CNews 30September07
Anglish perfesur Peter N. Kirstein continues to flog his Iranian TV interview; apparently, giving propaganda-fodder to Muckmound Imadinnerjacket's fascist regime absolves anyone, even
CNews 29September07
Jonah Goldberg makes some enlightening observations on "freedom of speech" qua Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and The Perfesser.
Excerpt:
When Cindy Sheehan was still a darling of establishment liberals, they defended her increasingly batty statements by saying, in the words of Fox News’ Juan Williams, “she’s an American, she has the right to her opinion.” Absolutely, and I have the right to my opinions, too. But somehow I’m anti-free speech when I voice them.Update: We're surprised to discover that there really is a cheapdegrees.com, but as jgm insinuates (or vaguely implies) (or we erroneously infer),
This whole line of argumentation is a sign of intellectual weakness or cowardice. Take, for example, that mossy cliché “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it!”
The only reasonable response is, “Who gives a rat’s patoot?” If I deny the reality of the Holocaust, or insist that “2 plus 2 equals a duck,” or that I can make ten-minute brownies in six minutes, responding that you may disagree with what I say but will defend my right to say it is a shabby way to sound courageous while actually taking a spineless dive. How brave of you to defend me from a threat that doesn’t exist while lamely avoiding actually challenging my statements.
Similarly, there’s been a lot of high-minded gasbaggery over this elusive idea of “academic freedom.” A more selectively invoked standard is hard to come by. Somehow, when former Harvard President Larry Summers, one of America’s most esteemed economists, told a group of academics that the distribution of high-level cognitive abilities may not be evenly spread out among men and women, activist feminist professors got the vapors and claimed, from the comfort of their fainting couches, that their hysteria could only be cured by Summers’ head on a platter. But Ward Churchill, a penny-ante buffoon who seems to have downloaded his Ph.D. from cheapdegrees.com, compares the victims of 9/11 to Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann, and suddenly academic freedom demands Churchill keep his tenured job forever, at taxpayers’ expense.
CNews 28September07
From our Answer: The Poor, Ward Churchill & Cockroaches. Question: What Will We Apparently Have With Us Always? department: The Daily Camera fills in the details on the unscheduled, unpaid "lecture series" The Perfesser plans to present this Fall and Spring. (ht Leah)
Excerpt:
The students organizing Churchill's teachings say the series is intended for those who "missed out" on his years as an American Indian studies professor and as head of the ethnic studies department at CU.Update: ...As we've noted on numerous occasions,
Neither Churchill nor his student backers could be reached for comment Thursday.
"He's a professor, he likes to teach people — so that's what he's doing," said David Lane, Churchill's attorney, who was unaware of his client's planned lecture series.
CU officials released a statement Thursday afternoon emphasizing that any students who attend Churchill's discussions will not receive credit and the lectures aren't endorsed by the university or considered to be sanctioned academic coursework.
"Any CU student is at liberty to invite Ward Churchill to campus to speak, but this should not be viewed by anyone as a resumption of employment or of his former professorial role at the University of Colorado at Boulder," campus officials said in the statement.
Update II: We missed this, but Drunka did not—The Perfesser's "lectures" will not be open to the public. Quelle surprise.
Update III: As the inimitable Noj comments, "If Ward Churchill lectures in an empty classroom, is he still lying?"
CNews 26September07
Drunkablog has a scoop (maybe): Ward Churchill to hold classes at CU (maybe). Yeah, that's what we thought.
Update: As Noj points out in our comments section: "My prediction is that CU will ignore it, and let Churchill speak. His "students" won't get credit for attending, and thus few will bother to show up. Churchill will no longer get to park in the faculty lot. The whole thing will peter out fairly quickly."
Update II: Lokki notes: "The best part about it is that it suggests that Ward doesn't have anything better to do. That's nice."
Update III: Last but not least, as Drunka says in his post: "Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket."
Update IV: Drunk gets more info from a CU spokesmutant. Excerpt: "[The Churchill lout-shouting] is open to all students. That means any fee paying students and no student (College Repub, Campus Press student or otherwise) can be turned away. The media cannot be turned away either because these classes are being held on a public campus in a public building." Hmmmm. You don't think the spokesmutant is, like, suggesting anything there, do you?
CNews 25September07
Useless idiot & critical thimker Peter N. Kirstein shamelessly fellates Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (via Marathon Pundit)
Update: As Noj points out in our comments, Kirstein also has a hole for Holocaust denier David Irving.
