'I'm going nowhere' says Churchill after firing

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

'I'm going nowhere' says Churchill after firing

By Jeffrey Wolf and Nicole Vap

9News.com

From the article:

The University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to fire Ward Churchill on Tuesday evening, prompting the promise of a lawsuit from the embattled professor.

The Board of Regents passed a motion to accept the recommendation from CU President Hank Brown to fire Churchill from his position in the Ethnic Studies department.

The measure passed with an 8 to 1 vote. The vote was made just after 5:30 p.m. and Cindy Carlisle was the dissenting vote. The move came after academic committees found in 2006 that Churchill was guilty of academic misconduct, including plagiarism.

. . .

"I am going nowhere," said Churchill. "This is not about break, this is not about bend, this is not about compromise."

. . .

"The university has, over the last two and a half years, orchestrated an amazing performance, in some ways, of creating the illusion of scholarly review," said Churchill during a news conference with his attorney, David Lane. "We will be going into court to expose the nature of that fraud."

. . .

Churchill touched off a firestorm in 2005 after an essay surfaced which he wrote shortly after 9/11 likening some victims in the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, who helped carry out the Holocaust.

University officials concluded he could not be fired for his comments because they were protected by the First Amendment, but they launched an investigation into allegations that he fabricated or falsified his research and plagiarized the work of others.

On May 16, 2006, Churchill wrote in Counterpunch a denunciation of the report of the Investigative Committee of the University of Colorado: A Travesty of an "Investigation". From his denunciation:

The upshot is that the committee's report is often self-contradictory. It frequently misrepresents or conflicts with the evidence presented. In many respects, it is patently false.

As things stand, the entire procedure appears to be little more than a carefully-orchestrated effort to cast an aura of legitimacy over an entirely illegitimate set of predetermined outcomes.

It follows that I reject and will vigorously contest each and every finding of misconduct.

Uh huh. We don't even need to look at the report. Let's see something with our own eyes. Here is a story from 2005 about a serigraph by Churchill.

'Original' Churchill Art Piece Creates Controversy

by CBS4 News reporter Raj Chohan and news4colorado.com staff

Feb 24, 2005

CBS4Denver

This is from the 1972 book, The Mystic Warriors of the Plains by Thomas E. Mails.

This is Ward Churchill's 1981 masterpiece (and plagiarism), a serigraph called "Winter Attack." He is reported to have printed 150 copies, selling them for about $100 per copy.

A very interesting article in Indian Country Today dated February 24, 2005 was written by Patti Jo King: King: Ward Churchill -- Questionable identity and questionable scholarship. Sections from the article speak for themselves.

Churchill, a postmodernist, lacks a believable Native identity and family history.

. . .

Claiming to be ''one-sixteenth Cherokee,'' he has opposed the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act, a law protecting Indian artists from unfair counterfeit competition. His Indian claim further enabled him to secure his lucrative teaching position (over $94,000 annually) at the University of Colorado, where he beat out several fine Indian scholars for the coveted job.

He claims to be Cherokee and Creek, although the Okmulgee Creek Agency, the Muscogee Creek Nation and the Cherokee Nation contend he is not a member and is not known among their people.

. . .

A 1992 essay, ''Federal Indian Identification Policy,'' co-authored with his former wife, Marie Annette Jaimes, has long concerned Indian legal scholars. It asserts the 1887 Dawes Allotment Act required individuals to be one-half or more Indian to be eligible for land allotment. Jaimes chastises tribes for adopting Dawes blood quantum requirements for tribal membership. Churchill has continuously berated tribes and enrolled Indians, viciously referring to them as ''ethnic cleansers'' and ''racists'' for participating in blood-based tribal enrollment. He repeatedly attributes his theories to Jaimes' blood quantum/Dawes Act claim in ''Federal Indian Identification Policy.''

Blood quantum, however, is never mentioned in the Dawes Act.

Such shoddy scholarship immediately raises a red flag. Are we to believe that a man who has written dozens of books and nearly 100 essays - a foremost authority on Indians - has never read the Dawes Allotment Act? The act is one of the most prevalent and important documents of American Indian legal history and is brief and easy to read.

