Let’s start where we left off last time — Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado at Boulder professor who called U.S. citizens who died in the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns.” I argued in my last column that now that he’s been hired, he should be allowed to speak. But here’s another (more important) question: Why (how) the hell was he hired in the first place? And why was he given tenure? And a chair and an almost six-figure salary? How did this happen?
As a professor, the man is grossly unqualified. He has a master’s degree from Sangaman State University in communication, but that’s it. No doctorate. What’s more, at the time Sangaman State was an “experimental college” — no grades, no departments, no publish-or-perish requirement for professors.
Churchill’s also an intellectual fraud. He claimed his American Indian identity has guided his activist career, but he’s not, per se, an American Indian. He’s got a membership card from the Keetoowah Tribe of Oklahoma, but so do a lot of other people — including, um, President Clinton. They’re honorary memberships, Ward. I realize hedging on one’s ethnic identity is sometimes forgivable and almost always unavoidable (I, for one, am … Irish? Maybe? Possibly Welsh?), but Churchill has consistently encouraged the notion that he is someone he’s not — he’s even grown his hair long and taken to wearing beaded headbands, even after the American Indian Movement and numerous other prominent American Indian activists have denounced him as a fake. He’s used his “identity,” falsely and unjustly, as a legitimator for his (crazy) ideas, and that ought to count as fraud. In interviews he’s stated he’s at least one-sixteenth Cherokee and Creek (Wow! So American Indian!) but, according to The Rocky Mountain News, “family tree researchers have verified only white branches” of his genealogy. Just as damning is the University of Colorado’s cowardly policy that, according to former Chancellor James Corbridge, who recommended Churchill for tenure in 1991, “a person’s race or ethnicity is self-proving.” Um. What? Can I be Maori?
It’s not like Churchill had a stellar academic or intellectual record that happened to be marred by his crazy worldview. He had no such record, so I’m going to conclude that unless he was a total fluke, he was hired because of his radicalism, not in spite of it. Scary. Unless, of course, he was hired for some other, uglier reason — might I be suggesting he was a crude, unqualified affirmative-action hire? Gasp! Did he bypass the rigorous hiring and tenure process because of his (falsified) ethnicity? A number of University of Colorado professors seem to think so — do the research at Rockymountainnews.com.
This difficult Churchill pill is to be taken with a tall glass of surveys harpooning the idea of real intellectual diversity on college campuses. We all know it by now: Faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. Right-wing thought is sorely underrepresented. Check out the Chronicle of Higher Education’s survey or that run by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles for a damage assessment. After all, the American Association of University Professors has issued its own cowardly defense of Churchill’s statements.
I am not charging that people like Churchill are widespread. I think (hope, actually) he is the exception to the rule. The majority of professors I’ve encountered at this university have been levelheaded at best and quirky at worst, so, anecdotally speaking, I’m not worried.
My point, though, is this: Churchill was hired by the University of Colorado in the face of his fifth-rate mind and fraudulent intellectual conduct. He was given tenure, a chair and too much money. The reality is that we’ve somehow created (or allowed the creation of) an academic atmosphere that permits the hiring and promotion of unqualified loons such as Churchill. What’s more, he was prattling long before he was granted tenure in 1991. He’s entrenched.
And if we can’t dig him out because he’s snuggled in with the First Amendment, we can at least see that no other crazies are allowed to burrow with him.
Morgan Hubbard is a junior history major. He can be reached at mhubbard@umd.edu.
