> Meanwhile, Douglas Feith gets appointed to
Georgetown;
Sure, true, hypocrisy is never in short supply. But do we really want to adopt Feith as the standard?
Doug
AS: Not sure what you mean by "Feith as the standard", Doug. Are you suggesting that legacy hires such as Feith aren't standard? or that Churchill and Feith set a comparable standard of scholarship?
I haven't followed Feith too closely, but if he cooked pre-war intelligence on Iraq, that bias alone is reason for academia not to touch him--and the charges against Churchill pale in comparison. Instead, Feith's been sitting at Stanford and Harvard, while the Pentagon's inspector general conducts an investigation. How come there's been so much press about the Churchill investigation, and comparably none about the Pentagon IG into Feith's office?
What interested me about your previous post, Doug, is that I don't know whether Churchill sees himself as or aspires to be the Noam Chomsky of Native American Studies. At root, there may be some philosophical differences--thought and practice--as to what it means to be a radical scholar and an ethnic studies scholar in the academy.
Having read some of WC's work and some of your work, there are obvious differences of approach: given the choice between publishing books almost every year since the late 1980s and publishing a couple a decade, WC chose the former. Why? Questions of public intellectualism and radical practice are much more interesting to me than the constricted scope of politics of affiliation--do you or do you not associate yourself with WC?--which is what most of this LBO thread has focused on.
There's no reason why the Dean at Colorado couldn't cut and paste and say about Churchill--substitute "little Eichmanns" for things to be considered under a spectrum of views--what the Dean at Georgetown said about Feith's hire...
"ROBERT GALLUCCI: Pardon me, but now we're talking, because we've gotten to the real issue [about Feith's hire], and I do not believe it is process. I don't believe it is for you, and I really don't believe it is for Professor Lance. The issue is the policy. Much of this policy I personally have no sympathy for. I would close Guantanamo tomorrow morning. I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against the invasion of Iraq. I don't have sympathy for large portions of this administration's foreign or security policy, but that really is not the point.
The point is that we have an obligation as a university to present a spectrum of views, not just with visiting people who come and give a speech, but even on the campus with our faculty. We have the opportunity to do that. We are a special university, a special school in a very special city. It's not an opportunity I plan to miss. The fact that I have very little personal sympathy with the policies of this administration on counterterrorism, at least some of them, doesn't really for me determine what ought to be present or who ought to be present on the campus."
Personally, I would argue this with Gallucci. I would argue that hiring someone who cooked intelligence on Iraq to teach a course on counterterrorism is hiring a paid propagandist for genocidal imperial policies as professor. Couldn't say the same thing of Churchill... aaron
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