Teachers for a Democratic Society: Online Petition
. . . . The case against Professor Churchill is flawed on multiple contextual, procedural, and substantive grounds. . . . These include (1) an unreasonably broad and elastic definition of “research misconduct”; (2) a near-obsessive interest in dissecting a small number of paragraphs and footnotes from an otherwise “impressive” and “unusually high volume” of academic work, an analysis that virtually guaranteed the discovery of errors, misrepresentations, and inconsistencies even as it reaffirmed the validity of several “general points” and a core of “historical truth”; and (3) a failure to fully appreciate the “scholar activist” and “public intellectual” roles—roles that, on balance, expand and enrich the academic and journalistic enterprises—that Professor Churchill was clearly expected to fill when hired by the University of Colorado.
The actions of the University of Colorado in this case constitute a serious threat to academic freedom. They indicate that public controversy is dangerous and potentially lethal to the careers of those who engage it. They suggest that professors—tenured and untenured alike—serve at the pleasure of politicians and pundits. They call into question standards of scholarship and peer review at Colorado ’s flagship institution. They endanger not only those scholars working in that area where historical inquiry, critical social commentary, and political activism intersect—an area that defines the true locus of academic freedom in an open and democratic society—but also those historically disenfranchised “others” who are struggling to have their perspectives and programs represented in, and legitimized by, the academic mainstream. . . .
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