former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer admonishing Americans to “watch what they say.” I have a footnote listing a news report about the statement. But I also include in the footnote a reference to a letter to The New York Times by Fleischer explaining why he is being misinterpreted. I do not comment on this claim, because every word in my footnotes counts against the word limit for the book, and I don’t want to waste precious space scrutinizing some political hack’s line of bullshit. But I thought readers might want to look at a different view."

  Maybe Wilson's example, I assume makes sense to him, but let's remember that Churchill is supposed to be writing for academia, not the general public. In my experience, footnotes are always used to support or confirm the writers point of view, unless the writer explicitly states otherwise.

  Wilson's defense of Churchill is, in my view, just another "academic hack's line of bullshit." Churchill knew what he was doing and he knew it was deliberately misleading. Let's not shed crocodile tears for this creep, this "little Lenin".

• plagiarism and terms
• Posted by Larry on May 19, 2006 at 8:45am EDT

• Since I am not going to talk about Churchill specifically, I might add this:

  In the past few years I have published in a number of law reviews. From time to time, after determining that nobody had noticed some pattern, I would coin my own phrase, which I found to be descriptive of this pattern. Without fail, I would get a note from the student editors asking me to footnote where this phrase came from, and some where quite insistent that I give “something.” In one case, I cobbled together a couple of terms from well-outside legal scholarship, and it made the reviewers happy. (In legal advocacy there is nothing per se wrong with not citing a source, and, as a routine matter, the logic of law review articles is adopted by advocates and judges without giving credit, and citation is not to much to “give credit” but serves a more directive purpose of attempting to establish a duty.)

  This is still a mystery to me.

  While I do believe that plagiarism in academe is widespread (from personal experience), I do not that it is nearly as obvious as others would believe. First of all, there are major problems in determining who gets to be an author or a co-author of many works. Some of the more flagrant abusers of these things, I think, skirt the line into plagiarism, as one person is claiming some input into the work of another. Perhaps “honorary” co-authorship is a form of reverse-plagiarism, which is just as bad. Ghost-writing, too. But, everyone seems cool with it. Writing papers with the author “to be announced” causes similar problems, as nobody has any idea of who came up with the idea, and who tested it.

  What I have noticed, is that most plagiarism scandals break because of political reasons. They doesn’t make the underlying behavior bad, but it is politically unwise and stupid to accuse a powerful faculty member of taking your work. It is politically unwise to investigate them. It might just as well be career suicide for many people.

  Finally, while some professors say they are against cheating, students are just as flagrant as ever about cheating. (Ironically, I recently had one tenured professor admit to cheating in undergrad to me. She even came close to being caught, but a decision was made by the department (who knew she had been admitted to the a prestigious department) not to pursue the matter.)

• The defense of Ward Churchill
• Posted by Gene Jewett on May 19, 2006 at 8:45am EDT

• To understand more clearly the upside-down logic of those who coalesce around a moral imperative, one that renders them the final arbiters of moral virtue, I'd suggest reading, "Why Robespierre Chose Terror" in the Spring 2006 issue of the City Journal. The righteousness with which college professors dismiss the fraudlent behavior of Churchill makes a mockery of any search for agreed upon facts with which one might use to support an argument, one that stays on point. The above article is illustrative in its stunning duplicity.

• Truth
• Posted by Chicken Little on May 19, 2006 at 8:45am EDT

• Mr. Wilson and Professor Krause come very close to suggesting that because there is no "truth," there can be no standards. Thus when Churchill asserted without a scrap of evidence (other than misleading footnotes) that the US Army *deliberately* gave small pox infected blankets to native Americans, who is to say whether he is guilty of scholarly misconduct or he is a brilliant but misunderstood Galileo of modern social inquiry. This line of argument is troubling indeed.

• ward churchill
• Posted by robert gaudino on May 19, 2006 at 9:00am EDT

• People like churchill need to be held accountable. Academic freedom is not license and if churchill and his acolytes stick out hteir necks then the chopping bolck becomes an option.

• Why this article?
• Posted by math prof on May 19, 2006 at 9:40am EDT

• I wonder why IHE decided to publish this article
  as a stand-alone piece.

  Certainly Wilson is entitled to his opinion, but
  this would have better appeared as simply one
  more comment in the long thread of responses,
  most of which considerably better argued, to the
  IHE news article of May 17 ("Truth and
  Consequences") on the Churchill verdict.

  I urge everyone to read that article and thread.

  In particular, one poster to this article wrote
  "I'll have to defer to Wilson's interpretation of
  what's going on there." Big mistake.

  But let's see if I understand what's going on here.
  Wilson writes an article that trivializes Churchill's
  conduct. Then, in a posting in the response thread,
  he writes that in his original article he only
  mentioned some of what Churchill did.

  It's my opinion that Wilson's original article was
  a distortion. It's his own admission that his
  original article was selective (to put it mildly)
  about the facts he cited. Is this the standard
  of ethical conduct he is upholding?

• Witch hunt
• Posted by DGH on May 19, 2006 at 10:00am EDT

• Timothy Burke, a historian of Africa at Swarthmore, has an excellent, thorough commentary on the ACTA report that complements this piece. He demonstrates persuasively that the report is based on a deep misunderstanding of what it means to research or teach controversial material:

  http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=201

• Ward Churchill
• Posted by Droopy on May 19, 2006 at 10:00am EDT

• The real villain in this story is U. of Colorado which not only tenured, but also promoted a certified sharlatan.

• For Shame
• Posted by vinnie , VG on May 19, 2006 at 10:00am EDT

• After reading Mr. Wilson’s article on the Ward Churchill incident I was troubled by the tone of this article, which appears to focus upon some “vast new right-wing witch hunt on college campuses.” This tone was present throughout this article, and gave Mr. Horowitz position that there is a left wing conspiracy much more credence than it should have.

  What is even more disturbing is that this article defends Churchill through attacking the Colorado committees conclusions. Wilson cites “Churchill is guilty of occasionally shoddy scholarship and the dubious practice of ghostwriting, and perhaps even more.” Occasional shoddy scholarship!!!! Wow, is that what we are reduced to labeling plagiarism. I feel that there has been substantial evidence that Ward Churchill is guilty of plagiarism. He has done everything from steal large swaths of other individuals research, to copying paintings, and claiming that they were original work! To defend Churchill, and to claim that the committees findings are somehow detrimental to university professors everywhere is ludicrous. In fact, what the university does in response to the committee's findings will set the bar for university professors and students everywhere. This will be accomplished through setting a precedent that even if you are tenured, you are held accountable for claiming that work is original is in fact taken from other sources without permission.

  Plagiarism is far from a rare event. According to Plagiarism.org, cites that 80% of college students cheat at least once in their life, while 36% of undergraduates plagiarize while in school at least once. Furthermore, 55% of faculty are unwilling to devote time to investigate student plagiarism. You can find this information at http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism_stats.html.

  The point of my rant is this. If professors are not held to a higher academic standard how can we expect students to be held to a similar standard. Instead, if we shrug off blatant theft of others intellectual property and label any punishment as being part of a "conspiracy" such as Mr. Wilson suggests, would we expect the problem to get better or worse?

  I think Mr. Wilson needs to reconsider his thesis, in that Mr. Churchill is the victim of a rightwing conspiracy. In fact, his thesis is analogous to an individual who gets a speeding ticket being justified for blaming the cop for giving him the speeding ticket, as opposed to taking ownership for the fact that he was guilty for speeding. Or maybe a better analogy is a student blaming the instructor for "giving" him/her a failing grade, when in fact the student earned that grade without any help from the instructor.

  Instead Mr. Wilson's thesis should be that Churchill got what he asked for. If he did not steal other individuals intellectual property, then any group looks for wrong doing, regardless of their ideological slant, would find nothing, so long as the individual accused did not plagiarize. Just a thought.

• To Chicken Little....
• Posted by Steven D. Krause , Associate Professor, English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University on May 19, 2006 at 10:10am EDT

• Chicken Little wrote (among other things):

  "Mr. Wilson and Professor Krause come very close to suggesting that because there is no “truth,” there can be no standards."

  That's not what I said-- certainly is not what I meant. What I said/meant was it would simply not be possible to apply the same standards of research for the sciences to the humanities. The definition of what "counts" as research varies too much. The "case study/interview" is valid research in my field of composition and rhetoric; it isn't valid in physics (or at least I assume it's not; perhaps someone knows differently). Composition and rhetoric has a dramatically different sense from physics about what counts as statistical significance. And so forth.

  I believe this is Wilson's point as well when he writes "The problem is that when a policy largely developed to address scientific misconduct is applied to the humanities, it must be properly interpreted."

  As for the "there is no truth" issue, well, that's a much bigger issue than can fit in the comment window here.

  Chicken Little goes on:

  "Thus when Churchill asserted without a scrap of evidence (other than misleading footnotes) that the US Army *deliberately* gave small pox infected blankets to native Americans, who is to say whether he is guilty of scholarly misconduct or he is a brilliant but misunderstood Galileo of modern social inquiry. This line of argument is troubling indeed."

  Like I said, I don't want to defend Churchill one way or the other and I don't know enough about the particular issue of the spreading of small pox to comment. I do know that the U.S. government did all kinds of things to American Indians in the 19th century that we find deplorable now.

  But I think Wilson's example of the Kirshner case above in the comments is helpful here. There's a difference between someone publishing scholarship that is labeled "shoddy" and and someone publishing scholarship where, in reality, he has represented someone else's work as his own, or when writers just "make shit up." If "shoddy" is going to be the standard, then that more than opens the door to this being just about politics.

• Posted by Paul Gowder on May 19, 2006 at 10:15am EDT

• Oh, c'mon. The guy ghostwrote papers for others then cited those papers in support of his own work. He plagiarized. How are these things not misconduct?

• Go Figure
• Posted by P.D. Lesko , Executive Editor at Adjunct Advocate on May 19, 2006 at 11:05am EDT

• Just as a bit of food for thought, on our Web site, we publish regular (albeit unscientific) opinion polls. The subjects of cheating and plagiarism have been addressed several times:

  We asked: "Do you care if your students cheat?" Out of over 400 respondents 94 percent said they do care.

  We asked: "Did you ever cheat on a exam as an undergraduate student?" Out of over 200 respondents, 19 percent said yes.

  We asked: "What should happen to faculty who plagiarize?" Out of over 300 respondents, 54 percent said those professors should be fired (24 percent said a reprimand would suffice).

  Unscientific interpretatation: The subject of cheating brings out the righteous indignation in us all, including those who've cheated.

  I am of the opinion that the mainsteam media focus on plagiarism and "cheating" within higher education, because it's a heck of a lot easier to get the average news consumer whipped up into a frenzy over cheating (on the part of students and faculty) than, say, declining graduation rates, overuse of temporary labor, and/or faltering student academic achievement.

  Ward Churchill (no offense intended) is small potatoes. His story is being sold as a five-course meal by journalist-cooks who cover higher education with the a mission similar to that of Betty Crocker. Higher education news made simple and easy.

  P.D. Lesko
  Executive Editor
  Adjunct Advocate
  P.O. Box 130117
  Ann Arbor, Michigan 48113-0117

• All cats aren't equally gray
• Posted by LogicGuru on May 19, 2006 at 11:05am EDT

• There's a heck of a lot of difference between Churchill's claim that the US intentionally gave Indians infected blankets and Horowitz's objection to women's studies programs on the grounds that women's inequality is a myth. The difference is lots, and lots, of substantiated data concerning, e.g. male-female wage gaps, "missing women" in asian countries, etc. Now there may be an innocent explanation for that data: women may prefer lower paying jobs and the missing women may be a consequence of some medical condition. But the data is there, and it's the business of academics in women's studies and related disciplines to ask the why questions.

  The stories Churchill has been telling are apparently along the lines of holocaust denial and space aliens landing in New Mexico. People don't deserve to be put in jail for telling these stories but they also don't deserve to be tenured. Note, the appeal to a left-, right-, Jewish-, scientific- or whatever establishment inttent on shutting them up is standard procedure for these charletans. And on the left in particular they're inclined to appeal to the Solidarity of the Oppressed to make the case that if fellow leftists challenge any scholarship that purports to be radical, feminist, or whatever they are playing into the hands of the enemy.

  I can't think of anything more likely to support the conservative agendas of Horowitz et. al. than taking the bait.

• "Hardly a witch hunt" -- Chappelle
• Posted by Art D. on May 19, 2006 at 11:05am EDT

• " .. Timothy Burke, a historian of Africa at Swarthmore, has an excellent, thorough commentary on the ACTA report .."

  ACTA -- a group of highly-educated college trustees and administrators -- don't understand how to teach?

  Isn't the real problem, ACTA doesn't agree with Mr. Churchill's sloppy research methods? And his inability to admit he was sloppy? [Note to whiners: begin comparison of WC to GWB/Iraq]

  All this permanent-denial and counter-factual thinking reminds me of "The Chappelle Show" routine about how Dave can never find black people guilty. Dave says he will find R. Kelly guilty ONLY if two cops, four friends, and Kelly's grandmother eye-witness any alleged crime.

  So it is with the Great White Deceiver and his supporters. No matter what his ex-relatives, real Indians, Italian-Americans, peers, AND an independent commission say -- he's right, they're wrong.

  My God -- what a litigation cesspool for taxpayers! They are underwriting the litigation risk of having tens of thousands of self-annointed experts like Mr. Churchill! What a joke!

  No sane person would voluntarily accept that kind of litigation risk. More public higher-ed budget cuts, coming right up?

• Focus, people...
• Posted by Jeff on May 19, 2006 at 11:05am EDT

• There are multiple charges in the report. The pagiarism ones justify firing in my opinion, since I have very little tolerance for plagiarism by fellow professors.

  However, I do worry about the idea that incorrect facts are considered misconduct. Factual errors are part and parcel of science, and they are quite different than fabricating data. The appropriate place for factual errors to be addressed is in publications or the peer-review process; they do not constitute ethical violations. I find this part of the report worrisome because while I never plagiarize, I'm sure that there are factual errors somewhere in my work. Moreover, it is often non-obvious how the sources I footnote combine to create support for a data point.

• Standards
• Posted by Chicken Little on May 19, 2006 at 11:05am EDT

• To Professor Krause:

  1. The committee devotes considerable attention in report to standards. Here is most of concluding paragraph:
  "Scholars in ethnic studies can and often do offer revisionary reappraisals of conventionally accepted social events and interpretations, but not by violating accepted norms of veracity. For example, the Second World War against Japan was initiated with an attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Although there can be reasonable scholarly debate as to whether the United States subsequently carried out a war in the Pacific based on a racist agenda, that debate cannot permit a statement to the effect that the attack on Pearl Harbor never occurred. The interdisciplinary work and social commitment of ethnic studies scholars may require an even stronger fealty to standards of veracity and evidence. The particular, distinctive, and welcome features of ethnic studies that entered the academy in the late 1960s and early 1970s were never intended to sanction misuse of the evidence, fabrication, plagiarism, or false attribution of academic work. Ethnic studies has now produced a large and distinguished body of scholarship and a parallel fine record of teaching to revise and correct an often distorted understanding of United States society and culture. That record should not be sullied by poor scholarly practices."

  Do you disagree?

  2. Unlike you, the committee draws a distinction between plagiarism and fabrication, and finds convincing evidence of both in Churchill's work. Are you suggesting that "fabrication" is merely "shoddy scholarship"?

• Make university investigations public!
• Posted by Michael Pyshnov on May 19, 2006 at 11:05am EDT

• With both communists and neo-conservatives abandoning any semblance of scholarly attitude and pushing for the abolition of law established for centuries, universities have entered the era of Inquisition.

  The university "investigations" are DESIGNED (with all "procedures" and "guidelines") to result in arbitrary decisions. These "investigations" must be conducted in public, period. Otherwise, they will continue to allow such fraud as this:
  http://ca.geocities.com/UofTfraud/

  Is there anyone who can stop these monkey trials? Anyone who can prohibit using universities for political gains by the "groups"?

  Michael Pyshnov.

• Following up on "Witch Hunt"
• Posted by math prof on May 19, 2006 at 11:05am EDT

• In his commentary "Witch Hunt", DGH cites Burke's response to the ACTA report. I
  haven't read that report and so can't comment on it. But I do want to quote from Burke's piece:

  Let me tell you what I consider to be a few important academic standards. These apply across the disciplines. 1. Careful collection of evidence. 2. Constraining claims or arguments to the evidence available. 3. Proportionality of argument or analysis, especially in making demands for action or changes in practice. 4. Careful definition of key terms, concepts and methodologies used in scholarly analysis. 5. Respect for expertise and caution about making claims when you are well outside your areas of specialized knowledge.

  These are certainly standards that Churchill has violated.

• Invented, not incorrect
• Posted by JBM on May 19, 2006 at 11:35am EDT

• "However, I do worry about the idea that incorrect facts are considered misconduct."

  That is not what Churchill did. He invented "facts," published them under different names, then cited among those publications to make it seem as though those "facts" found acceptance in the scholarly community.

• Left vs. Right
• Posted by tanta07 on May 19, 2006 at 12:35pm EDT

• Why are discussions of Ward Churchill so often framed in a left vs. right context, or conservatives vs. liberals?

  Ward Churchill is not a leftist. He is an anarchist. He would take just as much joy in watching the ACLU's headquarters burn down as he did watching the twin towers fall.

  And let's not forget that this report was put together by a committee of his peers at CU, which happens to have a culture that is not only left, but FAR left.

  Churchill has made a career based on lies, deceipt, intimidation and distortion. It's an embarassment to CU that a person of his character rose to such a lofty position in their faculty, and I'm glad to see them taking action to correct their terrible mistake.

• Posted by Bob at State U. on May 19, 2006 at 12:35pm EDT

• Can't anyone spell charlatan?

