Greg Ransom
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The real question is why wasn't anybody embarrassed before? In 1998, to cite one example, Churchill published a book - Pacificism as Pathology - which was essentially an argument for violent revolution to overthrow America's democracy. It was dedicated to an American terrorist who blew herself up while making a bomb intended to kill Army recruits and their dates at a social dance at Fort Dix. Why weren't any of his colleagues or superiors upset about this?UPDATE: Prof. Thomas Brown of Lamar University has the goods on the bogus scholarship of Ward Churchill and his claim that the U.S. military deliberated infected Mandan Indians with smallpox in the 1830's. (via Betsy). Posted by Greg RansomChurchill is most widely known, in fact, for his academic writings in defense of the Black Panthers, a leftist gang that murdered a dozen people, and for his academic treatises accusing America of plotting and carrying out genocide against minorities throughout its history ..
In sum, Churchill's views, which are both hateful and ignorant, represent the views a substantial segment of the academic community at Boulder and on campuses generally. Robert Jensen, a leftist professor at the University of Texas whom I have debated on TV over the Churchill matter, fully shares Churchill's views that America should lose the war on terror and that the terrorists are in fact "resistance" fighters opposing the American empire. A well-known required text for "Peace Studies" programs authored by two professors at well-known universities teaches students that the word "terrorist" describes the American Founders, that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" and that America is the world's "most terrorist state." Churchill's new book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which contains his offending essay, is up for a Gustavus Myers Award, a "civil rights" award administered by academics.
The Churchill affair is an expression of the degenerate state of American social science and humanities faculties. It illuminates the political subversion of the academic enterprise by tenured radicals who have made universities like Boulder political institutions of the left, and in the process so diminished the presence of conservative, libertarian and even centrist thought from university faculties that hate-America radicals like Churchill are now pillars of the profession.
The remedy for this situation is not to purge the Ward Churchills from academic faculties. Their ideas are by now entrenched in the university curriculum and cannot be stamped out by firing an individual even if that were advisable (which it is not). They need to be confronted intellectually. Their scholarly incompetence needs to be exposed, and students need to be presented with an alternative view of history that is closer to reality.
The remedy for the Churchill problem is first of all to embrace the idea of intellectual diversity as a primary university value .. The real problem is that there is no such diversity at the University of Colorado at Boulder today. In the present academic system, conservatives are as rare as unicorns, and have an almost impossible barrier to overcome in order to get hired. That is because search and hiring committees are composed of professors like Ward Churchill. That is the problem that the regents of the University of Colorado .. need to begin to address, now.
