Recently I noted it would be revealing, and in the interest of accountability, to better scrutinize the credentials and activism of those who do the actual hiring of extremist and incompetent professors. In passing, I wondered who, for example, “committed the dastardly deed of hiring the disgraced Ward Churchill.”

One reader promptly responded by sending the following account by K.C. Johnson, who attributes the deed largely to the efforts of Professor Evelyn Hu-DeHart director of Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. According to Johnson:

Hu-DeHart last published a scholarly monograph in 1984; since then, she seems to have devoted herself almost full-time to administrative tasks geared toward championing a peculiar vision of higher education…Scholarly critics of the diversity agenda, she has contended, “provided cover for white supremacists to oppose affirmative action,” while subjecting African-American and Hispanic students to “oppressive public scrutiny” and “extremely harsh attacks”…
On curricular matters, Hu-DeHart has championed the Curriculum Transformation Project — an initiative that seems to have more to do with imposing a specific ideological perspective on all classes rather than on “diversity” as commonly understood. The CTP’s “curriculumt [sic] transformation” website urges colleges to utilize “the classroom as democratic space in which students can dialogue about and practice new ways of relating across race, class, and gender”… The CTB’s first “resource” is a guide to “teaching about Hurricane Katrina,” developed by the New York Collective of Radical Educators. The site urges professors to focus on how Katrina illustrates “the criminalization of poor people of color”; “the capitalist interests that govern public policy”; “militarism”; and “consumerism and related environmental degradation”…
Hu-DeHart also has an administrative record of translating her ideas into action. Before coming to Brown, she chaired Colorado’s ethnic studies department for more than a decade. Her highest-profile hire was none other than Ward Churchill. Indeed, in April 2005, Hu-DeHart described Churchill as “her hire.” Most observers consider the hiring, early tenuring, and finally promotion of Churchill, who lacked a Ph.D. and has faced credible charges of massive plagiarism, weak scholarship, and lying about his ethnic heritage, as an example of exactly how institutions of higher education ought not to function.
Moreover, Hu-DeHart has been less than candid about the relationship between her “diversity” ideas and Churchill’s career. To a reporter at Brown, she claimed that no special considerations relating to “diversity” helped Churchill get his job. But this assertion that was directly contradicted by internal documents recently released by Colorado, which showed that the then-chair of the Communications Department, which originally hired Churchill, listed two reasons for doing so: Hu-DeHart’s request, and how Churchill’s claim that he was a “Native American” would improve the department’s diversity. Ironically, one of Hu-DeHart’s final acts before leaving her department chairmanship at Colorado in 2002 was to put in motion the first of four merit-pay raises that Churchill received between 2001 and 2005.

Therein a glimpse into the often grossly ideological, incompetent hiring practices on campuses. The sunlight on them the better.