• Posted by circe on May 19, 2006 at 12:40pm EDT

• In law, we frequently distinguish ordinary negligence from gross negligence in order to capture just the distinction we need here between factual mistakes in footnotes and egregious research fraud. If the Colorado committee report on Churchill is correct, then he committed gross misconduct. Only if we fail to make this distinction do we have to worry about a slippery slope or witchhunt. (BTW, we'll have the witchhunt anyway.)

• Churchill's Mandan Fabrications
• Posted by arthur eckstein on May 19, 2006 at 12:40pm EDT

• People should read the Churchill Report carefully.

  The Report was written by a panel including one
  prominent historian and one person in Mexican-American Studies, so it's not like they don't know what they're doing. Churchill is, simply, a fraud: read the material on the epidemic. It's clear he made things up.
  He said in print, and said repeatedly in print, that the small pox epidemic among the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikaree people in 1837 was the result of a conscious U.S. Army plot, spread from U.S. army posts on the Upper Missouri, spread by army surgeons at those posts (later reduced to one army surgeon) who intentionally gave infected blankets to the Indians, those blankets having come
  from Army smallpox wards in St. Louis. These post surgeons also withheld from the Indians a small pox vaccine that was available at the army forts, and these "post surgeons" gave advice to the Indians to "scatter", the advice being given with the intent of spreading the disease farther.

  That is Churchill on the smallpox epidemic of 1837. Courses based on his books will be saying this is what occurred.
  > But the written sources Churchill himself cited in his writings demonstrate:

  1. There were NO army posts in the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikaree country. NONE. That is a fabrication.
  2. Hence there were NO evil army "post surgeon(s)" (in fact, no doctors existed on the Upper Missouri at all in 1837) to hand out infected blankets intentionally. That is another fabrication.
  3. There was no U.S. Army smallpox ward, or any smallpox ward, in St. Louis in this period from which the "infected blankets" could have come. That is another fabrication.
  4. There was NO vaccine available on the Upper Missouri in 1837 (as sources complain about), so none could be
  evilly and intentionally withheld by the "evil post surgeon(s)" at the "army forts". That is another fabrication.
  > 5. There were indeed forts, but these were forts of the American Fur Trade Company (which Churchill evidently mistook for U.S. Army forts on the basis of the term "fort"). One of these forts, when struck by the smallpox, closed its gates to prevent contact with the Indians. They had no desire to spread the disease. Naturally: the AFTCompany had no desire to kill their own customers! The idea that "bad advice" was spread is yet another fabrication.
  6. The written documents all indicate that the smallpox was spread accidentally because of smallpox on an AFTCompany steamboat that came up the river: the
  captain of the boat kept on, instead of turning back when the smallpox was discovered, because he feared angering his Indian customers if the steamboat with its merchandise didn't arrive that spring. He was an idiot, and greedy, or concerned to maintain the Company's customers.
  7. One written document DOES say the smallpox was intentional--spread by a white man who was denied passage on the steamboat, in order to kill all the whites on the boat. This was a rumor. Other than that--no, no, no evidence of Army, Army surgeons, intentional spreading, etc. These are fabrications.
  > 8. Churchill, citing various authorities in his written, placed the number of Indian dead at over 100,000, or at 125,000, or at 400,000. Any reader will assume that this is what the various authorities say. But none of the authorities he cites for his death-figures gives ANY figure at all. This is another fabrication. ( The authorities agreethat the deaths were huge in number).

  Now, read the report: When questioned about his "lack of contemporary sources" for the things he had repeatedly asserted about the epidemic, Churchill then lied about those sources to the committee itself. Most striking is that while he only cited the traditional
  written sources on the epidemic in his repetitive published work on this topic, now,
  > when shown that these sources not only did not support what he said happened (the army conspiracy) but directly contradicted what he said happened, he only now suddenly claimed to the investigating committee that his exposition was all along based NOTon the written sources he had cited in print, but instead on a mysterious "Indian oral tradition" concerning a U.S. Army plot. Upon investigation, the committee determined through investigation with Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikaree experts that this "Indian oral tradition" itself turned out not to exist. That is, it was another fabrication. It was evidently made up on the spur of the moment in February by Churchill to cover himself when caught grossly misusing the traditional written sources.

  It is important to remember that Churchill repeatedly published, in books that sell widely, that the U.S. Army engaged in a plot to destroy the tribes on the Upper
  > Missouri in 1837. This poisonous story has been spread and spread and spread by him. It is fiction. The real story is horrendous enough--7/8 of the Mandans died between June and October 1837!--but Churchill's work is fiction.

  In the state of our evidence, no one knows HOW the smallpox was transmitted to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikaree. Trade blankets are possible, but human contact is equally likely (the Indian oral tradition--the real ones the investigating committee found--has both versions). That is: blankets may not have been involved at all.

  Worst of all, and noted with horror by the committee, is that when confronted with his shoddy scholarship and outright fabrication, Churchill didn't give an inch.
  He said he intends to republish his account of 1837 this year. He doesn't understand what he did wrong.

  This is just ONE part of the Churchill verdict.

  For a professional historian such as myself, this kind of conduct by Churchill is really stunning. That he doesn't think he did anything wrong is worst of all. This is not a matter of the picky "footnote police." Churchill is an untrained fraud.

  Arthur Eckstein, Professor of History, University of Maryland

• Serious Errors of Fact in Wilson's Essay
• Posted by Thomas Brown , Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lamar Univeristy on May 19, 2006 at 12:40pm EDT

• John Wilson makes several egregious errors in this essay, indicating not only poor research skills on his part, but a failure to understand elementary tenets of scholarly ethics.

  I) Wilson claims that CU's "policy explicitly exempts 'honest error'." This is one hundred percent false. CU's policy charged the committee to come to one of three possible conclusions: research misconduct, serious research error, or exoneration. The committee unanimously agreed that Churchill's conduct constituted "serious research misconduct" on all seven counts.

  II) Wilson misreads the committee's report, wrongly inferring that the American Historical Association’s ethical standards were used as the controlling authority. Had Wilson done his research, he would have learned that CU professors are held to the ethical standards written into federal law. These standards control recipients of federal research grants. CU’s policy extends the federal standards to all faculty, regardless of whether they are working on federal money or not.

  III) Wilson’s lack of familiarity with research ethics leads him to argue that the committee “concluded without the slightest evidence that Churchill intentionally deceived readers with his footnotes.” In fact, the report cites extensive evidence that Churchill did precisely that. Churchill repeatedly cites books that not only contradict his claims, but that say the opposite—without disclosing the contradiction. According to the relevant federal law, this constitutes “falsification.”

  IV) Furthermore, Churchill repeatedly fails to report the extensive disconfirming evidence in the sources he cites, thus concealing inconvenient data points. This also constitutes “falsification” according to the federal regulations.

  V) Wilson is correct that no one has accused Churchill of making up historical sources. Instead, Churchill is accused of fabricating historical events that never occurred, historical characters who never existed, and falsifying his sources to support these fabrications. If Wilson believes that these actions do not constitute research misconduct, then his conception of scholarly ethics is far out of the mainstream.

  VI) I am one of a handful of people outside of CU who has seen Churchill’s written defense of his misconduct. In his defense, Churchill repeatedly engages in new fabrications and new falsifications as part of his attempt to cover up his previous misconduct. This is strong evidence that Churchill’s actions were not the result of honest error, but part of a conscious effort to deceive. CU’s investigative committee did not address this new obfuscating misconduct in their report, because it was not part of their official purview. However, it must have affected their evaluation of the seven official charges. The committee members’ frustration with Churchill’s dishonest non-response can be glimpsed in their report. They observe that Churchill would not acknowledge any error, refused to engage his critics in reasoned debate, and instead responded with ad hominem attacks on his critics.

  Wilson’s opinion essay demonstrates an appalling lack of knowledge about CU’s process, and about the high ethical standards to which most scholars hold themselves and their colleagues. The political context of the Churchill investigation remains an important topic for discussion. But when Wilson argues that Churchill is innocent of research misconduct, and when he trivializes the work of the CU investigative committee as “footnote police,” Wilson demonstrates that he does not understand the difference between honest scholarship and dishonest scholarship.

• Posted by Bernardo O'Boyle on May 19, 2006 at 1:40pm EDT

• The heavy lifting in Wilson's article is done by a phrase like "shoddy, perhaps more ...." That's terrific rhetoric. It's utterly inaccurate, but terrific rhetoric.

  Note how the "perhaps more" protects Wilson from the accusation that he's failed to consider the string of frauds by Churchill. But if we're to take Wilson seriously, he needs to come out from behind his "perhaps" and come down firmly: was there "more" or not? If so, what kind of "more"? Did Churchill engage in a long, repetitive pattern of scholarly frauds or didn't he?

  The positive developments from the Horowitz onslaught and Churchill onslaught, etc., is that the left on campus -- which has for decades been operating in the "if we don't like it, we censor it" mode -- is now rediscovering the once-quaint virtues of academic freedom, open dialogue, and tolerance of different views.

  This is Phase 1 of the process -- where academia "talks the talk" of viewpoint tolerance. Walking the walk will take a few more year, but it will come. Academia is always a lagging indicator of social mores. It will take another decade for academia to catch up to the conservative turn our society took in the 1980s.

• Read the report
• Posted by GT on May 19, 2006 at 1:40pm EDT

• The Committee's report comes to 125 pages published online. I am not an academic, but a father, and am quite interested in the thought processes of those who will be helping my children understand the world they live in. Clearly, the Committee did not act as "footnote police" - the report follows their careful and painstaking approach to each charge. I am heartened by the responses I read here to Mr. Wilson's article. If people such as Mr. Churchill continue to get the kind of attention that he has over the past few years, and if others such as Mr. Wilson continue to characterize the search for truth in such ways, I regret to inform you that higher education in the humanities will continue its long slide to oblivion. We will take our education elsewhere.

• Well done, Prof. Brown
• Posted by R.A.S. on May 19, 2006 at 1:45pm EDT

• Dr. Brown has shown the difference between a scholar's respect for truth and research rigor -- and myopic, rank politization of issues.

  It is like the true scientist Dr. Koop and the AIDS crisis. Dr. Koop's heart felt one thing -- but his medical mind acknowledged the impending crisis.

  Mr. Churchill is an unhappy man who used a family fable ("we're Indian") to enlarge his ego.

  He harms the cause of American Indian rights with his shoddy research methods -- if there can be no generalized consensus, how can there be some resolution?

  He places himself above the CU community because to acknowledge the facts would be to crush his self-ego.

  This is beyond appalling. The word I want to use now is unprintable in a family publication.

• Krause's comment on the Churchill investigation report
• Posted by Kathryn W. Kemp , What is the difference? on May 19, 2006 at 1:45pm EDT

• Could Professor Krause elaborate on his comment that "There’s a difference between someone publishing scholarship that is labeled “shoddy” and and someone publishing scholarship where, in reality, he has represented someone else’s work as his own, or when writers just “make shit up"..." What is the significant difference here? They all seem condemptible to me. If extremist critics use the careers of individuals such as Churchill to attack academic freedom, it won't do any good to respond by defending his right to be slipshod.

• Shoddy versus "making shit up"
• Posted by Steven D. Krause on May 19, 2006 at 3:20pm EDT

• For me, "shoddy" scholarship includes lots and lots and LOTS of pieces of academic writing, essays that make arguments that are full of holes, bad evidence, leaps in logic, etc. There are many examples, of course, but the ones that attract attention are the ones that push particular political/cultural buttons. Churchill's infamous 911 essay is an example. I did read that piece about a year and a half ago, when this whole business began, and the reason why I think it is shoddy is because his argument is full of lots of holes and his writing is pretty poor. I haven't read it, but everything I hear about Horowitz's book on the 101 most dangerous academics suggests to me that it too is probably an example of shoddy scholarship.

  "Making shit up" is fabrication. To borrow from Chicken Little's post about "Standards" (which was useful, btw), saying that Pearl Harbor didn't happen would be a fabrication. Signing your name to something you didn't write would be a fabrication.

  Now, there is a fuzzy line possible between these two things. It is possible to be a thinker so far ahead of her time to be perceived as fabricating something (I don't think Churchill is such a thinker, btw). It's also possible that the writer didn't realize that they were fabricating something (this happens with student writing all the time, but that's a plagiarism topic where I'm not going to go). But generally, I think the line is pretty clear.

  Shoddy work happens all the time. But I don't think that's a "crime." Fortunately, most shoddy scholarship doesn't push the political/socal buttons being pressed by Churchill or Horowitz, so they remain forgotten among the thousands of academic articles that go virtually unread.

  Blatently "making shit up" is (I think/hope) more rare, and I think that is a crime.

  How does this figure in with Churchill? Well, as I said with my first comment here, I'm not going to defend Churchill and I don't really care what happens to him. But I will say this: the fact that Churchill's 911 piece was shoddy (or poorly written or badly reasoned or whatever) is not the reason why this brew-ha-ha (sp???) started in the first place. The reason why this all started, obviously, is because Churchill's argument about 911 pissed people off-- which I suspect was his purpose.

  Pissing people off with shoddy scholarship is not a reason to fire a tenured professor (and btw, I strongly agree with the comment that CU got what it deserved when it hired, tenured, and promoted Churchill in the first place).

  However, making shit up is a crime and deserves to be punished. If Churchill is guilty of that, if it's not the whole 911 issue, then I would agree, he should get some kind of punishment.

• Churchill
• Posted by Harry Mills on May 19, 2006 at 3:25pm EDT

• I spent far too much time today reading the actual report by the investigators. Churchill DEFinitely has serious problems. Sure, there are a lot of good GENERAL points he makes, but ghostwriting an article and then CITING that article as a supposedly independent third-party source is bad.

  Citing references that purport to support one's contentions but that do NOT support one's contentions is bad. Maybe he slipped up once or twice, but he's either incompetent or deliberately misleading people on the facts.

  I wouldn't want the guy to have tenure where _I_ work, although he is a great advocate in the Rush Limbaugh sense of the term: He makes good points, but is more of an entertainer (rabble-rouser) than a scholar. His scholarship is terrible.

• Posted by Andrew on May 19, 2006 at 5:40pm EDT

• Hmmm, using data you know to be false as evidence to justify a conclusion that you have already reached. Doesn't sound like academic work; sounds more like politics. The only difference between this firing offense and a possibly impeachable one is there is a reasonable chance the president believed his sources were credible.

• One more thing ...
• Posted by Andrew on May 19, 2006 at 6:00pm EDT

• This all seems very reminiscent of Stephen Glass, the journalist who made up stories and then created sources, Web sites and documents to support his stories. Journalists had no qualms about firing and shunning him. Sad that the pinnacle of our academic thinkers is put to shame ethically by the partisan publishers of political pap.

• Posted by humanities anon. at University of Colorado on May 19, 2006 at 9:45pm EDT

• I was vehemently opposed to the investigation when it started because the political motivation of the CU admin. was apparent to everyone who watched. And I was one of many CU faculty who signed a statement protesting the initial investigation. But I am perplexed by the left's continued defense of Churchill and by Wilson's characterization of the committee's report as mere footnote policing. I encourage anyone who is inclined to accept this view to read the report and make your own decision. Wilson suggests that Churchill's only misdeed was citing a source that reaches a conclusion different from his own. But when we write a sentence stated as a fact, then provide a footnote, we are clearly implying that the souce will document that fact. If not, it's still fine to cite it, but then we write something like, "For another viewpoint, see.." The main issue in Chuchill's work, though, is that THERE SIMPLY WAS NO DOCUMENTATION FOR THE CLAIMS HE WAS MAKING and he cited a source AS IF THERE WAS DOCUMENTATION. And this didn't just happen once; it was a repeated pattern. The committee distinguished between simple factual errors and deliberate misrepresentation, and argued (persuasively IMO) that the many instances of this in WC's writing added up to something other than shoddy work or lousy footnoting practice.

  The report notes that the circumstances of the investigation are highly suspect because W.C. had previous complaints against him that the university decided not to investigate. If CU had only investigated earlier, it could have been done without explicit political motivation. Yes, I'm ashamed that the admin. stooped to political pandering and took weeks to decide that his 9-11 comments were protected by the 1st amendement. And I share Wilson's concerns about witch hunting and slippery slopes.

  But... why are some on the academic left (which I consider myself a part of) still rushing to Churchill's defense? None of the dubious political motivations of Cu's admin. make it OK for a prof. to misrepresent sources and and historical events to buttress a false case. This kind of thing makes humanistic scholarship difficult to defend and justify. We all know that there was genocide against Indians by whites. We didn't need WC to tell us that. It is a scholar's job to document the details of that genocide, accurately. WC's antics, and especially the left's defense of them, ultimately make the alternative and sorely needed perspectives of ethnic studies scholars much more difficult to be heard, especially by those who don't want to hear them anyway: by students, university administrations, and the public.

• The degradation of the left
• Posted by BrianGratton , Professor at Arizona State University on May 19, 2006 at 9:45pm EDT

• John Wilson shames the left and himself with this shameless defense of gross plagiarism and fabrication. Churchill cited himself under false names to defend his arguments.

• back to 9/11
• Posted by Tim Behrend , School of Asian Studies at University of Auckland on May 19, 2006 at 11:10pm EDT

• Churchill's scholarly shortcomings and professional integrity are all beside the point in one important sense: the political processes leading to his exposure were triggered by an emotional and ideological response to a from-the-hip essay in which he attacked American notions of national and cultural exceptionalism while trying to place the crimes of 9/11 into political-historical context. Given its own moral economy, he argued, the US state "deserved" to be attacked. It's this unremarkable analysis that, ultimately, is the target of the campaigns against Churchill. He "blasphemed" the people and idea of the United States and had to be made to pay. His ethnicity (defined in biological or legalistic rather than discursive terms by his detractors), his personality and style, certain points in his scholarship became avenues of a totalistic attack in retribution for, and to undermine the power of, his 9/11 ruminations. One hopes that the idea of "roosting chickens" won't be dismissed because of Churchill's academic misconduct with respect to particular historical issues. Vainly, no doubt.

