The jury decided, correctly, that he’d been fired not because of his plagiarism but because of something he said. A victory for free speech.
And listen. For the regents of a university that dishonors itself every day in the administration of a dirty sports program (for a little history, go here) to get all het up about how Churchill “dishonors” their institution is laughable. Behind the Ward Churchill story lies the hypocrisy of quite a few American universities, whether that involves overlooking instances of faculty plagiarism (you’ve heard UD already on Harvard law school’s shameful practices) or corrupting themselves intellectually and morally through big time athletics. It’s hypocritical to overlook diploma mill admits for your football team, and high-profile faculty – not to mention presidents, as at Southern Illinois – who plagiarize, and then go after this or that person because he said something that made you angry.
April 3rd, 2009 at 7:27AM
Should Churchill get a free pass for repeated plagiarism and academic dishonesty, just because he says obnoxious things?
Should Churchill get a free pass because his university administration does obnoxious things?
It seems to me that the implications are troubling. Given that most administrations do obnoxious things at some point or another, and that all of us could easily say obnoxious things if we needed some protection for sins of various kinds (plagiarism, chasing undergrads, etc.), could we ever discipline anybody?
April 3rd, 2009 at 7:44AM
Dave-
Most places have a tenure code. There is a provision for discipline, including being fired, for specified activities. This is called for cause. Go after the alleged miscreant for cause.
The jury ruled in this case that Churchill was fired for what he said. (Not for plagiarism and all the other bad things that he may have done.) They obviously were not very sympathetic because he was awarded $1 in damages. His court costs will apparently be paid in this case and will run into six figures.
Defining academic freedom is like the old joke about trying to nail jello to a wall. If you allow someone to be fired for what they say, then someone is going to have to make a judgment about where to draw the line. Let’s just say that I don’t trust university administrators – in general – to do this.
Bill Gleason – U of Minnesota
April 3rd, 2009 at 8:00AM
Dave: The underlying issue for me is one of fairness. Churchill’s massive academic misconduct was easily discovered; and yet he was chair of a dept. at Colorado. No one cared.
The principle has to be equal treatment. If your university typically overlooks plagiarism among your professors, you don’t get to randomly brutalize one plagiarizing professor because he said something that pissed off people.
The Churchill story, by the way, makes clear why it’s so important for universities to act with integrity and swiftness when someone acts truly badly. Because Southern Illinois did nothing about its plagiarizing president, it’s not only a laughingstock; it’s an institution that’s going to have a lot of trouble punishing any subsequent scholarly misbehavior. The president has set the example.
A counterexample would be the admirable swiftness and sureness with which the University of Mary Washington dismissed a president for multiple drunken driving arrests. This took guts, since the president threatened to sue, and the university could have lost a lot of money. But universities that have a strong sense of institutional identity are not so easily trifled with or corrupted, and they reap the rewards.
April 3rd, 2009 at 8:35AM
[...] is right that the university acquitted itself poorly throughout this mess. I also agree with Margaret Soltan on this much: Churchill’s massive academic misconduct was easily discovered; and yet he was chair [...]
April 3rd, 2009 at 8:42AM
We might just have to agree to disagree on this one.
As I understand the sequence of events, after Churchill made himself notorious, evidence of his academic fraud became public and was presented to the university. Past problems aside, it seems to me that the university has little choice but to investigate the plagiarism, which is exactly what it did.
As a thought experiment, let’s presume two folders full of evidence of academic fraud come through the Colorado provost’s transom on the same day. One is Ward Churchill’s, the other is a molecular biologist no one’s ever heard of. It seems to me that the argument presented here is that it’s fine to go after the molecular biologist, but not Churchill. In effect, he’s shielded from penalty for wrongdoing by the fact that he previously said obnoxious things.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:04AM
I think the better analogy would be to a police officer who pulls over a car because she doesn’t like the political views expressed in the driver’s bumper sticker, and then arrests the driver after finding a baggie of marijuana under the passenger’s seat. Although hard to prove, this would obviously be a First Amendment violation. Actually, given Colorado’s tolerance for gross misconduct on the gridiron, perhaps we should add to the analogy that this same police officer previously allowed other drivers to go free even after discovering a smoking gun, a bloody knife, and a dead body.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:12AM
Ward Churchill just helps me justify not contributing to the two universities I attended. Most of the social sciences have become leftist propaganda mills and really don’t care about "science." I am new to your site but I am troubled by a belief that even though Churchill is the fraud that he is, he is entitled to his position because the University forgives plagarism. It is not an issue of fairness. It is an issue of integrity.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:14AM
I promise–my last word on this subject. I think TAFKAU’s analogy isn’t quite right. Joe is walking down the street and sees a political bumper sticker he doesn’t like. He looks in the car and notices a bag of marajuana on the seat. He then flags down Officer Joe and reports this to him. Officer Joe then arrests Jim, the pot-smoking, political-bumper-sticker-sporting perpetrator.