So, in addition to being a terrible scholar with a reading comprehension disability, this guy ain't even an Indian. Here is an article posted in 2005 to Free Republic with lots of comments. One of the comments (No. 36) was pretty funny:

He's what real Native Americans call a "wannabe", a lower form of life which they occasionally tolerate but secretly (or not) despise; a "Cherohonkie", as a Native American author wrote "one of the 10 million assholes who claim their great grandmother was half Cherokee."

Cherohonkie it is. How about a new name: Ward Cherohonkie?

If anybody is interested in looking into the controversies surrounding this Cherohonkie, here is the Wikipedia article: Ward Churchill.

As far as his academic misconduct is concerned, here is a statement from the Summary of Key Points of Report of the Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder concerning Allegations of Academic Misconduct against Professor Ward Churchill:

May 16, 2006

The Committee was charged with investigating seven allegations:

Allegation A: Misrepresentation of General Allotment Act of 1887

Allegation B: Misrepresentation of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990

Allegation C: Captain John Smith and smallpox in New England, 1614-1618

Allegation D: Smallpox epidemic at Fort Clark and beyond, 1837-1840

Allegation E: Plagiarism of a pamphlet by the Dam the Dams group

Allegation F: Plagiarism of Professor Rebecca Robbins

Allegation G: Plagiarism of Professor Fay G. Cohen

Based on its investigation of those allegations, the Committee unanimously found, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Professor Churchill committed several forms of academic misconduct as defined in the policy statements of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Colorado system:

1. Falsification, as discussed in Allegations A, B, C, and D.

2. Fabrication, as discussed in Allegations C and D.

3. Plagiarism, as discussed in Allegations E and G.

4. Failure to comply with established standards regarding author names on publications, as discussed most fully in Allegation F but also in Allegations A, B, and D.

5. Serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research, as discussed in Allegation D.

The Committee did not find fabrication in the first sub-question of Allegation D or plagiarism in Allegation F.

The Committee noted additionally that Professor Churchill was disrespectful of Indian oral traditions when dealing with the Mandan/Fort Clark smallpox epidemic of 1837, both in his essays and during the course of this investigation, as discussed in Allegation D.

The Committee found that Professor Churchill’s misconduct was deliberate and not a matter of an occasional careless error. The Committee found that similar patterns recurred throughout the essays it examined.

All this probably caught my eye because of the recently discovered spate of plagiarism on OL. I started looking up links to the different allegations in the above report and I literally got sick at heart, so I decided to stop here. If anyone wants to know more, the items are easy to find on a Google search.

I am aghast that a plagiarist can get tenure and keep it at a university and only be condemned when a scandal erupts over a non-related issue, like this joker's comments on 9/11 (written and published in September 2001, but only erupting publicity-wise in 2005 when a 21 year old college student found it and wrote about it in the Hamilton Spectator of Hamilton College in New York). Churchill was granted tenure in 1991 at the University of Colorado. Proof of plagiarism was formally presented in the Spring 1999 issue of the Wicazo Sa Review by Prof. John P. LaVelle, The General Allotment Act "Eligibility" Hoax (see Footnote 8).

It's 2007, folks. I believe in taking time to make an important decision like firing a plagiarist, but 8 years? We all have our standards, I guess. The guy now says he ain't going anywhere. It's strange how plagiarists get awfully comfortable with their unearned position and belligerent when busted. This must be part of the nature of a parasite.

Michael

[Chris Grieb]

Michael; Thanks for all the information. Churchill thought he could keep biting the bear and the bear would never bite back. Guess What! The Bear did!

Edited July 25, 2007 by Chris Grieb

[John Dailey]

~ He should have taken a lesson from Pross (or, er, vice-versa?)

~ Churchill ('Ward', that is) gives a bad rep to the one worthwhile for remembering.

LLAP

J:D

[Robert Campbell]

Michael,

Thanks for all of the material you linked concering Ward Churchill's plagiarism and general-purpose bogosity. I've seen several of these items before, but it's good to have them all in one place.

Neither the ACLU nor the University of Colorado chapter of the AAUP should be expending any of their resources defending this guy. Throughout his academic career, he has been a poseur and a phony.

Unfortunately, the administrators who were responsible for hiring him, granting him tenure, making him a department chair, and covering up for him when colleagues began to complain about his plagiarism are likely to escape without being held accountable.

Even in a politically charged area like "Ethnic Studies," academic phonies like Ward Churchill can't get hired, stay hired, or secure any kind of advancement without administrative sponsorship.

Robert Campbell