• Posted by Colin Danby on May 19, 2006 at 11:10pm EDT

• Thomas Brown, before you start making accusations about "poor research skills" and "a failure to understand elementary tenets of scholarly ethics" you should reflect on how easily the charges can be turned around.

  You say "Wilson claims that CU’s “policy explicitly exempts ‘honest error’.” This is one hundred percent false."

  But the policy is here http://www.cusys.edu/policies/Academic/misconduct and says "The definition of research misconduct does not include honest error or honest differences in interpretations or judgments of data. "

  You say "Wilson misreads the committee’s report, wrongly inferring that the American Historical Association’s ethical standards were used as the controlling authority."

  But the report http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/download/WardChurchillReport.pdf says that "Since the allegations considered here are in large part historical, we proposed—and Professor Churchill concurred on February 18, 2006—that we would use the “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct” prepared by the American Historical Association as a general point of reference." this is quite consistent with what Wilson says (He doesn't use the words controlling authority).

  Should I, on the basis, of this, denounce you for falsification? False data, false conclusions? No. I shouldn't. You're making an argument, and like a lot of people making heartfelt arguments, you get a little tendentious, you read things in an unfavorable light, you jump to conclusions, you wiggle around the meanings of words.

  Large point: The normal penalty, in scholarly work, for publishing something wrong is for someone else to publish showing that you're wrong. It happens all the time. Yes, scholars do believe in truth, and you get closer to it by careful critique. The question that we have here is when the wrongness goes so far that you should also get fired.

  Your point III is precisely an issue that Wilson discusses at length: the practice of including in one's notes a range of relevant material. Your use of the term "data points" suggests that you are misapplying a model from natural-science experiments to the writing of history. And I strongly suspect that the "fabrication and falsification" in the UC policy were aimed at data gathered in experiments -- there have been various cases where people have made up experimental data or changed it.

  There are a number of important questions raised here, and it would be nice to talk about them without people working themselves up into a lather so they can have the pleasure of words like "appalling."

  FWIW I found the pattern of conduct described in the Investigative Committee's report distressing, and "footnote police" struck me as a poor choice of title. The hard part is this: on the one hand, it's very important that people footnote conscientiously, and are as forthright as possible about their evidence and logic. Even if bad work is eventually caught, it gums up the works. In the other hand I don't want scholarly disagreements to turn into efforts to get people fired.

• Posted by Mitchell Langbert , Associate Professor at Brooklyn College on May 19, 2006 at 11:10pm EDT

• Professor Wilson's claim that "ACTA threatens that academic freedom will be revoked from colleges unless they start censoring their professors and ban such courses" puzzles me. I have the ACTA report in front of me, which was forwarded to me by Charles Mitchell of ACTA, and I do not see any statement indicating an intention to advocate revocation of academic freedom.

  Indeed, Wilson's statement is nonsensical because ACTA has no authority over academic freedom. Rather, academic hiring committees have such authority, as do university administrations. Since both academic hiring committees and university administrations are more likely to be dominated by left wing extremists than by conservatives, it would hardly seem likely that a conservative group like ACTA would have much influennce over academic freedom.

  Rather, Wilson once again illustrates the Orwellian use of the term academic freedom characteristic of the suppressive left wing McCarthyites who dominate universities and suppress and fire anyone who disagrees with their dumb hypotheses, such as caucasians are responsible for high crime rates in Cote d'Ivoire, Aristotle lynched Hispanics, and there are no differences between males and females. Rather, such crackpot views have come to dominate universities, and most who disagree, like Lawrence Summers at Harvard, are driven out by the left wing bigots who dominate these institutions.

  How could ACTA threaten academic freedom when left wing campus bigots have already destroyed it?

• Horowitz and Women's Studies
• Posted by david horowitz on May 20, 2006 at 5:10am EDT

• John Wilson misrepresents what I said about Women's Studies. I said the academic study of women is of coruse a legitimate field of inquiry, including gender inequalities. What is illegitimate is to make Women's Studies a course of indoctrination in sectarian views of the status and condition of women. In my Kansas testimony I used the Women's Studies Department at Santa Cruz as an example. It has been renamed the Department of Feminist Studies at Santa Cruz and it is made clear in the departmental descriptions that this is intended as a department of Studies in Feminism, not about Feminism. This is an inappropriate academic program in the same way that a Department of Conservative Studies designed to make students conservatives would be inappropriate.

• Moreover
• Posted by Mitchell Langbert , Associate Professor at Brooklyn College on May 20, 2006 at 5:10am EDT

• In the introduction to the ACTA report Anne Neale makes the statement: "the solution is not to fire professors who express extreme views but to expose them, to compel them to defend their positions, invite them to debate ideas and above all, to insist that they do their job of teaching students well...the faculty's academic freedom should end at the point where profesors abuse the special trust they are given to respect students' academic freedom to learn." These remarks are entirely consistent with the statements of the American Association of Univeristy Professors.

  Of course, leftists like Wilson find the idea that he should be required to respect students' academic freedom troubling, even baffling.

  Since Wilson's remarks about ACTA are characteristic of the misrepresentation in which academics engage in suppressing conservatives' academic freedom, I have written the following letter of support to ACTA:

  "In cataloguing ideologically- and politically-driven courses in nearly four dozen well-known institutions of higher learning, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has performed an important public service. You have broadened and further documented Roger Kimball's insights in Tenured Radicals. The courses that you describe in "How Many Ward Churchills: A Study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni" do not deserve the appellation "academic." Rather, the courses that you describe amount to trash; that is, shrill advocacy of left wing ideology and biases, reverse racism, and anti-American demogoguery. The courses that you describe are the handiwork of cranks. Sadly, the broad prevalence of such courses across a wide swath of the country's best colleges suggests a decline in standards in higher education to which the public needs to be alerted. Alumni are not getting what they think when they contribute; the public does not get what it thinks when it provides tax exemptions; employers do not get what they think when they insist on credentials from institutions; and parents do not get what they think when they pay tens of thousands of dollars to be told that the most free, wealthiest and creative society in history, the United States of America, is inferior to the left wing prison camps of the Soviet Union or Cuba, or the backward, suppressive and closed-minded cultures of the third world."

  Of course, our left-wing campus cranks do not volunteer to emigrate to North Korea beause, er, well, you figure it out.

• Responding to my critics
• Posted by John K. Wilson on May 20, 2006 at 9:10am EDT

• I disagree with Langbert that I misrepresent ACTA's report. They do warn about academic freedom being revoked; I don't accuse them of doing it, although as an advocacy group that trains trustees, they certainly might have a role.

  As for Langbert's claim that these courses are "trash", I find it difficult to understand how anyone can reach that conclusion from reading a title and a few selective details. Surely we would need to study the syllabus, and probably attend at least a few classes before we could justify such a dismissive conclusion.

  As for David Horowitz, he defends his attack on Kansas by citing Santa Cruz. I don't like the term "feminist studies" but the study of feminist approaches seems perfectly legitimate. Condemning entire fields based on some mission statements strikes me as deeply flawed methodology.

  Regarding the Colorado report, I agree with most of the attacks on Churchill (although I would like to read a full response from him). I believe, however, that the best way to criticize his errors is to denounce him, not to try to fire him. If this is a watershed moment, when the academic profession raises its standards and takes a strong stand against tenured professors who engage in shoddy research, I fear that we will have footnote police who are less careful and more politically motivated than the committee was in this case.

  It's always hard to defend the academic freedom of people like Churchill who do so little to deserve it. But we should worry if a crackdown on bad researchers begins with an investigation motivated by political views. The committee shows clearly that Churchill made a lot of dumb mistakes. But I think it fails to prove a clear intent to deceive.

• Posted by arthur eckstein on May 20, 2006 at 2:10pm EDT

• In my view, Mr. Wilson is simply wrong to believe that in the Ward Churchill case the academic community is suddenly raising its standards of scholarship. On the contrary: in the Ward Churchill case the academic community is simply applying to Ward Churchill the prevailing standards of scholarship that are absolutely required of all professionals.

  Mr. Wilson also cynically implies that conduct such as Churchill's is widespread among scholars--and I believe that is wrong as well. In 25 years in the profession I have never come across a previous case of a scholar simply MAKING UP historical events, as Churchill does. I deny that such fabrication is widespread.

  Wilson now finally agrees that Churchill's scholarly failures are far worse than just a few confused footnotes. But he still does not want to see an intentional pattern of misconduct here. I urge him to read the report, and especially to consider Churchill's deceptive conduct towards the investigatory committee itself when they caught him out on the question of his outrageous misuse of the sources of the 1837 smallpox epidemic on the Upper Missouri. At that point he had sudden recourse to a mysterious "Indian oral tradition" which he had never ever referred to in print, and which turned out only he knew. No scholar from the Three Affiliated Tribes vouched for his "oral tradition" on the epidemic; they denied it. It was just another lie. (Of course, Churchill's last desperate defense here rested on the idea that he himself is an Indian,which he isn't, and thus had access to "special knowledge", which he doesn't.) We can all agree that Churchill's performance was pathetic. But Mr. Wilson, it was worse: it was completely and cynically unethical.

  It is fair to say that Colorado is now reaping the results of having intentionally hired and then promoted to the heights an unqualified political hack, and paying the price for having protected and promoted him for a decade after the complaints about his grotesque misuse of sources and evidence started to flow in (which was long before 9/11). That should be a lesson for other university administrations.

  If the Ethnic Studies Association decides to support Churchill along the lines suggested by Mr. Wilson, the entire field will be going over a cliff.

  Arthur Eckstein

• Errors of Fact by Danby and Wilson
• Posted by Thomas Brown , Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lamar University on May 20, 2006 at 2:10pm EDT

• A) Mr. Danby makes the same error that Mr. Wilson made. He confuses CU’s definition of misconduct with its policy for determining misconduct. CU’s policy states:

  “At the conclusion of the investigation, the Investigative Committee may reach one of the following decisions:

  A finding of misconduct
  A finding of no culpable conduct, but serious research error
  A finding of no misconduct and no serious research error.”
  (http://www.colorado.edu/graduateschool/ORI/Research%20Misconduct.html)

  Which rather pulls the rug out from under one of Wilson’s major arguments.

  B) Danby and Wilson both confuse the investigative subcommittee’s report with the official policy. Danby and Wilson both wrongly infer that the AHA ethical standard is the controlling authority, simply because the investigative subcommittee referred to the AHA in its report.

  In fact, CU’s policy is written to comply “with current federal regulations regarding scientific research misconduct, for example those promulgated by the Public Health Service (PHS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF)” (http://www.cusys.edu/policies/Academic/misconduct). Furthermore: “This policy applies to all faculty, students, administrators and staff on all of the University’s campuses who are engaged in research, whether or not it is externally funded” (http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/researchfacts.html).

  Note that CU’s policy does not preclude the investigative subcommittee from citing additional ethical standards such as the AHA. Also note that nothing in the AHA standard contradicts the university’s official policy or the federal regulations it follows. The subcommittee’s report was written for the eyes of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct, who will apply the federal standard as they see fit.

  C) Danby writes:

  “Your point III is precisely an issue that Wilson discusses at length: the practice of including in one’s notes a range of relevant material. Your use of the term “data points” suggests that you are misapplying a model from natural-science experiments to the writing of history. And I strongly suspect that the “fabrication and falsification” in the UC policy were aimed at data gathered in experiments — there have been various cases where people have made up experimental data or changed it.”

  The problem with this excuse for Churchill is that when it comes to Churchill’s smallpox fraud, there is no “range” of material that might provide support for his tale. There is no support whatsoever in either the primary sources or the scholarly literature for Churchill’s smallpox blankets tale. All of the evidence he cited fails to support him, and most of it directly contradicts him. Churchill repeatedly conceals this inconvenient fact, by citing the literature as if it supports his contentions, and failing to disclose that he has no evidence for the elements of the story that he has invented.

  Churchill cannot evade a finding of misconduct by pointing to differing ethical standards between disciplines. There is no system of scholarly research ethics that permits making up stories, concealing disconfirming evidence, and misrepresenting the evidence that you do cite. This is precisely the point that the investigative subcommittee’s report was making when it cited the AHA standard.

  D) Danby and Wilson’s errors of fact appear to arise from an attempt at procedural nit-picking. Certainly the political context of the process is ripe for criticism. But Wilson in particular denies what is obvious to any of us who have carefully studied the history of the 1837 smallpox epidemic: that Churchill repeatedly fabricated history and falsified his sources. If Churchill’s actions do not meet the definition of misconduct for Wilson, it would be interesting to know what would. I cannot imagine a more egregious example of misconduct in historical research than what Churchill has done here.

  E) Mr. Danby’s caution about strong language is well-taken. However, for those of us who are intimately familiar with Churchill’s malfeasance, it is distressing to see people such as Wilson defend him and attack the investigative committee, especially when Wilson is clearly not conversant with the facts of the matter and makes elementary errors of fact in his critique. I think that any randomly selected committee of five competent academics would arrive at the same conclusion that CU’s committee did, assuming they put in the same amount of effort to familiarize themselves with the evidence.

• Posted by Colin Danby on May 20, 2006 at 7:00pm EDT

• My point was that the claims Wilson made, in the language he made them, were borne out by the documents he cited, so that Brown’s extreme language about Wilson’s capacities and veracity was uncalled for. As I noted in my previous post Wilson does not use the term “controlling authority.” Nor do I. Nor do I “infer” anything about controlling authority. If Brown wants to argue that we *should* be discussing this in terms of something called a “controlling authority,” that’s fine. But to say I “wrongly infer” something when I don’t make the inference in the first place, or even use the concept, is just silly.

  On (C) I’m not excusing Churchill, simply noting that the issue Brown raises is one that Wilson had quite a lot to say about, and that one would think that a reply to Wilson would engage his substantive argument on that point. Much turns on what implicit claim a reference is thought to make.

  Brown’s real argument seems to be that Wilson understated the original charge to the committee. That is, while the documents Wilson cites are relevant and appropriately characterized, there are other more-relevant or more-powerful documents, and once you take them into account the severity of the committee’s judgments is more comprehensible. I don’t know enough to assess its merits, but this strikes me as a reasonable, smart argument.

  Let's pursue it with an example. The report has the following passage on page 24.

  “In short, when one carefully dissects the Churchill claim quoted in the original allegation, the three apparently independent third-party sources dissolve into one source (the Act) that clearly does not expressly support his claim, and two other sources (the Robbins and Jaimes chapters) that he wrote himself. Although Professor Churchill purported to offer his claims as supported by research, based on independent sources, it turns out that the claims not only cannot be supported but that he has misrepresented the independent nature of his sources employed to buttress the unsupportable details of his conclusions. Were Professor Churchill a scientist, rather than a researcher engaged in social science research in ethnic studies, the equivalent would be (1) the misstatement of some underlying data (i.e., his mischaracterization of the General Allotment Act) and (2) the total fabrication of other data to support his hypothesis (i.e., the ghostwriting and self-citation of the Robbins and Jaimes essays).”

  Self-citation is a perfectly honorable thing. It’s a way of saying that you dealt with this question already, and anyone who wants more can go to your earlier publication for the details. Ghost-self-citing is, however, pretty weird. It’s certainly misleading. You owe it to your reader to be clear when you're self-citing and when you are not. So I agree this falls within the realm of misconduct. (And ghosting scholarly work sounds like misconduct itself.)

  But the last sentence of the passage quoted above seems to me to be using the wrong categories. The analogy between natural and physical science does not hold here. Articles aren’t data. (No scholar will be so naive to think that your ability to cite three names in support of a point proves it -- you may have three lunatics.) We can say that Churchill was wrong about the archival data three times under three different names (and as the committee notes, scholars have already gone after him in the literature on these claims.) We can say that he is highly misleading by self-citing in a way that does not make it clear that nobody else supports him on this point. But experimental data this is not.

  If Brown’s right, it’s now clear why the committee made this tortured analogy to natural science, rather than just relying on the perfectly good criteria historians use: this analogy puts them in contact with a federal legal standard that was written to go after natural-science data-fabricators. (Again, this isn't to excuse the conduct, but we can perhaps see the structure of the legal case for firing Churchill being bolted together here.)

  Wilson could launch a plausible critique here: exactly what is the relation between the AHA standards and the Federal ones used above? If AHA standards were ultimately not what this rested on, why does the committee make such a big deal about them, and about having agreed with Churchill on their use?

  Just to be clear, I've not written a word attacking the good faith of the UC committee and I’ve seen nothing so far to suggest that theirs was not an honest effort to complete a very difficult task. This cannot have been a committee assignment that any of them welcomed.

• his critics live in glass houses
• Posted by Rob , thank goodness at CU on May 20, 2006 at 7:00pm EDT

• I heard Mimi Wesson, one of Ward's "evaluators", speak on NPR last year about freedom of speech and sexual issues.

  She actually --- (and this is a fact, not something I made up) --- argued that Nabokov's "Lolita" does not pass muster as a work legitimately included in public school libraries because of its content ---

  she argued firstly that Nabokov had written "better" books than Lolita ---

  meanwhile, if you read her novels, and are familiar with the crime genre --- you know her works are derivative of any number of other crime writers you could easily list --

  Wilson is totally right --- the officially sanctioned attack against Ward may have standing as criticism; as a case for his removal or suspension, it's sick and absurd --- period.

• Watching this Debate
• Posted by Ira Socol at Michigan State University on May 20, 2006 at 7:00pm EDT

• One of the fascinating things here is watching this debate.

  There is, of course, the left-right split. Probably legitimate because there is an ongoing organized attempt to intimidate faculty not adhering to America's current political "party line." That makes it logical for faculty from outside "the American Right" to be highly suspicious of the findings of an investigation that was begun for political reasons. To deny that this happens within a context is nonsense, and had the UC committee investigated "all" faculty in the same way, people would be less nervous about accepting the findings.

