Ward Churchill Solidarity Network

Dean Saitta

Dear Colleagues,

As President of the University of Denver Faculty Senate—and thus as someone concerned about an administration’s adherence to principles of due process and fair play as concerns the evaluation of faculty work—I have been closely following the Ward Churchill case as it has developed at CU. As an anthropologist I am familiar with Churchill’s scholarship. I have studied critiques of Churchill’s work (especially Professor Thomas Brown’s, as published in a recent issue of Plagiary), and consulted about Churchill’s work with colleagues who are expert in the field of Native American history. My concerns about the complex contextual, procedural, and substantive issues at play in the Churchill case led me to co-author the Teachers for a Democratic Society (TDS) petition (available at http://www.teachersfordemocracy.org/) calling on the CU administration to reverse its decision to fire Professor Churchill. After a summertime of interacting on various internet sites with scholars and citizens who are highly critical of, if not deeply hostile to, both Churchill and the TDS petitioners, I’m now compelled to urge with even greater conviction that Chancellor DiStefano reconsider and reverse his decision to terminate Professor Churchill’s employment.

The equivocal review of Churchill’s work by the CU Investigative Committee is striking, and speaks volumes about the complexity of the issues at stake in this case. At the end of the day 4 of the 5 scholars on that committee–those most familiar with the quality of Churchill’s scholarship–recommended suspension rather than dismissal. This outcome is especially notable given the committee’s use of what the TDS petitioners, as well as CU professor Tom Mayer, consider an unreasonably broad and elastic conception of “research misconduct”. The conception employed by the CU Investigative Committee could certainly endanger even scrupulously honest scholars if an administration was intent on purging them from a faculty. It seems to me that Vine Deloria—another CU professor who, on the occasion of his death in November 2005, was widely and justifiably eulogized as an important contributor to the study of Native American history and culture—could certainly have been found guilty of research misconduct for work that, though flawed by Western philosophical standards, was quite useful in raising unexamined issues and encouraging new learning about the Native American past.

As noted by CU’s Investigative Committee, and as reaffirmed by the TDS petitioners, other contextual and procedural concerns are just as troubling as the substantive scholarly ones. These include (1) highly inflammatory and deeply prejudicial external political interference in the case right from the start, (2) administrative inaction as concerns much earlier rumors of Churchill’s plagiarism, (3) Churchill’s widely-known reputation—even at the time of his initial hiring by CU—as a polemicist and provocateur, and (4) the questionable legality of the complainant’s position as interim Chancellor of the university. The Standing Committee on Research Misconduct’s response to two of these concerns (#’s 1 and 2) is not particularly strong and, indeed, the 6-3 vote by that committee in favor of dismissal means that the 14 scholars involved in the Churchill investigation are absolutely split on the question of sanctions.

Given these numerous concerns and divergent outcomes I do not see how the CU administration can justify, in good conscience, its decision to terminate Professor Churchill. I’m not entirely comfortable about registering this opinion given my inclination to respect the internal governance procedures of other institutions (and I speak only for myself and not the DU Faculty Senate). But this is a very public case, and the current threat to academic freedom on American campuses is very real. There is now a significant and growing list of faculty who have lost, or are threatened with losing, their jobs and/or directorships because of unpopular, but protected, public and classroom speech. I have heard both directly and indirectly from colleagues on Colorado campuses that many faculty, especially junior faculty, will not take a public stand against the CU administration’s intent to fire Churchill because they fear the consequences for their own careers. This goes for faculty even at a private institution like my own. This is not a healthy state of affairs, for faculty or for students. The final Churchill decision stands to set a historic precedent that will either erode or preserve academic freedom on our campuses. I hope that you will side with preservation.

Sincerely,

Dean J. Saitta
Professor, Department of Anthropology
President, Faculty Senate
University of Denver
Sturm Hall 146-S
2000 East Asbury Street
Denver, CO 80208

Ward Churchill on Parallels: The Coming War at Home

Fundraiser for WBAI in NYC

Presented by WBAI 99.5fm and The New York Society for Ethical Culture

Featuring WARD CHURCHILL
Plus, Lynne Stewart, Bernard White, Amy Goodman (Invited)

Performance By M ATOU = Soni Moreno (Ulali)
Attahua Papa, Tiokasin Ghosthorse

Saturday March 31,2007
New York Society for Ethical Culture
West 64th Street at Central Park West
7 to 9 PM

Ward Churchill, author of a mountain of books on the FBI and Cointelpro, is standing at Ground Zero in a raging firestorm over academic freedom.

For more information: www.wbai.org

Open Letter Calling on the University of Colorado to Reverse Its Recommendation to Dismiss Professor Ward Churchill to be Published in The New York Review of Books

The Open Letter Calling on the University of Colorado to Reverse Its Recommendation to Dismiss Professor Ward Churchill – initiated by 11 of this country’s distinguished public intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Richard Falk, Derrick Bell, Rashid Khalidi, and Irene Gendzier – is being published as a full page ad in the upcoming April 12th issue of the New York Review of Books (their special Spring Book Issue), which appears on the newsstands two weeks earlier.

