Yesterday, a verdict was reached in the wrongful termination lawsuit of University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill. As you might recall, Churchill was fired in the wake of a scandal and amidst charges of plagarism following publication of an essay, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” which blamed U.S. foreign policy for 9/11. (Nota Bene: Aside from the possible Jeremiah Wright connection implied by the title, the essay also controversially referred to those working in the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns” — a phrase borrowed from anarchist John Zerzan, whose writings were seen as the philosophical inspiration behind the the bandana-clad anarchists who wreaked havoc at the Seattle WTO protests of 1999.)
After an extensive legal battle, the court found in Churchill’s favor — but curiously awarded him damages in the amount of one dollar. Odd as it may seem, the verdict might strike just the right balance. There was a credible case to be made that after he became a political hot potato the university rushed to fire Churchill and trounced on his academic freedom procedurally. However, in recognition of Churchill being generally obnoxious and possibly dishonest, the jury wasn’t about to reward him unduly.
To get some perspective on the verdict, I called University of Oklahoma professor David Deming. Though Deming is an unabashed conservative, he has been a vocal defender of Churchill on the grounds of academic freedom. Deming himself has been the target of political inquests against his work. He’s been an outspoken critic of global warming hysteria, and further, he faced trumped-up sexual harassment charges at the OU in 2000 because of something that he wrote. Deming responded to the female author of a pro-gun control column in the student newspaper with a letter to the editor that included the now infamous lines:
I just want to point out that Kletter’s ‘easy access’ to a vagina enables her to ‘quickly and easily’ have sex with ‘as many random people’ as she wants. Her possession of an unregistered vagina also equips her to work as a prostitute and spread venereal diseases. Let’s hope Kletter is as responsible with her equipment as most gun owners are with theirs.
As a veteran of battles with his own University over political expression, Deming retained some sympathy for Churchill, telling NRO:
Having been in the academic system for 17 years, I know how the system works. I know how dishonest these people can be. They won’t say that they’re firing you for the real reason. They’ll trump up charges, they’ll invent some specious reason. They’ll stack the committee members with people that will do what they want. Waiting to go after Ward Churchill until he wrote that controversial essay, and then they suddenly become concerned over the quality of his scholarship?
I guess the guy has written a massive amount of stuff which they put under a microscope and then they express all of this outrage. There very well may be problems, I don’t know. I certainly know that the timing tells you everything about the true motivation. Conservatives like myself are very much in the minority in the academy and if we want to have our free speech rights respected then we need to be willing to extend free speech rights to those on the left as well.
By contrast, the response to the Churchill verdict issued by National Association of Scholars Chairman Stephen H. Balch clearly condemns the verdict for ruling in Churchill’s favor. However, Balch and Deming seem simpatico in one respect — they both agree it’s rather unfortunate and telling that universities wait until a public controversy arises to professionally evaluate the work of a suspect scholar such as Churchill:
The decision for Churchill will only further attenuate an already fraying relationship between the protections of academic freedom and their corollary obligations. Churchill is the poster boy for academic irresponsibility in both substance and style. That he wins today in court, helped somehow by his very notoriety, can only fortify the sense that anything goes.
If there is a lesson here it is that universities must be proactive in the enforcement of standards. Waiting for a public scandal with all its attendant complications is hardly the policy of choice. Universities must build a culture of responsibility that affects every aspect of institutional operation, but especially scholarship and teaching. Faculty members must realize from the beginning of their employment that their institution, and their peers, care about issues of intellectual integrity, foster a consciousness of scholarly ideals and good practice, and apply these at every level of professional review.
The outcome of the Churchill trial is unfortunate, but it was a trial that in a better academic world would never have occurred. The best point at which to protect professionalism is not career exit, but career entrance and stage-by-stage thereafter. If that’s the lesson learned from this sorry result, academe will still be able to recoup its loss.
The biggest academic scandal here isn’t that Churchill was fired wrongly or that his political opinions were somehow anathema in a free society; it’s that his scholarship was unprofessional and eluded scrutiny for so long.