Salon: Ward Churchill's slanted Indian 'scholarship'

Education

Thursday, April 9, 2009

"Last week, a Denver jury found that Ward Churchill, the former head of the ethnic studies department at the University of Colorado, had been improperly fired and awarded him $1 in damages. A judge must now decide whether Churchill should be reinstated in his job or receive back wages. The verdict was justified, but Churchill's victory offers scant cause for celebration. To put it mildly, Churchill was not an ideal poster child for the cause of academic freedom. If right-wing critics of the university had set out to create a perfect caricature of a tenured radical who sacrifices scholarship for advocacy, they couldn't have come up with a better one than Churchill. The Churchill case was a train wreck pitting the First Amendment against academic standards in a zero-sum game.

Churchill's self-described ethnic identity played an important, perhaps crucial, role in his academic career. He has stated that he is of Indian ancestry, and was granted tenure in a "special opportunity position," later described as a program to"recruit and hire a more diverse faculty." However, an exhaustive investigation by the Rocky Mountain News found no evidence that he had Indian ancestry. The Denver Post confirmed the same finding. (Churchill was awarded honorary associate membership in the United Keetowah Band in 1994, as were Bill Clinton and others, but such membership does not indicate Indian ancestry.)

C.U.'s failure to do due diligence on Churchill, both before it hired him and later, reflects the peculiar relationship between college administrations and the various identity-based programs -- ethnic studies, gender studies, queer studies -- that sprang up in the 1970s and 1980s. These are legitimate academic fields. But by their nature they are tinged, and often more than tinged, with advocacy. This sets them apart from other academic disciplines and can have problematic consequences. Many students enroll in these programs not just to learn about a subject but to affirm their identity as a member of a "subaltern" group. And some professors in these fields were hired less because of their scholarship or qualifications than of their identity and their passionate advocacy on behalf of that identity. Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that some hires were not always held to the highest academic standards.

If C.U. had been paying attention, or had wanted to pay attention, it would have looked into Churchill's record long before his controversial essay. Serious questions about his research had been raised as far back as 1996 by John LaVelle, now a professor of law at the University of New Mexico Law School. But C.U. failed to look into LaVelle's allegations that Churchill was slanting and fabricating evidence about Native American history."

Get the Story:
Gary Kamiya: Ward Churchill's win is scholarship's loss (Salon 4/9)