Someone who believes strongly in the effort to defend dissent and critical thinking in academia in today’s climate has put the cost of the ad on their credit card so that it can be published without delay. We still must raise the major portion of the $9,000 to pay for its publication, and are calling on everyone reading this to help - by contributing through the PayPal account linked to on the Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking website, forwarding this letter to colleagues, list serves, etc., and/or by directing colleagues to the www.defendcriticalthinking.org website. At the same time, we’re calling on you to circulate the letter broadly for signatures.

As we wrote on March 1st, “the appearance of this letter in the NYRB will contribute to significantly transforming a situation where entirely too few of this countries’ scholars and intellectuals are even aware of this case, and the implications of its outcome. And it will bring before them an articulate challenge, from some of this country’s most respected public intellectuals, to the overwhelmingly one-sided version of the facts of this case that people have been given to date.

“Through this we will be working to bridge the current gap that exists between the section of academia that recognizes and is responding to the urgency of the overall assault on dissent and critical thinking and the way it is manifesting itself in the Churchill case, and the broader community of scholars and students.”

If you have not yet contributed to publishing the letter, now is the time to do so!

Cornell American Indian Studies Professor Cheyfitz: Research Misconduct Charges Against Ward Churchill Fabricated

An excellent article from Cornell University about the Ward Churchill seminar given by Eric Cheyfitz:

Cheyfitz speaks up for academic freedom in Ward Churchill case
By Daniel Aloi

Cornell’s Eric Cheyfitz defended academic freedom in recent testimony in the case of controversial Native American scholar and activist Ward Churchill’s threatened dismissal from the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB).

Cheyfitz, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, discussed the case in a seminar, “Ward Churchill, 9/11, and Academic Freedom,” Feb. 8 at Cornell’s A.D. White House.

The action against Churchill began after his Sept. 12, 2001, essay, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” attracted media attention in January 2005. Churchill’s essay criticized U.S. foreign policy and questioned the innocence of some of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, comparing “the technocratic corps” of WTC workers to “little Eichmanns.” Cheyfitz said this metaphor is both unfortunate and historically inaccurate, but he agrees with the essay’s overall point in its critique of the violence of U.S. Middle East policy. Churchill’s work has created controversy for a long time for, among other things, its comparison of the Jewish Holocaust with what some scholars consider the genocide of American Indians, Cheyfitz said.

In the immediate wake of the media attention in 2005, Colorado’s then governor, Bill Owens, called for Churchill’s resignation, a state House of Representatives resolution condemned Churchill, and Boulder interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano ordered that his research be investigated, after a UCB faculty committee found that Churchill’s 9/11 essay was protected free speech.

The Investigative Committee formed by the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at UCB published a report in May 2006 upholding charges of plagiarism and falsification of research brought by DiStefano. Only one of the five investigative committee members recommended Churchill’s dismissal, while six of the nine voting members of the standing committee endorsed DiStefano’s recommendation for dismissal. Churchill was relieved of his duties in June 2006 but remains on staff pending the outcome of deliberations by the Privilege and Tenure Committee of the Colorado System, and then a decision by the system president and regents.

Cheyfitz, an expert on Native American culture, law, literature and history, read the 124-page report containing the charges of research misconduct and, he said, “I slowly began to see [the charges were] fabricated. They hired him with tenure in 1991, and none of this surfaced until 2005. He was promoted to full professor in 1997, he got regular merit raises, and there’s no reason to suspect there were any issues about his teaching either.”

He spoke in Churchill’s defense on Jan. 12 before the committee on privilege and tenure — which is reviewing the case and will decide if Churchill merits sanctioning and if so, what form the sanction should take.

“I went over the report and the charges, and deconstructed them for the committee, going over each charge and pointing to the problems in the investigative committee’s own flawed scholarship,” Cheyfitz said. “The research misconduct charges disappear when you start looking at them closely. I said at the end that what is properly an academic debate about the relationship of Native peoples to United States history was turned into an indictment.”

Only one investigative committee member had expertise in Native American studies and federal Indian law, Cheyfitz said. “This is fraught with problems. By the University of Colorado’s own published standards, it should have been a ‘committee composed of individuals with expertise relevant to the specific allegations.’”

Cheyfitz said the case against Churchill is “linked up to other witch hunts, like that in the Columbia University Middle East studies department,” where scholars were accused of anti-Semitism because of their critical view of Israel, though they were ultimately exonerated of those charges.

“When you couple this with the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, the whole atmosphere of the war on Iraq and the war on terror, and the actions of the Bush administration … to undermine the Constitution, [it can] lead to an atmosphere where people can feel threatened,” said Cheyfitz, noting that the case is not just about Churchill and limiting free speech.

“It is an attack on tenure, too, which is the bulwark of academic freedom,” he said. “Academia has changed over the last 30 or 40 years because of a movement we can call corporatization. Nationwide, 65 percent of academic positions are nontenured and nontenure-track labor. That has tremendous implications for academic freedom. That change is very, very significant because it enables the attacks from the right wing. This structural change has gone on apace and has serious consequences for the profession.”

CU Students Host Teach-In

March 6th, 5PM
Benson Earth Sciences
Room 180

Flyer here.