  Then there is fear. A many have said, shoddy, sloppy research happens all the time. Universities almost insist on this by creating exaggerated faculty publishing requirements. And logically, faculty members are nervous about anyone combing through their work looking for errors.

  A nice touch is the worried father, a common element in the United States today, who having given his child no discernible judgement capabilities, and sent him or her to a secondary school devoted to AP courses and achievement test scores, hopes Universities will protect that child from dangerous ideas.

  And of course there is the very understandable - if very disappointing - outrage against someone who has (legitimately or not, convincingly or not) attempted to trash a cherished American myth-set. Good teachers, good schools, and good entertainers are all dependent on risk-taking and myth-breaking - but all can go badly - be it horribly inaccurate historical film-making (Pearl Harbor, U-571) or Churchill's writing. What Colorado seems not to have done, is develop a way of saying that extreme controversey is essential on their campus, but (perhaps) not this way.

  Finally there is the issue of plagiarism, false sources, and ghost writing. Every day hundreds of university faculty put their names on student-developed papers they had - essentially - no part in writing. Colleges and journals encourage this. Every day authorship "order" gets arranged by who needs that "first credit" right now. Every day people are out there Googling themselves and their colleagues counting citations. And obviously, every day crap is written and published because - hey, all that counts is publication.

  Do I have an opinion on Ward Churchill? I'm not sure. He seems like so many, someone who warps their research to fit their publication and political agendas. If this is wrong, and I believe it is, then a lot more needs to change than the status of one tenured professor.

• Posted by PB Hall on May 20, 2006 at 7:00pm EDT

• With some sadness, I observe that articles like this one give fuel to Horowitz et al.

  I read the investigative committee's report. It's worth reading before you comment.

• More Errors of Fact
• Posted by Thomas Brown , Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lamar University on May 20, 2006 at 9:40pm EDT

• Once again Danby misrepresents the facts, falsely stating that “the claims Wilson made, in the language he made them, were borne out by the documents he cited,” and thus I should not take Wilson to task for his errors of fact.

  But that is not the case. Quoting Wilson:

  “Because Colorado’s policy explicitly exempts “honest error,” the Colorado committee turned into a kind of character police. Noting their dislike for Churchill’s “attitude,” the committee members seem to have concluded without the slightest evidence that Churchill intentionally deceived readers with his footnotes.”

  I’ve already demonstrated that CU’s policy does not “explicitly exempt” honest error--but in fact specifically takes it into account--and that Wilson is simply wrong on this. And Danby is wrong to say otherwise. Such stubborn refusal to face facts is what incites me to strong language. Wilson cited to the definition while misrepresenting it as policy, thus wrongly implying that the CU committee was not permitted to reach a verdict of honest error.

  Furthermore, anyone who takes the trouble to read the committee’s report will immediately see that Wilson is also willfully misrepresenting the report when he claims that they failed to find “the slightest evidence that Churchill intentionally deceived readers.” In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that Churchill did precisely that, and the committee gives numerous examples. Churchill’s sock puppetry alone is convincing evidence of an attempt to deceive, and there is much more.

  I agree that the report’s section on the General Allotment Act is poorly worded in places. But the fact remains that Churchill stated that the Act contains a blood quantum requirement, when it does not. Thus Churchill has falsified the central primary source--repeatedly. The committee’s reference to science is unneccessary. Churchill has both falsified data and fabricated data, violating the ethical standards of any scholarly discipline. A few paragraphs of clumsy writing in the report do not alter that underlying fact.

  On the question of why the committee invoked AHA standards, I think I have an answer. Churchill complains that none of the committee members is an American Indian, and that none of them are experts in American Indian Studies, and thus they are not familiar with the standards in his field. Of course, this complaint is so specious that it doesn’t require a response. But due to the political context of the investigation, the committee bent over backwards to give every consideration to Churchill’s complaint. Because there is no published ethical standard for American Indian Studies, they invoked the AHA statement on ethics, which is the closest and most appropriate ethical standard for assessing research on an historical event.

  Wilson complains that the AHA does not explicitly disallow citing someone who disagrees with you, as if that would somehow excuse Churchill’s transgression, or as if it demonstrates some sort of politicized malfeasance on the part of the committee. That is a willful misreading of the situation on Wilson’s part. Wilson is attempting to trivialize the degree of Churchill’s fraud by recasting it as being limited to citing someone who disagrees with him. But anyone who takes the time to read the report will immediately see that Churchill’s transgressions are far more serious than that. On this point, I found Wilson’s essay to be transparently dishonest, and that is what provoked me to criticize him in the language I used.

• Posted by Colin Danby on May 21, 2006 at 6:10am EDT

• Sigh. I *never* said that anyone should not be taken to task for errors of fact. But it's simply impossible to pursue nuance when you get this kind of serial, hostile misreading. As I said last time, I think Brown has an intelligent critique of Wilson’s larger argument, and may have a better interpretation of why the committee reasoned the way it did. What he doesn’t have is the basis for the bad-tempered accusations he levels at Wilson. E.g. given the prominence that the committee document gives to the AHA standards, it's hardly wicked or eccentric to treat them as important in an a discussion of that document. But for the second time in a row Brown reads carelessly and imputes to me things I don’t say, so I give up.

• Apologist Wilson and the comments
• Posted by William Sumner Scott, J.D. on May 21, 2006 at 9:15am EDT

• It is amazing that academics can comment on an article or opinion with the introduction, "I haven't read it, but" and make statements such as "may be shoddy, or more" and be published, much less read. The editors at Inside Higher Ed should reject opinion such as Wilson's and comments that obviously have no grip of the facts.

  An opinion or comment must be based upon at least a reading of the material critiqued and specific cites to the opinion or fact that is believed to be wrong or misstated.

  Some comments were outstanding, such as the parent who asks the Higher Ed profession to clean up its act or suffer oblivion.

  William Sumner Scott, J.D.
  wss@jefound.org

• End-game for never-ending conflict?
• Posted by R.A.S. on May 21, 2006 at 11:35am EDT

• The Churchill affair has dragged on for months (years?), tieing up valuable resources, and could continue to drag for years.

  For the sake of students, taxpayers, and everyone else -- why doesn't CU separate Ethnic Studies (ES) into a separate, stand-alone institute? And let ES find its own way, with WC aboard? Heck, the reduction in legal fees alone would pay a lot of ES' expenses.

• Churchill considers himself a scientist
• Posted by Bitch | Lab on May 21, 2006 at 4:15pm EDT

• As the report noted, Churchill agreed to be considered an historian for the purposes of the investigation and be held to the standards in history. But, more importantly, Churchill himself was cited by the committee regarding his claims about good science and journalism, to wit:

  “Tailoring the facts to fit one’s theory constitutes neither good science nor good journalism. Rather, it is intellectually dishonest and, when published for consumption by a mass audience, adds up to propaganda.”

  I believe we can infer from that statement that Ward Churchill considers himself a practitioner of science and journalism and that both require one to adhere to the same standards.

  The claim that Churchill should be held to standards of footnoting in the humanities is astonishing. Whether in the sciences or the humanities, scholars do their readers a service by noting the difference between a footnote that supports a claim and a footnote which supports competing claims. I dont' know about anyone else here, but that's how I track down the interesting material to read.

  Such footnotes are usually prefaced with "But see...." The author typically provides a brief summary of how the author in question disagrees with the matter at hand. It's really quite simple and obviously important for anyone who wishes to use those footnotes the way Churchill claims he wishes his readers to use them when speaking to a general audience. (See the "rich footnote" quote in the report.)

  Churchill knew he lied about the authorship of a few papers. He used that lie to pretend that he had support for his claims from independent researchers.

  Lying about who actually authors a paper by completely writing it yourself -- and having others in on the secret is not something to be treated lightly. That is, this is not a situation where a senior scholar takes credit for research conducted and written by a junior apprentice. This was a case of the senior scholar writing a paper and then assigning authorship to two other people -- two people who also committed acts of misconduct on my view.

  If you think someone like that has not besmirched the academy enough to warrant his removal from said academy or some equally serious punishment, all I can say is: I'm thoroughly disgusted.

  Feminists and left activists worked hard to bring universities to the point where they were willing to hire someone like Churchill on the basis of the critiques we'd lodged against the system of assessing someone's professional worth and publication record.

  Churchill has done a disservice to the social movements that helped put him in his position at the university. He has betrayed people who sacrificed their own careers to make that happen.

  He has also betrayed the men and women who defended him and who denied that he could possibly be guilty of anything more than a forgetful lack of quotation marks in a footnote.

• Summarizing the serious errors of fact in Wilson’s essay:
• Posted by Thomas Brown on May 21, 2006 at 4:15pm EDT

• I) Wilson falsely claims that: “Because Colorado’s policy explicitly exempts ‘honest error,’ the Colorado committee turned into a kind of character police.” In fact, CU’s policy explicitly *includes* a potential finding of honest error. I’ve cited above a link to CU’s policy that proves Wilson’s error.

  II) Wilson falsely claims that: “[T]he committee members seem to have concluded without the slightest evidence that Churchill intentionally deceived readers with his footnotes.” In fact, the report cites extensive evidence that Churchill’s intent was to deceive. Wilson would be on safer ground had he argued that the committee’s evidence was insufficient, or unconvincing. He’s entitled to his opinion of the evidence. But when Wilson argues that the evidence is non-existent, he is falsifying the contents of the report.

  III) Wilson falsely claims that the CU report finds Churchill guilty of falsification simply because Churchill cites sources who disagree with him. This is an extreme misrepresentation of the report on Wilson’s part.

  Imagine an author who claimed that Germany won WWII, and whose footnote read: “Germany’s victory is covered in the Encyclopedia Britannica.” There is no question that this author has falsified his source. That is the magnitude of Churchill’s transgression, and Churchill has done this habitually and repeatedly throughout his career. For Wilson to reframe this degree of falsification as simply citing someone who disagrees with you is dishonest on Wilson’s part.

  At this stage in the discussion, an honorable scholar in Wilson’s position would acknowledge that he is in error on Point I, and acknowledge that he has overstated his case on Points II and III. But Wilson has yet to even respond to this criticism, much less to acknowledge the serious errors. When these errors are corrected, Wilson’s basis for maligning the CU report disappears.

• Question for Thomas Brown et al.
• Posted by Tim Behrend , School of Asian Studies at Auckland University on May 22, 2006 at 5:35am EDT

• I'm curious how you imagine Churchill at work on the small pox epidemic among the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikaree people in 1837. Do you think he was searching for obscure evidence that there was some degree of intentionality in US Army actions that contributed, or even caused, the outbreak? But then, having failed in his search, he decided to make up evidence to perpetrate a propaganda hoax on the scholarly community and concerned political activists? In other words, do you believe that he calculatedly set out to perpetrate a deception? You and other harsh critics here seem, in fact, to use terms like lie and deceive and "falsely claim" quite readily (against Wilson, too). Do you think that Wilson, likewise, has intentionally erected an argument buttressed by "false claims" (as opposed to mistaken "views"). If you don't, you should pause over your rhetoric, lest some like-minded person of a different political persuasion, begin to peruse your comments for evidence of Churcillian or Wilsonian mendacity.

• Yes
• Posted by JBM on May 22, 2006 at 6:50am EDT

• "In other words, do you believe that he calculatedly set out to perpetrate a deception?"

  Yes. He made stuff up, published the fabrications under several names, then cited those names to pass the fabrications off as accepted scholarship. Not to mention stealing work from real scholars and distorting real scholarship to deceive readers into believing false contentions.

  Yes, Churchill is a liar, thief, and fraud.

• what the investigative report shows
• Posted by arthur eckstein on May 22, 2006 at 8:20am EDT

• Professor Behrend:

  Regarding Churchill's version of the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikaree smallpox epidemic--have you read the investigative report?

  1. Churchill has repeatedly said in print, in widely-used books, that the smallpox epidemic was intentionally started by the U.S. Army, employing U.S. Army posts on the Upper Missouri to do it,and evil U.S. Army surgeons at those army posts to do it, Army doctors who intentionally employed blankets taken from smallpox wards at St. Louis to accomplish this evil deed, and who intentionally withheld the available vaccine (which could have saved them) from the Indians, and who, further, intentionally told the Indians to scatter, in a plot to scatter the disease more widely.

  2. Every single element in this story is false.
  There were no Army forts on the Upper Missouri in 1837, no Army surgeons (or doctors of any kind), no smallpox wards in St. Louis, no vaccine available on the Upper Missouri (as sources complain), no bad advice given. On the contrary: the forts (run by a private company) tried to keep the Indians away once people were infected, in order to prevent the spread of the disease (because--why kill their customers, the sources of their profits?). It is, further, unclear from the sources both written and oral (Indian traditions) whether blankets of any kind (as opposed to human contact with men on an infected steamboat) were even involved at all in the spread of the smallpox.

  3. To back up his false accusations of a plot by the U.S. government to kill the Indians, accusations which were dictated by his general ideology, Churchill consistently cited both primary documents and other scholars on the subject. Those primary documents and other scholars either did not support his contentions or (most often) said the opposite of what he claimed. But NO reader, reading his books, would know this.
  Do YOU do this?

  The historical falseness of Churchill's version of the events of 1837 has been protested by scholars, including Indian scholars such as Professor Thompson at UCLA, for almost a decade. Churchill's only response has been to launch personal attacks on them.

  4. When confronted with his consistent and gross misuse of primary sources and his consistent and gross mis-citation of modern scholarship based on those same primary sources, Churchill suddenly reverted before the commission to a mysterious "Indian oral tradition" about a U.S. Government plot, an oral tradition which he had never cited before--EVER. But Churchill isn't an Indian and he certainly has no "secret knowledge." This was shown via investigation by the commission, involving scholars from the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikaree, those affected by the epidemic of 1837), i.e., REAL Indian scholars from the affected peoples, which revealed that no such oral traditions about a U.S. Government or Army plot existed. Churchill made that part up in February 2006 before the committee.

  Whatever you make of points 1,2, and 3 (perhaps you will say that Churchill is merely an untrained and ill-tempered incompetent who somehow ended up a full professor and chair of a Department), with point 4 you clearly have an intentional attempt by Churchill to deceive the committee by suddenly appealing to a "secret oral tradition" which he had never before employed and which turned out not to exist.

  The epidemic of 1837 on the Upper Missouri was a gigantic human tragedy. But...Would YOU do this?

  I repeat that if Ethnic Studies people try to defend Churchill's conduct, they will be following him over a cliff.

  Arthur M. Eckstein

• Is this logical?
• Posted by R.A.S. on May 22, 2006 at 8:45am EDT

• "Churchill’s scholarly shortcomings and professional integrity are all beside the point .."

  Excuse me -- who would want to take courses taught by someone with "scholarly shortcomings" and a lack of "professional integrity?"

  Does that sound like a good use of limited resources? Not to me.

• Response to Brown's False Accusations
• Posted by John K. Wilson on May 22, 2006 at 9:15am EDT

• On Point I, Thomas Brown is completely wrong. The policy he links to explicitly declares: “Research misconduct does not include honest error or differences of opinion.” An honorable scholar in Brown’s position would acknowledge that he is in error.

  On Point 2, “without the slightest evidence” depends on how you interpret “evidence.” I would like to have direct evidence of dishonesty. The committee seems to think that no one could actually be so shoddy and incompetent and then unwilling to acknowledge his errors unless he was dishonest. I, on the other hand, find it plausible that Churchill is a shoddy and incompetent scholar who is too stubborn to acknowledge a mistake. And the direct evidence proving that Churchill intended to deceive is very weak.

  On Point 3, I’d need to go back to the report, but I don’t believe that Churchill ever wrote a footnote that falsely said, “this source proves my argument.” He simply cited the work. My complaint with the committee is that if it is research misconduct to get some fact wrong and have a citation that doesn’t support that point, then the meaning of research misconduct has been vastly expanded beyond what I believe it should cover.

  Of course, everyone should be free to use the term “research misconduct” in a common-sense way to condemn Churchill’s incompetence. But the standard for punishing a tenured professor needs to be much higher.

• Posted by arthur eckstein , "errors"--and intent on May 22, 2006 at 9:15am EDT

• Professor Behrend, I would add one further point:

  Yes, "errors" can occur in any scholarship, and maybe (as I said) you yourself want to say that Churchill is just an untrained incompetent, and not a conscious deceiver. Let us leave aside for the moment Churchill's obvious deceptive conduct before the investigatory committee which I referred to above. It is also generally accepted, for instance in the David Irving legal case in London in 2000, that when there are numerous grave "errors" committed by an author and every "error" occurs in such a fashion as always to SUPPORT the author's preferred thesis, then the likelihood is strong that one is NOT dealing with mere error.

  That is completely the case with Ward Churchill on the events of 1837.

  Arthur M. Eckstein

• Posted by Tim Behrend , School of Asian Studies at Auckland University on May 22, 2006 at 9:30am EDT

• I don't want to take up too much space here on a somewhat tangential question. But when I look at Churchill's entire corpus of published work, with its hyper-documented and footnoted apparati, I wonder why he would engage in intentional fraud on this particular point. There seems to be a lot of black-and-white exegesis going on here, and a surprisingly judgment of cold calculation where I would have expected the usual ambiguity of human intentions. The certainty with which accusers from Horowitz on down label Churchill a calculating "liar" doesn't comport with my experience of either bad scholarship or human frailty. Churchill is a pissmire who poses no threat to the academy or the American polity. He is, as someone else here stated, small potatoes. Peanuts. He is not the comprehensively destructive force that Horowitz is.

• R.A.S. and "logical"
• Posted by Tim Behrend , School of Asian Studies at Auckland Univeristy on May 22, 2006 at 9:30am EDT

• I don't think you are "lying", R.A.S., but I wrote: "Churchill’s scholarly shortcomings and professional integrity are all beside the point in one important sense: the political processes leading to his exposure were triggered by an emotional and ideological response to a from-the-hip essay in which he attacked American notions of national and cultural exceptionalism...", not "Churchill’s scholarly shortcomings and professional integrity are all beside the point". You sound positively Churchillian when you truncate quotes for your convenience.

