You've defended him recently, going so far as to suggest that the scholars who investigated his work be investigated (or was that Yoshie) and that the university wimped out by caving to the right.
then! you wrote this:
Ward Churchill is the Barry Bonds of the academic world, only he is the target of a smear campaign from the American right wing. How much of what Churchill is accused of is commonplace in the scholarly literature?
Fuck the University of Colorado and their lack of backbone.
Chuck0
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You didn't even bother to fucking find out what the charges were and all you could do was defend the guy.
really now. i don't know a better way to have fed into the rightnuts claims that the university system is an echo chamber of mono-thought than to have ignored these charges. Unfortunately, in this case, I have concluded that Churchill didn't so much do a disservice to scholars and the academy because he cheated but because he _knew_ he cheated and then refused to take his lumps when it came out and he was under the gun. Instead, he's bleated around the country about a rightnut attack. And he's violated your and everyone's else's trust in him by doing so. Why fucking defend someone who would do that. Forget that this happens a lot. Forget that it was the rightwingers, why godamned defend a guy who took you and his supporters for a ride.
Fuck man, even Lou Proyect, after reading Thomas Brown who was ridiculed on this list, changed his mind and said, "Yep. Churchill did what Brown said he did."
When you write essays for other people and then pretend those others wrote them and those other people, in turn, put them on their CVs that is cheating plain and simple and if he and those other people didn't know it, they are pathetic little fools.
Consequently, he has now probably managed to rollback gains we've made in the academy. I was reading the American Historical Association's code of ethical conduct last night since the Committee and Churchill both agreed that, since ethnic studies has no disciplinary code of conduct regulating scholarly behavior, then the closest discipline was history.
I hadn't read it since 2000 when I was involved in another very minor ethical violation by a visiting lecture in history. What struck me upon re-reading that is how the discipline of history has come a long way in acknowledging that 1. there is no archimedian point from which historians can do their work and 2. there is an important understanding in their code of ethics that it is possible to be both a scholar and a public intellectual in an advocacy role with movements for social change.
Feminists have worked fucking hard and sacrificed their careers to make those changes happens. They have worked their asses off to get the academy to start recognizing that publications in lesser known journals ought to be considered as part of your publication record. And we've done that so we can have a role in social change.
Because churchill not only fucked up, but refused to admit that, at the very least, he lied about who wrote essays that he cited -- not once but several times! -- he has managed to call into question all of that hard work.
I, for one, am not amused that he shat all over his own supporters and comrades.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org