WARD CHURCHILL AND THE LESSON OF THE FISH
Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, is back in the news because he might get fired. It seems that the university has finally figured out that he makes stuff up, or steals somebody else's stuff, or brazenly quotes other people's stuff as supporting his position, even when it doesn't. And all these lies and misrepresentations are in apparently serious, academic works, not street-corner ranting.
It appears that Professor Churchill (not "Doctor" Churchill -- he has no advanced degree) freely ripped off the works of another academic and did it several times in a way that can only be described as outright plagiarism. His defense against another charge of plagiarism is that he actually ghostwrote the article so he was only quoting himself; but the article was attributed to the author of record, so he was lying one way or the other. He claimed that Captain John Smith "of Pocahontas fame" attempted to wipe out the Indians of New England with smallpox and footnoted a source, which actually provides no support for that assertion whatsoever. And so on.
His defenders have attacked the report of the committee that reviewed the charges against him and have focused on some wacky stuff such as an alleged connection to Lynn Cheney. The only point on which they can muster much of a counter-argument is the dispute over whether a certain 19th century federal law required, or did not require, proof of Indian ancestry, which Churchill terms a "blood quantum." It looks like the law in question did not but that federal policy did in practice. (Native American tribes today are certainly keen on proving ancestry.) But on the questions of plagiarism and misquotation, the defenders have no defense.
Churchill might be hypersensitive to questions of Indian ancestry and tribal identity because his own Indian descent is so attenuated, if it exists at all. Churchill has passed himself off as a Native American but admits he is really no more than one-sixteenth native, and media reports question even that portion.
The heck of it is that his academic offenses might have gone basically unnoticed (or noticed only by a few specialists) if he had restrained himself in his non-academic speech, specifically his notorious description of the office workers killed in the World Trade Center attack of Sept. 11, 2001, as "little Eichmanns" because they supposedly were part of the worldwide holocaust of American capitalism. It was a cheap shot and by itself would not get a tenured professor fired, but it opened a window into Churchill's dark, closed work of paranoia and intellectual dishonesty. It's been all downhill for him from there.
As the fisherman said of the fish, he wouldn't have gotten into trouble if he hadn't opened his mouth.