• Posted by arthur eckstein on May 22, 2006 at 10:10am EDT

• Mr. Wilson, on "Point 3", footnoting, I repeat what I said above:

  To back up his false accusations of a plot by the U.S. government to kill the Indians, accusations which were dictated by his general ideology, Churchill consistently cited both primary documents and other scholars on the subject. He cited them AS IF they supported his position: that the primary documents spoke of an Army plot to spread smallpox via blankets, and that this version of vents was commonly accepted by modern scholars, and indeed that Churchill was drawing on their work when writing his won. But those primary documents either do not support Churchill's contentions or (most often) say the direct opposite of what he claims; and the same is true of the modern scholars he cites. But Mr. Wilson, NO reader, NONE, reading his books, would know this. On the contrary: they would think, and it is impossible to believe that they were not MEANT to think, that the primary evidence was in support of Churchill's reconstruction (why else would he cite it?)--but it isn't in support, because his reconstruction is false. They would think that modern scholars support his reconstruction (why else are they cited at important points in his narrative)--but in fact they don't, because his reconstruction is false. Churchill does this over and over and over.

  Is this how YOU use footnotes?

  And don't forget his sudden invention in February of 2006 of a secret "Indian oral tradition" which he claimed supported his version--and which ALSO turns out not to exist.

  As for being "small potatoes"--Churchill is a full professor at a major research university and was recently chair of his Department. In MY world, that is not "small potatoes". If corruption has extended that high, it is a big deal.

  Arthur Eckstein

• Churchill and scholarship
• Posted by lnp3 at Columbia University on May 22, 2006 at 1:30pm EDT

• There's a fundamental misunderstanding here about what Churchill is guilty of. It certainly is not shoddy scholarship, since Common Courage Press, who published the book that contains the unsubstantiated reference to smallpox blankets, churns out agitprop, not scholarly material. In fact you cannot find a single article in JStor written by Ward Churchill. All of his articles are meant for a popular audience, not his peers. Arthur Eckstein asks if any other scholar has "made things up" in the last 25 years like Churchill did. I imagine that if Churchill had been focusing on getting published in the American Historical Review like the average scholar does, he never would have run into this problem. Such journals are refereed and carefully monitored for misstatements, unsubstantiated claims, etc. Common Courage Press, on the other hand, is a typical "movement" press that operates on virtually volunteer labor. I have dealt with them in the past as I have dealt with academic journals and the difference is obvious to me. The people out gunning for Ward Churchill have focused on his scholarly failings in order to do to him what has been done already to Sami Al-Arian.

  On the question of historical accuracy, the real problem we are dealing with in scholarly material is not failure to substantiate an argument but in the argument itself. For example, the German "revisionist" historians who came to the fore around the time that Reagan put a wreath on an SS soldier's grave at Bitburg were very scrupulous when it came to footnoting, I'm sure. However, their scholarship was tainted by crypto-Nazism just as American scholarship on native peoples before the rise of Vine Deloria et al was tainted by racism.

  I hope that Ward extracts a hefty buy-out from CU and continues to write unstinting attacks on American imperialism. That will be his legacy not failing to mollify the redbaiters and academic witch-hunters.

• The double-lives of the professorate
• Posted by Larry on May 22, 2006 at 2:40pm EDT

• Inp, Having finally read the report this weekend, I came to the same conclusion you did, so kudos for beating me to it: Churchill’s lack of actual academic work, while not damning in itself, diverted the attention to his non-academic work.

  This raises the next interesting question. Several high-profile law professors (who have blogs) will write rigorous pieces for law reviews (that is, everything they cite is backed up by a citation that will be checked by a law student), but, on their blogs and in the popular press sound like an AM-talk radio pundit (or, an alternative-press wacko). Strangely, many of the “non-nerdy” legal blogs of professors are virtually in-disguishable from political blogs written by non-lawyers.

  Most of my fellow lawyers are quite up front about this: it is okay to be less rigorous when talking to non-lawyers, because non-lawyers don’t have the ability to cite-check anything they way. (Even though most legal resources are freely available.)

  So, for this reason, one frequently sees academics and practicing lawyers writing op-eds or even “objective” pieces in newspapers and magazines decrying some practice. (Of course, these op-eds always seem to favor their clients’ positions.) If they wrote the same thing in a brief, it would be laugh at, and in many courts, sanctions would be assessed.

  Churchill, by limiting his work to non-academic publications, seems to have cooked his goose by doing what other scholars do, without counterbalancing it with more rigorous work. Since he suddenly put his foot in his mouth, attention was focused on his non-academic work.

• This has gotten surreal
• Posted by Bob A. on May 22, 2006 at 4:00pm EDT

• " .. in order to do to him what has been done already to Sami Al-Arian."

  Mr. Al-Arian is a self-confessed felon.

  http://www.tampabays10.com/news/local/article.aspx?storyid=30910

  Mr. Churchill has not confessed to any felonies.

  Are we talking apples to apples?

• DaVinci
• Posted by Chicken Little on May 22, 2006 at 4:35pm EDT

• Is inp3 suggesting that Ward Churchill should be held to the same standard as the author of the DaVinci Code?

• Sami Al-Arian
• Posted by Louis Proyect at Columbia University on May 22, 2006 at 4:35pm EDT

• Here's what happened. He was found not guilty on 8 out of 17 charges and the jury was deadlocked on the other 9. Rather than endure another long drawn-out trial from inside a jail (he could not get bail), he plead guilty to a minor charge in a kind of plea-bargaining. Then the judge decided in an act of bad faith to keep him behind bars for another 19 months rather than deport him immediately, which was part of the plea bargain. The judge made inflammatory comments on Al-Arian being a terrorist and a war criminal even though that went against the grain of the jury's findings.

  So, yes, the comparison with Ward Churchill is relevant.

  They are both victims of justice, one in a criminal court and the other in an academic kangaroo court.

• Wilson continues to refuse to acknowledge error
• Posted by Thomas Brown on May 22, 2006 at 4:35pm EDT

• Wilson again refuses to acknowledge his errors

  I) Wilson’s defense of his first error is that: “Thomas Brown is completely wrong. The policy he links to explicitly declares: ‘Research misconduct does not include honest error or differences of opinion’.”

  I’ve already explained that Wilson has conflated CU’s *policy* for determining misconduct with the policy’s *definition* of research misconduct. For example, a criminal court’s definition of “guilty” would explicitly exclude innocence. But that does not mean that the court is therefore precluded from reaching a verdict of innocence.

  CU’s policy explicitly permits one of three findings: misconduct, honest error, or exoneration. When Wilson wrote that “Colorado’s policy explicitly exempts ‘honest error’,” he substituted one sub-definition within the policy for the whole policy, thus misrepresenting the policy. Then he built an argument on top of his misrepresentation of the policy.

  Wilson’s continued refusal to acknowledge that the content of CU’s policy refutes his characterization of that policy is disturbing.

  II) At least Wilson now seems to be conceding that the CU committee did indeed cite evidence of Churchill’s intent to deceive, when he characterizes the evidence as “very weak.” Thus Wilson tacitly concedes that he was in error when he originally wrote that the committee “concluded without the slightest evidence” that Churchill is culpable.

  III) Wilson says: “I’d need to go back to the report, but I don’t believe that Churchill ever wrote a footnote that falsely said, ‘this source proves my argument’.”

  In Churchill’s 1995 version of his smallpox fable, his footnote reads: ““The dispensing of smallpox-infected blankets at Fort Clark is covered in Russell Thornton.” Wilson trivializes this as Churchill simply citing someone who disagrees with him, when it is obviously a falsification of Thornton—who never wrote a word about anyone distributing smallpox blankets at Fort Clark.

  Furthermore, Wilson again refuses to acknowledge that citing any honest scholar in support of your own fabrication is inherently dishonest. To paraphrase Mr. Eckstein’s question: Is this how you do research, Mr. Wilson?

  Mr. Behrend wonders about Churchill’s motivation. But this is not a criminal matter, and thus the question of mens rea is irrelevant to the committee’s determination of Churchill’s culpability. The standard of proof for research misconduct is “preponderance of evidence,” and the evidence against Churchill is overwhelming.

  The question of Churchill’s motivation is an interesting topic, but I don’t have enough space to get into it here. Also, much of what drives Churchill appears to originate in the realm of the non-rational, judging by his behavior.

  Mr. Behrends also finds Churchill less dangerous than Horowitz. That may be so, but it is irrelevant to a determination of Churchill’s own culpability.

  Mr. Behrends further assumes that ethical issues in Churchill’s corpus are limited to the handful of charges in the CU report. I can assure you that there are many more comparable examples throughout Churchill’s corpus. You could pick any one of his books at random and easily find examples of him diddling his sources. It’s a habit with Churchill. Indeed, the CU misconduct committee is now reviewing additional allegations, and there are countless more potential examples that have not been forwarded to the committee. The committee’s report even alludes to additional examples of Churchill misrepresenting his sources (pp. 97-98).

  Louis Proyect (lnp3) and Larry observe that Churchill publishes most of his output in non-scholarly venues, and Proyect suggests that these works should not be held to the same standard. But Churchill claimed all of these works on his CV, and was hired, tenured, and promoted on the basis of these works. Systems of scholarly ethics apply to the individual scholar, regardless of where he publishes. CU’s own policy applies its ethical standard to all faculty, student, or staff doing research. Thus Churchill cannot evade his ethical obligations by arguing that he was only talking to comrades in the movement.

• what bad faith
• Posted by Larry on May 22, 2006 at 7:20pm EDT

• Mr. Proyect, How in the world did the judge act in bad faith? He sentenced him not only according to the plea agreement, but according to the federal sentencing guidelines (in as much as they are discretionary post-Booker.) Al-Arian signed a rather detailed plea agreement where he admitted very specific things, and also acknowledged the extend to which he could be kept in jail for longer. If you can find an error in the judge's decision, please be specific. Although plea agreements are between the defendant and the prosecutor, the judge did not have to accept the plea-- but he did. The defendant did not have to plead guilty -- but he did.

  Going "against the grain" of the jury's findings means nothing. There are very specific admissions in his plea agreement. You can read the whole thing here. http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/flm/pr/2006/apr/041706arianplea.pdf . And so what if the judge said that he supported terrorism – or at least a couple of terrorists. He seems to have admitted just that. And this admission was made with 1) his lawyers present; and 2) with the benefit of knowing most or all of the government's case (a luxury few defendants have). This might startle you, but in this world there are some bad people.

  That said, I still don't see what in god's green earth this has to do with Mr. Churchill.

  Thomas Brown, I think you hit the nail on the head. Academics need to stop putting "non-academic" stuff on the CV, except maybe as a hobby. This stuff isn't "community service." Whether it really is “unethical” is not to engage in lay discussion within cites is an open question.

• Why Churchill was hired
• Posted by Louis Proyect at Columbia University on May 22, 2006 at 7:20pm EDT

• Thomas Brown: "Churchill publishes most of his output in non-scholarly venues, and Proyect suggests that these works should not be held to the same standard. But Churchill claimed all of these works on his CV, and was hired, tenured, and promoted on the basis of these works."

  I have never seen Churchill's CV so I am in no position to judge. But I guess that Churchill was hired for the same reason that Bard College hired Heinrich Blucher (Mr.Hannah Arendt) in the 1950s, for his 'cachet'. Blucher never even graduated college but was lecturing students on Western Civilization and the struggle against Communism throughout the 1950s and 60s. His lectures were filled with the kind of editorializing that David Horowitz rails against and with factual errors that were obvious to me at the time, even though I was not even a radical. But Blucher was a "star" because his liberal, cold-war credentials and Weimar mystique was highly marketable. Churchill was hired in the 1970s because he symbolized American Indian resistance not because he was just another scholar of the kind that posts to the H-AmerIndian mailing list at H-Humanities. You know the kind that post queries like: "Does anybody know when the Northern Plains tribes began to make moccasins out of bison rather than beaver hide?" "Was Chief Red Face of the Mohawks related to Chief Blue Face of the Iroquois?"

  Ward got in trouble because he spoke off the top of his head after 9/11. He would have been better off if he had followed the example of the President and spoke out of his ass.

• Pot calling the kettle black?
• Posted by Bob A. on May 22, 2006 at 8:35pm EDT

• " .. He would have been better off if he had followed the example of the President and spoke out of his ass."

  That is one of the most brilliant critiques I've ever read on American culture and politics. Your soon-to-be unemployable students must be certainly benefiting from your sage commentary. With public brillance like this, the continued downward trend in public support for higher education can only continue.

  Keep it up! Let zero public support, be your goal!

• Why, yes -- two wrongs do make a right
• Posted by R.A.S. on May 22, 2006 at 9:55pm EDT

• " .. You sound positively Churchillian when you truncate quotes for your convenience."

  No, sir -- it is you, who are Churchillian, in your evasive, counter-factual approach to WC's obviously crude faults. With your logic, WC's problems are the fault of Mr. Bush. Hardly -- Mr. Bush has been president only six years, vs. WC's 15-year professorship.

• Defining Scholarship
• Posted by John K. Wilson on May 23, 2006 at 9:20am EDT

• I won't keep responding to Brown, but I hope everyone else can understand why he's wrong. The point is that Churchill is an incompetent scholar who falls far short of my standards for research. However, he should be condemned, not punished, unless there is clear evidence of intentional error.

  The argument about defining scholarship is very interesting. I don't see a distinction between writing for the public and writing for a few professors. I think the same standards should apply; the footnotes may be omitted in the popular works, but you still should be able to apply them if asked. I think we should be encouraging more professors to act like Ward Churchill (not to think like him) in the sense of seeking to be public intellectuals who engage the public in important issues. If we had more real intellectuals discussing these issues beyond the obscure journals, perhaps we wouldn't have people believing fake intellectuals like Churchill.

  I should note that I once published a book on Newt Gingrich for Common Courage Press (I hadn't remembered that Churchill did as well). I'm not convinced that a referreed journal would have caught Churchill's errors, since I don't know if they verify footnotes. I'm fairly certain that a book publisher (whether Common Courage or a university press) would have missed them, because the editing and fact-checking of books is rather weak.

• In support of Brown
• Posted by Occom on May 23, 2006 at 9:40am EDT

• Mr. Wilson, readers understand your argument that the report does not clearly prove Churchill's intentional misconduct, as opposed to mere incompetence. Most readers simply disagree with your reading of the report and agree with Mr. Brown's reading.

• publication in non-academic venues
• Posted by arthur eckstein on May 23, 2006 at 10:30am EDT

• Thomas Brown writes:
  "Louis Proyect (lnp3) and Larry observe that Churchill publishes most of his output in non-scholarly venues, and Proyect suggests that these works should not be held to the same standard. But Churchill claimed all of these works on his CV, and was hired, tenured, and promoted on the basis of these works."

  EXACTLY. Churchill claimed to be a scholar, and was hired, tenured, promoted to full professor and to chair of a department at a major research university on that basis. His defenders cannot now argue that he shouldn't be held to scholarly standards.

  It may be part of the explanation of the grotesque situation that eventually developed in Ethnic Studies at Colorado, but as a defense of an academic fraud it is a non-starter, and actually urges that scholarly standards (including avoiding the gross fabrication of historical events!) should in some cases be completely abandoned.

  Two further points are relevant:

  1. Why DIDN'T Churchill publish with academic preses where the quality of his work would have received an academic review?
  That was his choice.

  2. Why WAS he promoted and promoted at Colorado when his books were never published by academic presses? Didn't that ring alarm bells?

  Regarding this last point, as I said long ago here, the group who will never be investigated in this tragedy, but who ought to be, are the University of Colorado administrators who knowingly hired and then promoted to the heights an untrained charlatan.

  Arthur Eckstein

• Posted by Larry on May 23, 2006 at 11:25am EDT

• Mr. Eckstein, A few points that might help your argument.

  1) He was “trained” in the sense that he had an MA. He wasn’t a “fraud” because his degrees were legitimate, and he didn’t claim to be something that he was not. You and I might disagree with what he chose to do, but I don’t think he perpetuated any fraud on anyone. (There have been, in the past, people who have lied about credentials. Indeed, IHE has even mentioned a few of them in the past couple of months. But they got to keep their jobs because they were better at playing politics, and BU has a higher tolerance for this stuff.)

  2) Most likely his department had a hand in securing his promotions. But, if we are going to start spreading blame around, perhaps we should punish every department that allows someone to be promoted that does not produce at least one scholarly work per year. I think this is a reasonable goal, but I don’t know if a failure to do this, or a promoting someone that fails to reach this goal is a fraud. Probably they are lazy. Whatever the case, my guess is that most tenured deans probably are not pulling their scholarly weight, but are writing the occasional op-ed. Who is to blame for this?

  3) Why don’t you just stick to the problem: The guy conflated populist political rhetoric with scholarship?

• Churchill's academic background and training
• Posted by arthur eckstein on May 23, 2006 at 12:05pm EDT

• Dear Larry,

  Churchill has what is essentially an M.A. in studio ART (not even Art History), from a fifth-rate place (Sangamon State College), which at the time he attended it did not even give grades (!).
  Yet he tried to write history, a field in which (I repeat) he had no training. And when he tried to write history, fervent ideology overwhelmed him, to the point that he had no concern about historical truth. Yet this did not stop his promotions at a major research university--despite the fact that almost as soon as he started publishing his "historical" work, complaints from real scholars started coming in to the administration at Colorado.

