>C'mon. You know full well I deliberately choose economics (and I should say
>its present state in NA universities) because it is a good example of how
>when a field is closely aligned with power it can get away with a whole host
>of academic sins. Intolerance to other approaches along side and little
>to no empirical
>evidence to back some of its most central propositions. Indeed it is almost
>a hermetically sealed discipline that refuses empirical or theoretical
>arguments to the contrary. And the profession gets away with it because
>they are for the most part apologists for capital.
Actually -- I don't have a clue.
I didn't go to a 'normal" school where you use textbooks. I read one, once. The rest of the time, they threw the primary sources at me and told me to read and come back with a series of papers in which I had to address major conflicts in the field, typically in a series of 4 - 6 20 page papers. Sometimes just a ten page paper for each primary source.
E.g, when I took intro to economics, I was given The Wordily Philosophers and then read Smith, Marx, Keynes, Ricardo,Veblen, Schumpeter, and Galbraith. I spent a lot of time in the library figuring out WTF they were saying.
(I found the phone number for the college on the back of a matchbook, so maybe it's not up to par with today's standards?)
I understand the broad interrelationships between the disciplines, because that was what I was supposed to have done my dissertation on -- until my department blew up political warfare and I was told my first year that it was empirical work or die.
Still, I have no idea how an economics textbook fails to do what a sociology textbook does.
I've gleaned a bit from PEN-L, but my speciality is sociology of work and the economy. You see, we pretty much picked up the mantle there: where neoclassical economy and its heirs study the narrower "market", sociology and political science often see themselves as correctives, studying the political in what was once called "political economy." Well, I should say: some of us. There is plenty of sociology that caters to power. In fact, really, all of it does. E.g., I was always acutely aware that no matter what I did, my work would be appropriated for policies that were just going to suck. If I studied the welfare-to-work program, the larger theoretical framework within which that study was conducted would have been ripped from the findings and implemented in whatever way they cold be used to fuck people over some more. If I studied long-term unemployment among professionals and blue collar workers, same thing: it would be used for ever more crap. If I'd continued my ethnographic research on managers working at a subsidiary of At&T after they slashed and burned millions of employees from the payrolls, my work would have been used in business schools to teach people how to manage post-mass layoffs better.
I happen to be designing a book right now -- cover and typesetting. the whole thing uses research by scholars that we can use to expose how screwed up is the nature of work under capitalism. This book, though, uses it quite effectively to teach managers how to manage with a carrot and coaching leadership style to... effectively secure every more labor from their employees. (and some people wonder why I see no difference between ordinary 'work' and prostitution! HA)
>So I choose economics as an example because it is a discipline that
>demonstrates how insulated and self referential one can be as an academic if
>they are on the right team.
>
>There is an old saying that whoever drinks from a poisoned well, no matter
>how well intentioned, gets sick or dies. As with a poisoned well, as with
>justice. It does not matter how fair the process was after Churchill was
>targeted. Nor for that matter does his guilt. He was targeted because of
>what he wrote about 9/11. This means that any procedural action that
>followed is tainted. Racial profiling is controversial for this very
>reason, i.e., it leads to an unfair application of the law to one subset of
>citizens and thus it violates a very basic expectation of liberal justice.
>Namely that the law should apply equally to all citizens. This should be
>the end of the story.
>
>But it is not. So may all of you get what you want. Let the Truth be Told
>even if the Heavens may Fall.
There are two reasons for my disgust with Churchill.
1. I worked closely with women who risked and sometimes lost their careers to change the academic system. They worked hard to see to it that oral traditions are accepted as part of the historical record, for instance. They worked hard to see to it that a publication record outside of peer-reviewed (political, advocacy) pubs was taken seriously. They argued repeatedly that it was possible to be fair minded and scholarly, even if you have a political role in a social movement.
Ward Churchill evidenced no respect for that in his actions and even in his defense. Saying that you used oral traditions and not referencing them? He's seems wholly unaware of the debt that he owed to the very people who made it possible for a university to consider hiring him as tenured faculty member from the git-go.
Whatever he thought of scholarship, which doesn't seem to be much, he apparently didn't realize that he owed a debt to the people who struggled on the fringes of academia and, to me, that debt you mean that you take seriously the charge they expected unconventional scholars were given: of being able to do this work and still do it in a scholarly manner.
The left is a big place - big tent. I care a lot more about that portion of the feminist left that has been shat all over by this guy.
2, When the shit his the fan as it was going to do anyway, if not Churchill someone else, instead of maintaining his innocence as anyone is bound to do even if they know they did something wrong, he exacerbated the situation among his publics encouraging them circulate stupidities like "WC would never do such a thing. he's such a 'rich footnoter.'" "WC only does what everyone else does." etc.
By allowing that to happen when, in fact, anyone with a head that exist somewhere outside their alimentary canal knows that ghostwriting is NOT something that happens all the time, he knew that with at least two incidents he was a liar. He didn't care and he allowed his supporters to circulate defenses of his scholarly work anyway.
My personal preference is that he keep his job: tenured adjunct professor. He should face the hostility of his colleagues every single day. The rest of the academic community should shun him and refuse to cite his work. As John Thornton already said, most people don't need to cite WC anyway.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org