I don’t see a First Amendment issue here.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:34AM
Dave, the key here is that, regardless of how the information about Churchill was obtained (and many, if not all, of these charges had been well ventilated prior to the "Little Eichmanns" comment), the University of Colorado was pretty obviously looking for a reason to unload Churchill. The legislator and governor–who control the purse strings–put enormous pressure on them to do so. So they made a big show of respecting his First Amendment rights and then kicked him out the back door. Universities very rarely fire a tenured professor for engaging in the sort of behavior attributed to Churchill. Indeed, if memory serves, the faculty committee that found Churchill guilty recommended punishment well short of termination. Thus, it’s really a matter of putting two and two together: Ward Churchill lost his job because he said something highly offensive and politically incorrect. And that’s a violation of both academic freedom and the First Amendment.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:57AM
TAFKAU: A majority (slim, to be sure — 3 of 5) of the faculty committee investigating Churchill’s misconduct recommended he be fired. See http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/17/nation/na-chuchill17 (the first link I could find, I’m sure there’s more)
For better or worse, I think Dave’s got the right analogy here. I’m not a huge fan of the CU athletic department to put it mildly, but their misdeeds shouldn’t protect Churchill.
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:45AM
The worst part is that the taxpayers of Colorado may once again be saddled with paying for Churchill’s excuse for teaching.
If UD is right and he was fired because he said some loathesome things in public, the irony would be that though he seems to be guilty of plagiarism, he was fired based on one of the times when he used his own words.
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:57AM
The whole issue of so-called academic freedom is being distorted too. It really doesn’t exist unless the views expressed are liberal. I actually believe that Churchill would have been fired in a minute if he was a conservative. The fact that he is liberal is the only reason dealing with this loon has dragged out so long. I would lI guess my theory is hard to prove since there probably are not enough conservatives in academia to provide for a valid number to study.
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:36AM
Yeah, my concern is the same as Eric’s here: the judgment of the faculty senate should be final for all academic matters. He already faced a jury of his peers, and lost. Chair Marianne Wesson’s specialty is due process, and from the article Eric quoted and almost everything else that’s been written about this, it looks like she did whatever was in her power to assure that he had a fair hearing on the plagiarism charge. Other commenters are right that you don’t get a free pass just because stupid things you said put you under the microscope. The question of guilt is or should be independent of how it was found out, barring any sort of Fourth Amendment violation. My first reaction to this story was to assume that he’d been fired for his little Eichmanns, but subsequent reading led me to conclude that it was just simple academic misconduct. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those darn bloggers. In a lot of ways, this is no different than a professor getting more carefully scrutinized after winning a MacArthur or the like.
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:54AM
Also, I’m not sure I understand the argument that because CU has done other bad shit, Ward Churchill gets a free pass. Because of the school’s failure (and Harvard’s failure?) to prosecute other misconduct, nobody’s guilty of it until everything at CU is perfect? They have to start somewhere, and maybe starting with a guy whose research is both cribbed and laughably political isn’t a bad place. Also, I don’t think you get to be Ward Churchill and condemn other people for their politically-motivated decision-making at the same time (cf. his argument, presented entirely without corroborating evidence, that John Smith brought smallpox to the Virginia colony deliberately).
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:50PM
Rapidly heading off topic. . .but I cannot resist.