  The point about a Ph.D. or an M.A. in History is not the credential itself. but that one is taught stern adherence to disciplinary standards of research and logic whose purpose is the dogged pursuit of conclusions that are validated by legitimate evidence no matter what those conclusions turn out to be. These were an idea Churchill was apparently never exposed to: ideology took the place of training. That he was given tenure, then made a full professor, then made a chair of a department at a major research university, in a field that is in good part a history field, on the basis of books published by left-wing vanity presses which did not use scholarly referees--this remains a scandal and was always asking for trouble, which has now arrived.

  But Churchill isn't a fraud because he doesn't have even an M.A. in the relevant field. That's not so important, nor was it my point. Churchill is a fraud because he has perpetrated a fraud in his written work--over and over and over. (Most disturbing is that those books are used in courses, including in high school!) Face it, though: he's now been caught.

  Art Eckstein

  Arthur M. Eckstein
  Professor of History
  University of Maryland

• Posted by Interesting on May 23, 2006 at 2:05pm EDT

• We learn from that "[i]t is common practice for footnotes to be used in order to refer readers to general works related to the period being discussed (as Churchill does), and even to cite works which provide a different or contradictory view of the era" (Wilson essay).

  True, but don't academics make a practice of signaling the intent of their footnotes? ( Cf. Wilson.) I refuse to believe that an interest in reducing the word count caused Churchill or Wilson to eliminate a signal such as see, see also, compare, or For more on blankets, see _____.

  In the legal profession, at least, it is elementary that a citation without a signal provides direct support for the proposition; this is how quotations are cited. If the citation is meant for any other purpose, the writer must note that purpose. A writer often cites contrary views, and he must signal the contrary nature of the source to avoid looking like an idiot. Surely academia is not as far behind in developing its own standards as Wilson implies?

• Posted by Stephen P. Johnson on May 23, 2006 at 2:05pm EDT

• having read the articles and comments regarding the Ward Churchill findings, I am perplexed by the recurring argument that Prof. Churchill is somehow exempted from significant punishment because the proximate cause of this inquiry into his scholarship was his 9-11 remark.

  By this same "logic" I can only advise anyome who ever committed academic fraud, plagiarism or merely shoddy pseudo-research, (or fears they might someday be accused of having done so) to immediatedly make a series of outrageous political statements. That way, regardless of what you may, or may not, have done in the past, you can fully immunized yourself from any sanctions.

• Clarification
• Posted by goethe girl on May 23, 2006 at 2:35pm EDT

• I think that no one called attention to Churchill's "little Eichmanns" statement at the time. A number of other people were making similarly stupid observations. It was only a year or so later when he was invited to speak at Hamilton College that the controversy arose. A student at the college had lost his father in the attacks on 9/11 and complained about the invitation to speak.

  Louis Proyect, from his language (the president speaking "out of his ass"?), appears to be wasting his parents' money at Columbia.

• Ward Churchill and his Hamilton College appearance
• Posted by Louis Proyect on May 23, 2006 at 4:15pm EDT

• Goethe Girl: "A student at the college had lost his father in the attacks on 9/11 and complained about the invitation to speak."

  Well, not exactly. Here's the background on the student from an article I wrote for Ghadar, a radical East Asian 'zine last year:

  After the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture at Hamilton College extended an invitation to Ward Churchill to speak on February 3rd about American Indians and the prison system, Hamilton political science professor Theodore Eismeier googled "Ward Churchill" and discovered that he had referred to some 9/11 victims as "little Eichmanns." This led to a controversy that has not yet been resolved. It should come as no surprise that the case has highlighted differences across the American political spectrum that can be seen on a range of issues, from the war in Iraq to the genocide against the American Indian.

  The Kirkland Project was a lightning rod for the ultra right even before an invitation had been extended to Ward Churchill, as is evidenced by the case of Susan Rosenberg. Rosenberg was a 1960s radical who had spent 16 years in prison for her role in Brinks armored car hijacking that left two cops dead. In prison, Rosenberg became a respected prisoner-rights activist and writer.

  In 2001, President Clinton granted her clemency just before leaving office. After she was released from prison, Rosenberg was hired by the Kirkland Project to teach a one-month course on memoir writing. After rightwing elements on and off campus began protesting her hiring, she backed out, citing "the atmosphere of such organized right-wing intimidation from a small group of students and faculty." So the campus was primed like a stick of dynamite for Ward Churchill's appearance.

  After Eismeier alerted a student named Ian Mandel about the "little Eichmanns" article, he began an email campaign that caught fire. Supposedly, Mandel (a Young Democrat, for what that's worth) was already worked up over Rosenberg 's hiring because Nyack, his home town, was home to the two cops killed in the Brinks hijacking. Nyack was a convenient excuse for hounding Ward Churchill as well. Why? Mandel told the Rocky Mountain News, a paper that has been in the forefront of the movement to get Ward Churchill fired, "I grew up 18 miles away from the city and I could smell the burning buildings from my home." As a Manhattan resident myself, I actually found much of Churchill's article to be of some value, despite questionable formulations--more about which in a moment.

  full: http://ghadar.insaf.net/April2005/MainPages/persecution.htm

• I still don't see the fraud
• Posted by Larry on May 23, 2006 at 5:45pm EDT

• Mr. Eckstein, To begin, I generally agree with you that people without terminal degrees in a subject have no business receiving academic appointments. Indeed, being somewhat of an elitist myself, I agree that people that don’t have such degrees from schools ranked in the top 20, probably shouldn’t be considered for employment, or that such appointment should be presumed to be the result of favoritism. But, for whatever reason, my beliefs are not the law, and a college that grants tenure to people without such credentials is not violating the law. Likewise, a person without such credentials is not perpetrating a fraud by applying for such a position.

  While it is all well and good to say that it is important not to be ideological, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to separate “training” from ideology. For example, since it is the beginning of the summer, and recently-graduated law students will start studying “objective” law for the bar, despite the appearance of objectivity in, say, the field of “contracts” every single rule or doctrine taught is actually the produce of state-adherence to a specific ideology. We are just so used to it that it sounds objective. (But, for purposes of the bar exam, students should ignore this, and not even attempt to deconstruct them.) If you still don’t believe me, trust that 1/6th of the multistate bar exam (and therefore 1/12 or 1/18th of the entire bar) are multiple choice questions on “objective” constitutional law – and each correct answer requires a knowledge of which political ideology won the day at the Supreme Court. This goes for abortion, religion, contraception, and Nixon. (Some states require essays on constitutional law questions as well, and believe me, students know that they will fail, if they write a polemic on how the Supreme Court was wrong.)

  I don’t see how he perpetrated a fraud. Since his work was not academic in nature (which, I think, we agree, is another problem), it is hard to say that he made any representations which were fraudulent. If, for example, he had made up sources, and certified that he had read them (or was in possession of them), I would be with you on the “fraud” aspect. Instead, Churchill repeated some rather well-worn views of the “truth” (which might not be supported by evidence that would live up to what you consider to be the standards of the discipline) to some lay people, who would have no idea what the standards of the discipline are, anyway.

  If you are interested, in your state, the elements of civil fraud are thus: (1) the defendant made a false representation to the plaintiff; (2) the falsity of the representation was either known to; the defendant or the representation was made with reckless indifference to its truth,; (3) the misrepresentation was made for the purpose of defrauding the plaintiff; (4) the plaintiff relied on the misrepresentation and had the right to rely on it, and (5) the plaintiff suffered compensable of the misrepresentation. Hoffman v. Stamper, 385 Md. 1, 28 (2005).

  Here, I don’t see how anyone really relied on Churchill’s Indian-blankets story, so that doesn’t work.

  (In MD there are various types of criminal fraud, but I don’t think you will do any better by analogizing them them.)

  For better or worse, there seems to be two realms of discussion. Academic discussion, which must measure follow certain rules. And everything else, which is just a series of political discussion. Churchill didn’t engage in academic discussion, but instead trolled the lay people.

• Academic Fraud
• Posted by art eckstein on May 24, 2006 at 4:40am EDT

• Dear Larry,

  I don't think this comment went through the first time, so I'm repeating it.

  You wrote:

  "I don’t see how he perpetrated a fraud. Since his work was not academic in nature (which, I think, we agree, is another problem), it is hard to say that he made any representations which were fraudulent. If, for example, he had made up sources, and certified that he had read them (or was in possession of them), I would be with you on the “fraud” aspect. Instead, Churchill repeated some rather well-worn views of the “truth” (which might not be supported by evidence that would live up to what you consider to be the standards of the discipline) to some lay people, who would have no idea what the standards of the discipline are, anyway."

  Larry, this is simple.

  1. Yes, Churchill did not make up sources out of thin air to support his reconstruction.

  2. What Churchill DID do was refer consistently in his reconstruction to REAL sources, all right--AS IF they supported him when they do NOT. The sources he repeatedly refers to either give no support to his thesis that the U.S. Army engaged in a plot to spread smallpox among the Indians of the Upper Missouri, or else they actually directly CONTRADICT his thesis that a U.S. Army engaged in a plot to spread smallpox among the Indians of the Upper Missouri. The primary sources show that, despite Churchill's repeated assertions, there were NO U.S. Army forts in the region, NO Army surgeons, NO Army smallpox ward in St. Louis from which the infected blankets allegedly came, NO Army vaccine that was intentionally withheld, NO bad advice that was intentionally given to the Indians. Yet in his books, Churchill consistently refers to the real sources AS IF they SUPPORT this thesis when they do NOT. Yet no reader is going to know this--NONE. And yet you say that "it is hard to say that he made any representations which were fraudulent"?

  Churchill's misuse of sources to "support" his conspiracy theory is so grotesque, Larry, that he might as WELL have made up sources out of thin air, because he consistently indicates that the real sources (yes, they ARE real) say things which they absolutely do not say--NONE of them. NONE. He grotesquely misleads every reader at every point about what the sources actually say.

  I don't know whether this is legal fraud, but this is a consistently gross misrepresentation of what all the sources say. It is a betrayal of every reader's trust. It is major academic fraud.

  3. Similarly with modern scholars: NO professional scholar supports the idea of the existence of U.S. Army forts on the Upper Missouri, of Army surgeons there, of the existence of ANY smallpox wards in St. Louis, let alone Army wards being used to poison the Indians, of available vaccine being withheld, of bad advice being given. No professional scholar asserts this because they know what the primary sources say, and they stick to them. Yet Churchill consistently refers to these other scholars as if they SUPPORTED him when they do not--just as he consistently refers to the primary sources as if THEY supported him when they do not. Again--none of his readers will know any different: that his representations to them about what modern scholars say are fraudulent. And when those other scholars learned how Churchill was misleadingly referring to them, misrepresenting their views, they protested. Churchill either ignored their protests, or attacked them personally.

  I don't know whether this is legal fraud, but it is consistent and gross misrepresentation of what other scholars say. It is lying about other scholars' professional opinion. It is a second major academic fraud.

  4. Nor can you escape the problem by arguing that Churchill was writing "non-academic" books. These books are listed on his ACADEMIC c.v., NOT on his separate section of "polemics". Furthermore, it was on the basis of this "academic work" that he gained tenure as an associate professor, was then promoted to full professor, and then became chair of a department at a major research university.

  It is fraud, fraud, fraud, Larry.

  Arthur M. Eckstein
  Professor of History
  University of Maryland

• obviously crude faults
• Posted by Tim Behrend , School of Asian Studies at Auckland University on May 24, 2006 at 5:55am EDT

• I have asked questions about Churchill and several posters' thoughts on him, since I have only read a few of his articles myself, not nearly the entire corpus. There were no "obviously crude faults" there – at least none that leapt out at a non-specialist who takes footnotes at face value. The impression given by those articles is one of well-documented, careful work (though obviously informed with ideological fire and a political agenda). I wonder how many commenting here have read Churchill himself, and not just the CU panel report? You, for example, Mr R.A.S. – how many of Churchill's publications did you study before forming your opinions of his scholarship? Did you form your opinions independently, borrow them from horowitzer fusillades or similar political blogs, or take them directly from the CU report?

  With respect to your (careless? tendentious?) reading of my "logic", Churchill's problems aren't Bush's fault per se. But the exposure itself, and all the dramaturgy surrounding it, are clearly political in origin and purpose. If Churchill had joined the great American mythopoeic project and written about the 9/11 "heroes" and the evil or insanity of the bombers, he wouldn't have been in his current fix.

  As an aside, I'd be curious to see how the academics providing the scholarly infrastructure for "terrorist studies" would measure up if brought up before panels of area experts who know the local languages and who began studying local politics years before 2001. And who aren't American patriots. Quoting journalists quoting journalists quoting government spokesmen and secret intelligence sources that can't be named, all in the service of pushing a flawed idea, has resonances with the Churchill case.

• Eckstein on Fraud and misrepresentation
• Posted by Larry on May 24, 2006 at 8:30am EDT

• Mr. Eckstein, After accurately what Mr. Churchill did, you say this, “I don’t know whether this is legal fraud, but this is a consistently gross misrepresentation of what all the sources say. It is a betrayal of every reader’s trust. It is major academic fraud.” Although I am not a scholar of this era, I generally agree with your description of the literature regarding these issues. (Though I wonder why you think that it matter that “no professional scholar supports X.” After all, it may be that professional scholars are all blind to some point, or deliberately overlooking it. But, this is a matter for another day.) Further, I agree that Churchill’s problem lies in his substitution of publication of books for lay people in the scholarly parts of his C.V.

  Okay, so we agree that it wasn’t fraud in the legal sense of the word. Your backup position is that it is “major academic fraud.” However, you don’t really define that term, so I find it hard to actually differentiate between that and, say, mere academic negligent misrepresentation, or just some form of misconduct.

  Instead of providing a definition (like I did), you just write the word three times in order to convince me that this is “fraud.” This doesn’t really help the discussion. Why not, "It's Negligent Misrepresentation; Negligent Misrepresentation; Negligent Misrepresentation.

  Mr. Behrend, I like your point. In fact, I am pretty sure that I know a couple of people in this field who do far, far, worse things than Churchill was even accused of doing.

• The facts
• Posted by R.A.S. on May 24, 2006 at 8:55am EDT

• It has been well-documented for years that Mr. Churchill has treated non-Colorado American Indian groups (y'know -- people actually from reservations) with vitriol, bile, and personal behavior that makes a Duke lacrosse party seem like a faculty tea.

  Then, when you read the Jane Fonda Vietnam-era banality and obvious lack of overall understanding of Indian issues in Mr. Churchill's work, a cognitive connection develops. The man is a fraud, an intellectual scammer.

  It is one thing to direct a movie like "Platoon" with Oliver Stone's authenticated background (know his politics?). It is another to sloppily throw stuff together, as well as crudely abuse real Indians, professional historians, Italian-Americans, your ex-relatives, and Japanese and British bankers killed at the WTC on 9/11.

  Mr. Churchill has reaped what he has sown. He has no one to blame but himself. To keep hyper-rationalizing his actions is to encourage deceit, intellectual fraud, and public boorishness.

  As for this -- " .. I’d be curious to see how the academics providing the scholarly infrastructure .." Why don't you do it yourself? Ever heard of Google? That's how WC was discovered. Then blog the results. Lot easier than defending WC.

• FRAUD
• Posted by ART ECKSTEIN on May 24, 2006 at 11:20am EDT

• Larry,

  You wrote:

  Though I wonder why you think that it matter that “no professional scholar supports X.” After all, it may be that professional scholars are all blind to some point, or deliberately overlooking it. But, this is a matter for another day.

  Larry, the reason no professional scholar supports Churchill's conspiracy theory is that in the universe of sources there is no support for it, and much support against it. Such as: there were NO Army forts on the Upper Missouri (Larry, despite Churchill that's a FACT and that's NOT gonna change!), there were NO Army surgeons in those non-existent forts (ditto), there were NO Army smallpox wards in St. Louis, or ANY "smallpox wards" in St. Louis (ditto), there was NO vaccine, to be withheld (ditto), NO Army officers gave the Indians bad advice to scatter (ditto). All these are things which Churchill says repeatedly in books that are characterized as academic books, with footnotes referring to sources as if they support what he says when they don't. He's MAKING IT UP. This means his account is FICTION, totally fabricated, but MASQUERADING as fact by references to sources which say the opposite of what he claims. This is misreprentation to readers who buy his books believing they are getting non-fiction because he claims they are non-fiction, and misrepresentation to (i.e., a fraud perpetrated on) every student who is assigned these books by teachers (it happens!) who don't know any better.

  He did the same thing with other scholars--referring to them as if their work supported his conspiracy theory when their work (based, again, ON the sources) do not. And when they protested his misuse and misrepresentation of their work, he either ignored them, or attacked them personally.

  Is that so hard to understand?

  (P.S., I didn't concede it wasn't legal fraud; I meant I wasn't a lawyer and can't speak to the technicalities. But I am a professional historian with 3 books and 45 scholarly articles, and I'm tellin' ya--it's academic fraud).

  Mr. Behrend--you say you've' looked at some of Ward's stuff and it has lots of footnotes so it looks impressive to you. That's EXACTLY the problem! The same was true with Churchill's repeated discussions of the small-pox epidemic on the Upper Missouri: they're backed by lots of footnotes too. But when they were examined, they turned out to be fraudulent. Do you get it now?

  Art Eckstein.

• fraud and the nature of argument
• Posted by Larry on May 24, 2006 at 12:05pm EDT

• Mr. Eckstein, Since we generally agree on whether there were forts and the state of the blankets and such, we are not quibbling on anything. My only point is that academic inquiry can be, and in fact has, from time to time, suffered from a blind allegiance to a certain doctrine. In this case, I don’t think that Churchill was victimized by any of that groupthink, but we must be on the lookout for it.

  Secondly, as an historian, you seem awfully reticent to use the word “fact.” You don’t even seem to be using this as a shorthand for “agreed-upon perceptions of events or states” and that Churchill, by apparently disregarding the norms of practice in your field was unable to challenge such perceptions. This is a little extreme. But since it has been shown that Churchill was sloppy, I generally agree.

