Ward Churchill’s irresponsible behavior is one example among many of an ethical breakdown within the professoriate. As I wrote in an essay titled “Professional Ethics Begin on the College Campus” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2003):

Examples [of such behavior] include lateness for class, use of vulgarity in scholarly forums, showing favoritism among students, improper use of campus funds, plagiarism, sexual liaisons with students, failure to properly perform administrative duties, and, most basic, unwillingness to uphold the value of truth in teaching and research. …The 1966 ‘Statement on Professional Ethics’ of the American Association of University Professors…states that professors ‘accept the obligation to… practice intellectual honesty.’ The political bias exhibited in the classroom…utterly contravenes the responsibility of faculty members to respect the values of truth and honesty…Things are made worse by the fact that the traditional core values underlying the academic mission are themselves under unprecedented assault from postmodernists and others whose epistemological and moral subjectivism now permeates entire disciplines. To hold that the professoriate cannot acquire knowledge, much less superior knowledge, of a subject is to cut out from under academe the very ground upon which it rests.In addition,…the academic peer collegium is often lax in its approach to its administrative responsibilities to discipline its members. Again, the AAUP’s statement asserts that faculty members must ‘strive to be objective in their professional judgment of colleagues’…John Kekes, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany… describes a number of highly unethical administrative practices that are, he tells us, ‘routine’ on campuses. Peer evaluation of research is ‘rigged’…[Faculty] search committees…make judgments ‘on the basis of considerations such as race, ethnic origin, and gender, that have very little bearing on how well they [the candidates] may do as teachers or researchers.’
[Finally]…reports over the past decade have documented how seriously faculty members take their professional responsibilities. For example, a 1993 Acadia Institute study of 2,000 faculty members found that only 55 percent believed that they should exercise substantial responsibility for the conduct of their colleagues, and just 13 percent thought that faculty members in their department did so.