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Monday, January 31, 2005
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WARD CHURCHILL UPDATE
[For background, see various posts below.] A gun-toting hater of the United States who wishes death upon its citizens and disintegration of its political foundation holds a tenured appointment as a full professor at a public American university, where his salary is $90,000 a year. Radical fringe houses have gathered his screeds into books. In line with prevailing standards, his university doesn’t care - doesn’t know - that his books are without argument, literacy, reason, or mercy. For purposes of promotion, the University of Colorado, like almost everyone else, counts books. It doesn‘t read them, or look at who published them. Faced with the glare of national attention upon this fanatic, the Dean of Arts and Sciences says: "As a faculty member, he's spent his career talking about oppressed people's rights, and the essay [about September 11] tries to make some kind of connection ... I think his comments were ... ill-thought-out and hurtful, and I certainly don't agree with them…. It's hard to say he's overstepped his bounds. I don't quite know what the boundary is." This sort of comment has the flavor of a parent who, faced with the fact that his child has brandished a gun and threatened to kill him, says: “That was ill-thought-out and hurtful. I certainly don’t agree with what you’ve done.” With this sort of comment, we have entered the realm of Flo Whittaker, a character in Randall Jarrell’s academic novel, Pictures from an Institution: ‘Flo took nothing personally. If she had been told that Benton (College), and (her husband) Jerrold, (and her children), and the furniture had been burned to ashes by the head of the American Federation of Labor, who had then sown salt over the ashes, she would have sobbed, and sobbed, and said at last -- she could do no other -- “I think that we ought to hear his side of the case before we make up our minds.”’ Though Churchill’s Dean doesn’t see what the fuss is about, the CU Regents are upset, and have scheduled a special meeting to discuss the situation. Whatever they do or say, they know they're stuck with this man. As James Twitchell notes, in Branded Nation, “[W]hat distinguishes the academic world is a lifetime hold on employment. About 70 percent of today’s faculty have tenured or tenure-track jobs. Even ministers get furloughed. Museum directors get canned. But make it through the tenure process, and you’re set forever.” Yet one of the many destructive effects of this professor, UD predicts, will be to damage the already-shaky institution of academic tenure. In earlier posts (among them, “Smug Tenureds,” UD, 5/14/04), UD has considered the powerful arguments of people like Richard Chait at Harvard, who suggests that tenure as a universal feature of American colleges and universities has outlived its purpose, and that, while retaining tenure in some situations, institutions of higher education should offer a range of other, non-permanent arrangements as well. This rather reasonable suggestion has been met with near-total opposition by university faculty. But the anti-tenure forces are growing. If Ward Churchill did not exist, these forces would have had to invent him. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Updated Update: See? |