It would, indeed, be difficult to prove any first amendment violations in TAFKAU’s analogy, but there would be two clear fourth amendment violations:
1. An illegal seizure of the vehicle and driver, and,
2. An illegal search of the vehicle (unless the driver consented voluntarily).
The evidence would be tossed and the officer could be subject to a Section 1983 Civil Rights lawsuit.
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:00PM
With all due respect, I am having a hard time understanding this kerfuffle.
If someone says that the moon is made of green cheese or anything else crazy, you can’t fire him.
If he has done something in violation of the tenure code (cause) of the institution you can fire him. Now unfortunately, a lot of the wrong stuff being done – in his case – has been done by a lot of other people and they have not been fired.
So I don’t see how him not getting fired in this case amounts to a free pass, or have I missed something important?
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:18PM
So, Bonzo, are you arguing that if I misappropriated funds, but other people have done the same and not been held responsible, I also shouldn’t be held responsible until all of the others are punished, too?
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:36PM
No, I am arguing that if you misappropriated funds and it is against the tenure code (for cause), then you should be fired for that reason.
You should NOT be fired for saying that the moon is made of green cheese.
(I’m not trying to argue here, just make my position clear.)
And by the way it is probably easier to get someone fired for embezzlement than for plagiarism. Or scientific dishonesty. (Don’t ask how I know.)
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:25PM
It is easy to gang up on WC. He is not much of a scholar, he is a fraud, he incorporates all the negative cliches associated with a pseudoscientist.
Nevertheless, he got tenure: The university promised to pay him for his services. So he deserves a certain protection, and therefore I cannot disagree with the decision of the jury.
The real question, which I think needs some investigation, is why the hell did the UC give him tenure? I know many people with far more, real, accomplishments who were denied tenure.
So I think it would be time to investigate the Tenure & Promotions (or whatever her name is) committee and start firing a few of the committee members…
April 4th, 2009 at 8:45AM
Margaret,
The fairness issue has to be restricted by issue — if one person is exonerated though a plagiarist, then it’s much harder to crack down on plagiarism in general. But I don’t see why Colorado’s idiocy with the football team in multiple ways means the faculty can’t set standards for its own on plagiarism. Besides, your implied rule would mean that there is no way for an institution to walk away from the abyss.
April 4th, 2009 at 9:18AM
Hi Sherman: My response to your comment perhaps can be a response to a number of the comments on this very thoughtful thread.
No doubt my arch rhetoric and bloggy concision has made my position somewhat unclear. I’m not really about laying down rules, implied or otherwise. What I’m doing is responding to a thing that has happened.
A jury has decided a certain thing. I’m not sure it makes much sense to spend time denouncing the jury’s decision. The decision has been made; it tells us something about universities, about tenure, about how universities are perceived, and how they behave. And it will have ramifications.
So the important questions are: What has this told us about us? What can we do differently so that this doesn’t happen again?
Since I believe the jury’s response has to do with its reading of universities writ large, I do think that institutional history (in this case, things like a high-profile, corrupt sports program), and prevailing treatment of tenured professors found guilty of significant academic misconduct (prevailing treatment is to do pretty much nothing — at most, far as I can tell, you dock them a little pay), has got to be looked at as clearly as possible.
If Colorado finds this a punishing and embarrassing verdict (they have to pay Churchill’s court fees, etc.), it should ask itself how to reform itself so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. Same way it did (or certainly should have done) after the international scandal a few years ago involving its football team.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3508443.stm
I would ask all of the commenters on this thread: Do you think that local juries don’t have this institutional background in their heads?
April 4th, 2009 at 11:09AM
Econprof — Great minds. Colorado conducted exactly the sort of review of its hiring, tenure, and post-tenure review procedures alongside its review of Churchill’s academic conduct. It published the results in a 2006 report (https://www.cu.edu/tenurereview/docs/FINAL-REPORT.pdf), and recommended immediate overhaul of its internal systems of peer review. There was candid acknowledgement that the system was failing from the inside out. They have since crafted policy to improve these processes. Of course, there is a long way between policy and implementation — and the distance between the two is precisely what got Colorado into this mess. It will be up to the Colorado faculty to start doing things more responsibly — and it remains to be seen whether they can or will. But the necessary institutional acknowledgements have been openly and decisively made.