  Third, We agree that Churchill probably misstated the work of others. But this doesn’t make it fraud. It makes it sloppy. In law, when someone misuses a signal or cites a newspaper for authority, it makes people lose cases (and their freedom, lives, or money.) For that reason, many lawyers quit, as they can’t stand people constantly picking apart their citations. As a rule, most legal arguments are based on the fact that someone else agrees with them – or at least almost does.

  In other fields it is often ignored, because nobody really relies on what people are saying. In Churchill’s case, for whatever reason, people started to look at his use of citation, though I still can’t see who was injured.

  There is nothing “technical” about the definition of fraud. I provided the best definition of fraud that would be available to you. I don’t know why you dismiss an falsifiable definition of fraud as technical, and instead just recite Churchill’s behavior and then declare it to be fraud. It would seem that your definition of fraud is “I know it when I see it” regardless of 1) whether someone was actually injured; 2) whether someone intended to injure the other person; or 3) whether the injured party had it coming.

  Finally, since you are making arguments that really do appear legal in nature (such as the application of rules to behaviors), you probably should try and show more patience with people who have an open mind to your arguments (myself and Mr. Behrend), and not simply repeat words and express exasperation. These are difficult issues which reach to the core of culture and philosophy, and not everyone will instantly reach your conclusion, and repeating them won’t help.

• Posted by art eckstein on May 24, 2006 at 1:45pm EDT

• Dear Larry,

  I don't mean to be short with you, but these are simple issues. Ward Churchill makes things up, Larry. Period. Not little things--big things. In book after book, he consistently misrepresents to his readers both what the primary sources say on important issues, as well as the position of other scholars. And every "error," every fabrication, turns out to be in the service of his ideology. That's not an accident. It wouldn't matter if he were outside academia, but he's reached the academic heights. When I say he's a fraud, I mean: He's an intellectual fraud.
  Now he's been found out.

  Since you're a lawyer, I suggest you read Richard J. Evans' "Lying About Hitler" (2001), where David Irving was discovered in court to have committed a similar pattern of behavior. The legal judgment and court costs went against him.

  best,

  Art Eckstein

• Art
• Posted by JBM on May 24, 2006 at 4:05pm EDT

• "I don’t mean to be short with you, but these are simple issues."

  Yes, they are. That is why the reaction of many academics to the fraud is so telling: Many among them do not find the issues simple at all. That in itself proves beyond all reasonable doubt how terribly far gone unversities are, and the nature/scope of intervention required to restore scholarship and integrity to them.

  Even I am in shock by ideological rationalizations of fraud, and I have been in the business for decades. Given the realities of tenure and academic hiring practices, what can be done to liberate the schools from such corruption? Short of defunding taxes used to support them, nothing.

• replies to JBM and Mr. Eckstein
• Posted by Larry on May 24, 2006 at 5:10pm EDT

• JBM and Mr. Eckstein, Neither of you will provide an operational definition of “scholarly fraud.” Instead of providing a definition, you insist that the issues are “simple.” I, on the other hand, provided a definition of fraud. You said that it didn’t apply, but you didn’t offer a competing definition.

  Even though I have personally have little patience for people like Churchill, I know that life is complex. History is complex. Perceptions differ. I am surprised that academics who just love to say that their own field is so complex that nobody could possibly understand the subtleties say that a matter if “simple” and, ironically, it is simple because whatever mistakes (or deliberate misstatements) seem to support someone’s ideology. Yet, for some strange reason, you insist that you are correct because the matter is “simple” but you won’t even define your terms! Instead you just repeat words once, twice, and three times, thinking that we all agree on what they mean.

  Mr. Eckstein, Everyone I know that speaks about the David Irving case has read the opinion from the Queen’s Bench. Since you are an historian, I know that you understand the importance of reading the source materials before commenting on them, and therefore, I know that you read Justice Gray’s opinion. First of all, he was not sued under a fraud theory. He was sued under a liable theory. The law of libel in England is different than the law of libel in the US (and, of course is different than fraud in both places). An award of attorneys fees is not remarkable in England, and is almost always available. Since I know that you have read the opinion of the Queen’s Bench, perhaps you can explain to me how Justice Gray’s opinion has anything at all to do with Ward Churchill.

  I am also curious as to why a state-law substantive definition of fraud is “technical.” If anything is substantive, this is.

  JBM, Since this is so simple, you should be able to provide a definition of fraud. Mr. Eckstein has said that all legal definitions are of no relevance, but maybe you can provide specifics.

  So, I am open. Let’s us discuss this rigorously. Define terms. Cite things (that you have read), and act responsibly.

• Posted by art eckstein on May 24, 2006 at 9:00pm EDT

• Larry, defense of libel cases are very hard to win in Britain. Irving sued Penguin Books for libel, on grounds of a book by Deborah Lipstadt that called him a holocaust denier with no credibility as a historian. Penguin and Lipstadt's defense was successful. Irving was socked with big court fees. Their defense was successful because they proved that over and over again Irving fabricated events or grotesquely misinformed the reader as to the exact state of evidence (for instance, on the amount of casualties at Dresden). Every "error" was in favor of his ideology.

  This is what Churchill did. There is NO grounds for ambiguity about what he did, or what the conditions were on the Upper Missouri in 1837. There were NO army forts; he said there were and he referenced sources "in support" but which actually did not say that, but said the opposite. There were NO army surgeons; he said there were and he referenced sources "in support" but which did not say that, but said the opposite. Etc., Etc. Etc. I don't have to go through the list again. He lied, and lied and lied, and when caught by the investigation committee on this, he LIED again about his "secret Indian oral tradition."

  I repeat: there is no room for ambiguity about the historical facts here. None. There were no Army forts, no Army surgeons, no vaccine, no bad advice, no Army smallpox ward in St. Louis,etc, etc.. Yet he said there were, in "academic"-looking books, and cited references to "prove" his reconstruction that were either irrelevant or actually said the opposite. This is intellectual fraud.

  Do you understand now?

  Art Eckstein

• Posted by art eckstein on May 24, 2006 at 9:00pm EDT

• Larry,

  Regarding David Irving, a parallel case to Churchill: In Britain it is very very difficult to defend against a libel suit. Irving instituted a libel suit against Penguin Books and the author Deborah Lipstadt for saying he was a Holocaust denier who had no credibility as a historian. He lost the libel suit. He was assinged by the judge to pay huge court costs. He lost the libel suit in good part because he was shown to have fabricated events, and revealed a pattern of gross "errors" in his use of sources (for instance, regarding the bombing of Dresden) in which the "errors" were not haphazard but every single "error" served his particular ideological purpose, and the result was fiction masquerading as fact, though readers would not know this.

  This is the same pattern as Ward Churchill--but Churchill's case is actually much easier to show, and whereas Irving had (naturally) never been able to get a university job, the totally unqualified Churchill had maneuvered his way to a full professorship at a major research university and chair of a department.

  Larry, there is NO ambiguity about the 19th century history here, though you keep trying to sneak some in. Despite Churchill, there were NO Army forts on the Upper Missouri in 1837, though Churchill repeatedly said there were and repeatedly used sources to "support" this idea, sources which either were irrelevant or said the opposite. Despite Churchill there were NO evil Army surgeons either, though he said there were, and used sources to "support" him that either were irrelevant or actually said the opposite; there were NO Army smallpox wards in St. Louis (or for that matter ANY smallpox wards in St. Louis) from which the blankets came, and NO Army blankets involved, though he repeatedly said there were, and used sources to "support" him that either were irrelevant or said the opposite; despite Churchill, there was NO vaccine that was intentionally withheld from the Indians (sources complain about not having any vaccine, Larry!), NO bad advice to the Indians given by the Army (just the opposite--though of course not by the Army since the Army was totally uninvolved in this). In all these cases, Ward cited sources in "support" of him which either were irrelevant or proved the opposite of what he said. Similarly, he cited modern authorities in "support" of his reconstruction, when they too said the opposite, and he KNEW they did because they protested his misuse of their work. When caught out on all of this by the panel, he then lied about "a secret Indian oral tradition" to which he had never referred previously and which turned out not to exist. It was all in the service of his ideology. The work that was produced is ideologically-satisfying FICTION but it was and is sold to unknowing readers as non-fiction, it was presented to university promotion committees as academic work, and assigned in courses as if it were the truth.

  NOW do you understand? The man is an intellectual fraud--he foists fiction on his audience and claims it as the truth.

  If you don't, I see no reason in continuing this discussion.

  Arthur Eckstein
  Professor of History
  University of Maryland

• Intentional Deceit
• Posted by JBM on May 24, 2006 at 9:00pm EDT

• Larry, Churchill committed fraud by intentionally seeking to deceive readers of his work, who, by dint of his position at the university, trusted in representations that his work constituted fact-based scholarship. This is what I have already said, based on the report released last week (see above):

  Invented, not incorrect
  “However, I do worry about the idea that incorrect facts are considered misconduct.”

  That is not what Churchill did. He invented “facts,” published them under different names, then cited among those publications to make it seem as though those “facts” found acceptance in the scholarly community.

  JBM, at 11:35 am EDT on May 19, 2006

  Intentional deception passed off as "scholarship" to an unwitting readership is fraud.

• Ward Churchill responds
• Posted by Louis Proyect on May 24, 2006 at 9:00pm EDT

• http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/05/25/ward-churchill-responds-to-u-of-colorado-investigation/

• Bad scholarship drives out good......
• Posted by Don Stadler on May 25, 2006 at 5:30am EDT

• As a layman who has been observing the academic community for some years, I have observed that an application of Gresham's law "Bad money drives out good" may apply to work in many of the humanities, particularly history and it's derivative fields.

  Art Eckstein documented Ward Churchill's deception in one particular matter, but nobody here seems to have recognized the implication - that this particular deception has been widely publicised and part of the 'conventional wisdom' for many years now. I was certainly aware of it long before I had ever heard of Ward Churchill. And I suspect that the legends perpetrated by this charlatan will far outlive his tenure in the academic community.

  The more obscure the are of research the more likely the legend will hold up. It's unlikely that a single psuedo-scholar could permanently damage the reputation of Franklin Roosevelt - but an assertion that the US Army committed genocide in 1837 is far more likely to 'stick' as historical 'fact'.

  The misdeeds of one Ward Churchill can almost completely outweigh the efforts of many honest scholars because of the magnifying effect of the sensational versus the mundane.

  "Do I have an opinion on Ward Churchill? I’m not sure. He seems like so many, someone who warps their research to fit their publication and political agendas. If this is wrong, and I believe it is, then a lot more needs to change than the status of one tenured professor."

  -- Ira Socol, Michigan State University

  Professor Socol provides another piece to the puzzle, that this seems to be widespread. I kind of already knew that but this helps confirm what I had thought.

  The problem for me as a layman is - whom and what can I believe? I have to be skeptical having seen how truth can be manufactured and that sensational 'truth' frequently forces out true truth.

  This is important not so much because of the fate of the Mandan Indians in 1837 - but because of consequential issues where complete truth cannot be proven. Global Warming being an example. I cannot follow the trail of evidence, so how can I determine that Churchill's Law (Bad scholarship drives out Good) is not at play here?

• Posted by Larry on May 25, 2006 at 7:20am EDT

• RAS, Thank you for trying to define your terms. “Intentional deception passed off as 'scholarship' to an unwitting readership is fraud.” Now we are getting somewhere. I am not sure if the readership was “unwitting” or not. If these “deceptions” are so obvious (as Mr. Eckstein) seems to think, then it is not fraud. Also, since people are pointing out that Churchill's work was not even scholarship, perhaps he didn't commit fraud by your definition. In fact, if Mr. Eckstein’s protestations that the “facts” are so obvious is correct, the public is quite sophisticated and absolutely no harm was done, as nobody would believe him anyway. (This raises an interesting question, which I have a passing interest in: is there absolutely no obligation to verify facts in the course of political speech, as it is not an assertion of truth, but rather a political act.)

  Mr. Stadler, I know this is painful, but there probably never will be a way of easily telling what truth is. Everyone will come to the table with an agenda of some sort of another. Universities will be founded, not by the losers of wars, but by the winners. Universities will be funded generally by people who think that contracting with others is a good thing. Professors will grade students based on how well the student can convince the professor that they have things in common (even if they deny it), and prosecutors will indict (and juries will convict) based on their understanding of what they would have done or seen in the situation.

  Mr. Eckstein, I am not defending Churchill. I am beseeching you to be a little more intellectual. I realize that these modes of argument can be confusing, but you must understand that I completely agree with your assessment of Churchill's assertions. I did not say that there was ambiguity. You said I said that. I said, however, that determining “truth” is complicated, and often viewed as a political project wherein people agree to certain perceptions. Therefore, there is no point in providing me with additional evidence that Churchill was wrong, since we agree.

  While you tell me that he is an “intellectual fraud” you have yet to define the term. You keep repeating it. While calling someone an “intellectual fraud” is a nice insult, you still have not defined what actions would constitute intellectual fraud. But you do not define it. This is my only point.

• Fraud is Dishonesty
• Posted by RGS on May 25, 2006 at 9:35am EDT

• Larry, I know that you and many of the academics on this list are enjoying your little exercise in sophistry, but most of the laymen on the exchange really do understand the meaning of fraud. Take a look at the words "fraud," "dishonesty," and "misconduct" in a recent dictionary, and I think you will find that Mr. Churchill's behavior is accurately described by a commonly used definition for each of those words. A common definition that everyday people understand.

  In short, when someone says one thing, and means another, it is dishonest. When someone claims that a source says "A" when it actually says "B" it is dishonest. When someone uses another person's work and claims credit for it, it is dishonest. When a person writes something, and claims it is the work of another person, it is dishonest. One of the points made is that honest errors do not uniformly support only one side of a disputed point. Mr. Churchill's work, like that of Mr. Bellesile, always seemed to have the failings go in the direction of supporting his thesis. This, as most people understand, is a good indication that the work is dishonest.

  The previous poster makes an important point, Larry. If many academics are going to follow the line of consistently looking for ways to support Churchill, even after a long, detailed report has effectively shown his work to be intellectual trash, why should the public trust the work of academics? Mr. Eckstein is one of the few academics who has been posting that seems to understand the seriousness of this. The problem isn't just that one professor made some mistakes. The larger problem is that a person as clearly unqualified as Mr. Churchill was hired, and that his writing was accpted uncritically as scholarship in a field that was already viewed with suspicion by some of the public. Yes, the administrators at the University of Colorado who hired and tenured Mr. Churchill sould be held accountable. Unfortunately, most of them have moved on to other schools. But, to follow Mr. Eckstein's premise, what does this suggest about the quality of scholarship at Brown University, where Evelyn Hu-DeHart is teaching history and ethnic studies? Dr. Hu-DeHart is one of the persons who hired Mr. Churchill, and she is, as far as I know, still standing by her decision to hire Churchill at Colorado. I would say that a lot of what has been uncritically allowed to pass for scholarship should be given a much more rigorous review by people with the intellectual integrity of professors Brown and LaVelle. If it is junk, it should be clearly identified as suspect.

  Mr. Proyect offers another defense of Mr. Churchill, noting that his six-page defense of his actions is out. I've read it, and I don't think he really answers the 125 page report from the University of Colorado investigation, which I have also read. For those who seem to feel compulsion to commend without reading either the 125 page report, or Mr. Churchill's response, a condensed response is also out on the web, called "Footnotes and Fallacies," which happens to detail where Mr. Churchill's response to the investiative report fails. Nice try, Mr. Proyect, but no go. Mr. Churchill is not a scholar, and he is not being persecuted. He is reaping the rewards he richly deserves.

  RGS

• Posted by art eckstein on May 25, 2006 at 10:00am EDT

• Larry, JBM said it:

  Intentional deception passed off as “scholarship” to an unwitting readership is fraud.

  That's what Churchill did, that's what I've been saying (in more detail), and it should be obvious that that was what I was saying even to a layman. Stop trying to make tiny debating points and try to understand the big point instead.

  You say in your last posting that you accept the facts about 1837-- but then you start up AGAIN with the idea that truth is a matter of political viewpoint. Not here--it isn't. It is clear from the evidence what the facts about 1837 are, and Churchill lied about them for an ideological purpose. He wasn't just "wrong", or "sloppy", he consistently misused sources, consistently misreferenced them as if they supported him, consistently misled the reader about them, consistently misled the reader also about what OTHER scholars (real scholars) said about 1837, as if THEY supported him, and in the end tried to mislead the investigatory panel by making up a "secret Indian oral tradition" which didn't exist. According to JBM's definition, which was obviously the one I was using as well, he's an intellectual fraud.

  Another poster makes the point that Churchill's lie about 1837 has had baleful general effects, becoming part of the widespread perceived "general wisdom"--something which in an earlier posting you yourself apparently believed had some sort of historical validity by its mere existence, though it was Churchill's fraud that created that "general knowledge" in the first place. That is: Churchill's done a lot of damage here; this isn't a little thing.

  It's like David Irving's figure of 125,000 to 250,000 civilian dead at Dresden, Larry--one of the reasons why he lost his libel trial in London (the issues of which I carefully tried to explain to you). The casualty figure is a fraud, arrived at through consistent dishonesty and constantly repeated when all the evidence pointed to a much lower figure as Irving well knew. As with Churchill, this was a fraud which had an ideological purpose (in Irving's case, a pro-Nazi ideological purpose). And despite the solid work of ordinary well-trained historians, and even the judgment of the court in London, this fraudulent casualty-figure remains in public discourse as if it were true. It's done a lot of damage.

  Churchill's in the same league of intellectual fraud as David Irving. But as the panel report said, the real issue is why tbis untrained charlatan was hired at a major research university, why he was promoted to tenure, why he was promoted to full professor, why he was given chairmanshiip over an entire department. That has to do with the conduct not of Churchill himself but of the administration at Colorado. I've repeatedly said that as well--and so does the panel.

  Arthur M. Eckstein
  Professor of History
  University of Maryland

• I am not an academic; Churchill is not a saint
• Posted by Larry on May 25, 2006 at 11:30am EDT

• RGS, I am not an academic. I am not supporting Churchill. I am a professional lawyer. (I have a MA in another subject, too.) I get paid to make arguments, and if my arguments (on behalf of clients) don’t convince people, then my clients suffer financially or worse. Can you believe that is fairly common to see people lose years of their lives simply because their attorneys don’t raise issues? For this reason, the stakes are much higher than most academics are used to, but people do directly address arguments, and I am rarely called an “academic.” Therefore, I don’t know how to respond to the rest of your argument which assumes that I am an academic and engaging in sophistry.

  Getting to the rest of your argument, you cite to a “dictionary.” Unfortunately, dictionary definitions rarely, if ever, define the substance of a civil cause of action or crime. As I showed above, fraud is not dishonesty. Fraud (in just about every state) is much, much, more. (By the way, I actually agree with the findings regarding Churchill.) “Dishonesty” itself rarely is a crime, unless accompanied by something else. If it was, then, 99% of the country would be in jail. Maybe he misrepresented something. Likely he didn’t follow the normal procedures within his discipline. And, there is the confusing issue of whether admittedly non-academic works that are nevertheless listed on a CV should be treated as academic works.

  Mr. Eckstein, I am glad that JBM made an attempt to define “fraud” to people. I appreciate his attempt, but there are a few problems with it. First, I don’t think that most academic work is really meant for “the public.” Indeed, most members of the public don’t want to read anything that academics write. But, assuming this is true, one would have an absolute defense to a charge of fraud by simply claiming that one’s assertions were so far outside the mainstream that the public didn’t take them seriously. Therefore, the element of an “unwitting” public is not satisfied. But, I think that although JBM’s definition needs refining, he is definitely on to something.

  You don’t seem to have read Justice Gray’s opinion in the David Irving case, so it is difficult to discuss the issue with you. While I understand the need to draw a parallel, the elements of libel are completely different, and the assertion of “truth” as a defense to libel (as the defendants did) are different than a defense to “fraud.” This is pretty clear from the opinion, and if you would like a copy, I will post a link.

• sophistry
• Posted by art eckstein on May 25, 2006 at 12:50pm EDT

• Folks, here is Larry defending Churchill from the charge of fraud on May 23 at 5:45 p.m.:

  "If, for example, he had made up sources, and certified that he had read them (or was in possession of them), I would be with you on the "fraud" aspect. Instead, Churchill repeated some rather well-worn views of the "truth" (which might not be supported by evidence that would live up to what you consider to be the standards of the discipline)."

  In this defense, what saves Churchill from fraud is that he is simply repeating some well-worn views of the "truth" (which might not be supported by evidence that Eckstein would consider up to the standards of the historical discipline). In THIS defense, the Army plot against the Mandans is widespread knowledge, which Churchill is merely repeating.

  (Note: 1. Churchill didn’t "repeat" a widespread view, he himself INVENTED that public knowledge by lying to the public in his well-selling and widely-used books. 2. Larry, Churchill didn’t make up sources, no, but since he made up what the real sources SAID, it’s the same thing. If I tell the public in a book that Plutarch, Life of Crassus, chapter 7, says that Spartacus’s airforce bombed the city of Rome in 74 B.C., I am still lying to the public even though Plutarch, Life of Crassus, chapter 7, actually does exist; the problem is, it doesn’t say anything about Spartacus’s airforce. Do you see the problem? That’s the sort of thing Churchill did, and did consistently, and it’s intellectual fraud. 3. It’s not that Churchill’s version doesn’t meet stringent professional standards for establishing the truth, Larry—the problem is that it is complete and total fiction presented as fact. Do you see that now?).

  But now, folks, HERE is Larry defending Churchill today, on May 25, at 11:30 a.m.:

  "First, I don’t think that most academic work is really meant for "the public." Indeed, most members of the public don’t want to read anything that academics write. But, assuming this is true, one would have an absolute defense to a charge of fraud by simply claiming that one’s assertions were so far outside the mainstream that the public didn’t take them seriously. Therefore, the element of an "unwitting" public is not satisfied. But, I think that although JBM’s definition needs refining, he is definitely on to something."

  In THIS version, Churchill isn’t guilty of a fraud because no one listens to him, and so there IS no "unwitting public." This defense is the OPPOSITE of the PREVIOUS Larry defense of Churchill against fraud employed on May 23—when Larry defended Churchill from the accusation of fraud on the grounds that the theory that the Army poisoned the Indians was merely a widespread, indeed a "well-worn" view, which Churchill was merely repeating. NOW, however, it suits Larry's purpose to argue that no one knows or cares about 1837, so Churchill's lies don't matter for THAT reason.

  Larry, this is the sort of sophistry that gives lawyers a bad name.

  Art Eckstein

• Your point?
• Posted by Occom on May 25, 2006 at 2:00pm EDT

• Larry, the CU committee was chaired and staffed by lawyers. Your recent posts seem like resplitting hairs.

• replies to Occom and Eckstein
• Posted by Larry on May 25, 2006 at 3:00pm EDT

• Mr. Occom, I don't have a problem with CU's decision. It was carefully written, but, in doing so, as most people realize, it raised some larger issues. I do have a problem with people screaming "fraud."

  Mr. Eckstein, I am glad that JBM made an attempt to define “fraud.” I appreciate his attempt, but there are a few problems with it. First, I don’t think that most academic work is really meant for “the public.” Indeed, most members of the public don’t want to read anything that academics write. But, assuming this is true, one would have an absolute defense to a charge of fraud by simply claiming that one’s assertions were so far outside the mainstream that the public didn’t take them seriously. Therefore, the element of an “unwitting” public is not satisfied. But, I think that although JBM’s definition needs refining, he is definitely on to something.

  Since you don't refer to any of the elements, it seems that you have not read Justice Gray’s opinion in the David Irving case, so it is difficult to discuss the issue with you. While I understand the need to draw a parallel, the elements of libel are completely different, and the assertion of “truth” as a defense to libel (as the defendants did) are different than a defense to “fraud.” This is pretty clear from the opinion, and if you would like a copy, I will post a link.

• academic fraud
• Posted by art eckstein on May 25, 2006 at 6:10pm EDT

• Larry on Ward Churchill regarding the charge of fraud on May 23 at 5:45 p.m.:

  "If, for example, he had made up sources, and certified that he had read them (or was in possession of them), I would be with you on the "fraud" aspect."

  Larry, Churchill didn’t literally make up sources, no, but since his made up what the real sources SAID, it’s the same thing. If I tell the public in a book that Plutarch, Life of Crassus, chapter 7, says that Spartacus’ airforce bombed the city of Rome in 74 B.C., I am still lying to the public even though Plutarch, Life of Crassus, chapter 7, actually does exist; the problem is, it doesn’t say anything about Spartacus’s airforce. That’s what Churchill did, and consistently.

  SO: are you NOW with me on the "fraud" aspect? Or are you going to back away from your previous assurance here?
  The panel, which included and was advised by several prominent lawyers, as Occam says, concluded that Churchill was guilty in 12 of the 13 accusations made against him; this including four counts of "falsification" and 2 counts of "fabricaton" in published work, as well as multiple counts of plagiarism. And you still have problems with "fraud"? Occam is right.

  To judge from your posting at 3 p.m. you have decided not to respond to my demonstration of your quickly shifting position(s) over the past two days, which I pointed out at 12:30. Perhaps, however, you will choose to answer the question I pose to you above.

  Art Eckstein

• Last comment on Ward Churchill
• Posted by Louis Proyect on May 25, 2006 at 6:10pm EDT

• http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/05/25/thoughts-on-ward-churchill/

• Will it go 'round in circles?
• Posted by R.A.S. on May 25, 2006 at 6:15pm EDT

• From the first W. Churchill/D. Horowitz tag-team debate --

  http://rightalk.listenz.com/!ARCHIVES/ChurchillVSHorowitz2-64-44M.mp3

  WC indicates there is no truth, only individual versions of truth. Does that make debating "truth" and "fact" about WC, of any lasting value? Highly doubtful, IMHO -- WC could never be wrong, and he's always right.

  This is starting to be like the debate involving creationism. Darwin has a zillion studies; the other side, only a few conceptual papers.

• last thoughts on the nature of argument
• Posted by Larry on May 25, 2006 at 9:50pm EDT

• Mr. Eckstein, You don’t seem to understand: I am free to shift positions on Churchill as much as I want. I can argue conflicting points if I want. I am trying to demonstrate why various definitions of fraud are unworkable. Since RAS provided a new definition of fraud (which I don’t know where he got it from), I showed why there might be some problems with it.

  And finally, I agree with everything that the panel wrote.

• last thoughts for Larry
• Posted by art eckstein on May 25, 2006 at 10:20pm EDT

• Dear Larry,

  1. Sophistry

  In any debate it is dangerous to take self-contradictory positions one right after the other. That's what you did, and I caught you at it. Either Churchill was merely repeating a widely-known understanding of 1837 (Larry on May 23), or else he was saying things on a subject (1837) that no one knew or cared about anyway (Larry on May 25). Either of these propositions might be true; but to propose BOTH of these propositions in defense of Churchill, one right after the other, indicates a defect in the thinking.

  2. academic fraud
  Larry on Ward Churchill regarding the charge of fraud on May 23 at 5:45 p.m.:

  “If, for example, he had made up sources, and certified that he had read them (or was in possession of them), I would be with you on the “fraud” aspect.”

  Larry, Churchill didn’t literally make up sources, no, but since he made up what the real sources SAID, it’s the same thing. If I tell the public in a book that Plutarch, Life of Crassus, chapter 7, says that Spartacus’ airforce bombed the city of Rome in 74 B.C., I am still lying to the public even though Plutarch, Life of Crassus, chapter 7, actually does exist; the problem is, it doesn’t say anything about Spartacus’s airforce. That’s what Churchill did, and he did it consistently, over and over.

  SO: are you NOW with me on the “fraud” aspect? Or are you going to back away from your previous assurance here?

  I wonder what the answer will be.

  Art Eckstein

• stop making me out as a politician
• Posted by Larry on May 26, 2006 at 7:40am EDT

• I am not a politician. I don’t like politics, and I don’t below to a party, and I only vote for relatives (if they are running.) To me, and most people of my ilk, arguing in the alternative is a normal, and, in the face of changing “rules” and definitions, it is required. I am sorry that you don’t like it.

  No, I am not with you on the “fraud” aspect, since you can’t even fulfill the definition of “fraud” given on here. In fact, you admit that under one of my definitions (which people disagree with) the criteria isn’t fulfilled. (You say, “didn’t literally make up sources” but “made up what the real sources said.”) However, everyone else’s definition of “fraud” requires that there be some showing of actual harm, or at least intended harm to particularly vulnerable (or “unwitting”) people, which you don’t address.

• Definitions
• Posted by RGS on May 26, 2006 at 8:20am EDT

• For those who are still reading this thread, thank you for your patience. I agree with Professor Eckstein's point above regarding sophistry. I also took a little time to see what a recent edition of Black's Law Dictionary offered to define the three terms Larry asked about. From the 7th edition (1999):

  "Fraud n. 1. A knowing misrepresentation of the truth or concealment of a material fact to induce another to act to his or her detriment. Fraud is usu. a tort, but may in some uses (esp. when the conduct is willful) it may be a crime. 2. A misrepresentation made recklessly without belief in its truth to induce another person to act." (Page 670).

  Extrinsic Fraud. Def. 2 - Deception that prevents a person from knowing about or assenting certain rights. (Page 671)

  Dishonest No definition. But see:

  "Dishonest Act - See Fraudulent Act" (Page 481).

  "Fraudulent Act Conduct involving bad faith, dishonesty, a lack of integrity, or moral turpitude." (Page 672)

  "Misconduct. 1. A derelection of duty, unlawful or improper behavior." (Page 1013)

  "Willful Misconduct. Misconduct committed voluntarily and intentionally." (Page 1014)

  "Fact. Something that actually exists, an aspect of reality," (Page 610)

  "Plagiarism. The act of instance of copying or stating anothers words or ideas and attributing them as ones own." (Page 1170)

  Larry, my apologies for mis-represneting you as an academic. However, I find it interesting to see that the definitions form my 40 year old dictionary are pretty much in accord with the definitions given by a recent edition of Black's Law Dictionary. My layman's interpretation (I am NOT a lawyer, and I don't play one on television) is that the University of Colorado correctly found Mr. Churchill guilty of fraud, plagiarism, and academic miscounduct. Mr. Wilson and others want to continue defending Mr. Churchill, I think they are wasting their time. Mr. Churchill is guilt, and it is well past time for him to go.

  RGS

• RGS, I think we agree
• Posted by Larry on May 26, 2006 at 10:55am EDT

• RGS, First of all, there have already been two definitions offered. One by me, and one by another poster. Mr. Eckstein confused the proffering of a definition with a conclusion about Mr. Churchill’s behavior. Moreover, I have no quibble with what CU did. I agree with the report; and I agree with their findings.

  I understand from this thread and personal experience that many academics don’t like to define terms. They call this “sophistry.” But, ironically, in the real world, arguments are made in the alternative, and people live and die by these arguments. As you may have noticed above, I did provide a definition of fraud that operates in one state (I chose Mr. Eckstein’s state, because 1) he lives there; and 2) I am familiar with the law there.) A party proving these elements to a jury in Maryland would be entitled to recover monetary damages.

  Finally, as nice as Black’s law dictionary is, it, like all dictionaries, attempts to simplify terms into very neat one-sentence definitions. In doing so, it is usually subject to the whims of its readers. Most legal terms (“fraud” included) conjure up a long history of common law, judicial decision, and general “experience” which are not too accurately conveyed in one sentence. Usually it is a fallback resource to rely on when nobody else offers a definition.

• What is truth?
• Posted by Don Stadler on May 26, 2006 at 12:50pm EDT

• Larry, I wasn't being as naive as you seem to think in asking my question. I was not asking what truth is but pointing out the damage which results from a lack of self-policing within the academic community.

  It's a very important point when one looks at the larger issues, because if the academic community cannot police itself the value of both of it's products (knowledge and the education of young adults) declines dramatically.

  You seem to be making an argument upon the meaning of the word 'fraud', applying a legal definition. If something is not legally a felony fraud then is cannot be fraud for any purpose seems to be your argument.

  I see your point - but Professor Churchill is not under indictment for Fraud and is extremely unlikely to face legal charges - so I fail to see why you insist on using the crminal definition of fraud in lieu of it's more common usage.

  Dr. Eckstein makes the point that Professor Churchills actions go beyond shoddy scholarship and into the realm of the fictional presented as fact - which is what academic fraud is if it means anything at all.

  My point was to show what damage this has caused - not merely to Ward Churchill or the University of Colorado and/or Ethnic Studies departments in general - but to scholarship in general.

• truth
• Posted by Larry on May 26, 2006 at 2:25pm EDT

• Don, To be clear, I used the civil definition of fraud (in Maryland, Dr. Eckstein’s home). Not the criminal one. I chose to use this definition, because nobody would give me a definition. It seemed like as good a starting place as any.

  I don’t take a position on the rest of your policy points.

• Civil fraud. Hmmmm....
• Posted by Don Stadler on May 26, 2006 at 6:30pm EDT

• Ok, Larry. I would guess that very few people have lrgal stnding to sue Professor Churchill for fraud. The 'fraud' if that is what it was is a more diffuse thing.

  Ward Churchill clearly gained a good deal in both fame and monetary terms through his sensationalist 'scholarship', but the victims in this case are far more general.

  The general reputation of the US as a country suffered. I live in London and so I'm aware of the impact this kind of thing has. Colorado University suffered, fellow scholars suffer a loss in reputation due to his actions, the people of Colorado suffered by paying good money to a man for writing fiction masquerading as history.

  Churchill's gains can be measured in terms of his frequent promotions at CU and significant income from his books and lectures about his fictional scholarship with fabricated conclusions. Moreover he obviously holds ill will toward the US and most of it's citizens and he managed to do significant damage to our reputation, surely a kind a psychic income for a man like this.

  Perhaps not actionable civil fraud in the narrow legal sense (apart from a few scholar's the fruits of whose reseach he stole or misrepresented). But I don't think it wrong to call it fraud in a more diffuse sense.

• just a thought
• Posted by Larry on May 30, 2006 at 11:15am EDT

• Don, So, I think we agree. This did get me thinking. Let’s assume that CU promoted him and did what it did deliberately. (Indeed, I know a couple of well-known professors who I think are frauds, but are dripping with social skills, so that they can go undetected, and would never commit the such a faux-pas of mixing Hitler with 9/11 before Memorial Day.) Would the result be the same?

  For example, there are a few professors (usually deans) out there who have offered testimony to Congress which clearly supported a particular partisan view. Their schools were rewarded with grants. (Usually – but not always – from those “evil” “corporations.”) Whether their testimony was “slanted” or not is anyone’s guess. Whatever the case, nobody accused them of “fraud” and all differences were chalked up to differences in scholarly opinion. Has anyone suffered ?

  In such a case, the school hasn’t suffered, in fact it has prospered. Even if there was gross misconduct. The field hasn’t suffered (I don’t think). The country probably hasn’t suffered, since Congressmen pretty much know who is paying for whose testimony, even if it such a connection is denied. So, if anything the professor has committed what many consider to be a victimless crime. Of course, like Churchill, they probably committed a form of “misconduct.” But is it fraud?

• Posted by Tom R. on April 27, 2007 at 10:35am EDT

• A very reasonable stance taken by prof. Wilson. General rules and punishment for misconduct should of course be followed in this case like any other. Readers may of course agree or disagree with the "normal" sanctions against various forms and degrees of misconduct. Some no doubt find them too lenient. But there is no good reason for demanding unusually strict sanctions in this case based on political grounds. Professional scholars participating in such a witchhunt would themselves be guilty of academic misconduct.