CNews 24September07
OT: News From the Front
Excerpt:
Horowitz is threatening to go after “the anti-American curriculum of the tenured left” and to “teach an alternative curriculum that will arm America against the radical Jihad.” In fact, Horowitz has already led attacks on professors like Ward Churchill, known mainly for his work on exposing the U.S. genocide against Native Americans, and Norman Finkelstein, known mainly for his exposure of Israel’s crimes and its hypocritical use of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews to justify those crimes. He has published a book listing 101 “dangerous professors”—almost all of whom research and teach about the real nature of American society and whose work and views don’t “fit into” the crusade now being carried out by the U.S. government.
CNews 23September07
After a month and a half of blessed silence, those amorphous globules over at wardchurchill.net screw their courage to the sticking place and post more whine.
Excerpt:
[W]e need to remember that this case isn’t about a statement Ward Churchill posted on an obscure website on September 12, 2001, much less about a handful of footnotes or attributions in his prolific body of scholarship. It’s about sending a message (i.e., “shut up”) to all who would question the legitimacy of the U.S. government’s actions, both today and in the past.Sad when even The Perfesser's staunchest defenders refer to his scholarship as nothing more than "prolific."
Update: In our comments section, Noj asks "Why don't they mention Phil Mitchell, the religious conservative CU instructor who CU harassed and ultimately fired?" Odd, that. Even the incredibly partisan Boulder chapter of the AAUP has spoken out in Mitchell's defense (ht Waldo Pepper for the AAUP link).
CNews 22September07
From our Well, It's A Start department: CU to implement criminal background checks on faculty & staff.
CNews 21September07
Professor Mike Adams has been having fun at Kent State history professor Julio Pino's expense for months. Here's his latest.
Excerpt:
Yesterday, I took the time to log on to www.RateMyProfessors.com to see whether there was any evidence suggesting Pino was spreading anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric in the classroom. I also wondered whether he was one of those History professors more into teaching about his present political views than teaching about the past.
Here’s what I found:
“This guy is an idiot! Completely illogical...does not tolerate any views other than his own...hates Christians and intolerant of Christian values...”
Since the above comment was written on the day one of my columns about Pino was released, it should, in all fairness, be ignored. But consider the following comment, which was written before I exposed Pino in the national media:
“Definately a jihad boy in training. I think he's more the suicide bomber type though. If you think we are kidding, take this wackjob for class.”
And there were other students concerned that Pino had violent tendencies as well. The following comment was also written before I exposed Pino:
“I swear this guy is going to turn out to be the leader of a major terrorist group, he clearly hates America and capitalism.”
CNews 19September07
From our Marching Morons department: According to this site, Professor Ward Churchill will be joined by a veritable cornucopia of his fellow numb-skulls October 5-8 in Charlottesville, North Carolina oops, Virginia. (ht Leah)
Excerpt:
Just one more reason Charlottesville is an awesome place to live. Where else east of the Mississippi would you get the chance to hear Ward Churchill, Natsu Saito, Derrick Jensen, and Dana Lyons — all in one weekend? Columbus: Myth and the American Dream Revisited will be a full weekend of investigation into “our collective historical and cultural lineage, its consequences and contemporary condition.” Expect it to be…edgy.
Hope that edge you're talking about isn't the reason or ethics ones, because these frauds fell off both of those edges long ago.
Update: Drunkablog worries that while they're Speaking Truth in the Teeth of Charlottesville Power, Wart and Truthforce might miss the Denver Moonbat Convergence.
From our Shiver Me Timbers, Be It That Time Again? department: It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Arrh! So here be a new Churchill quote pirateized for yer edjumafication: "I were hired fer whut I does. Arrh!"
CNews 15September07
Mildly OT: El Presidente over at Slapstick Politics has the low-down on the show trial conducted recently by the Columbus Day Truth Commission. Spoiler: Columbus was a white supremacist.
CNews 13September07
Debunken posts a second video of Ward Churchill's campaign stop at VCU last Friday. In this one, Debunken himself is engaged by The Perfesser mid-hector in a lively discussion on, well, you figure it out.
Drunkablog discovers a new transitive verb: "to Finkelstein"
CNews 12September07
Minding the Campus ("Reforming Our Universities") is a new think tank from The Manhattan Institute, and its website features numerous excellent essays concerning the idiocy of modern higher education, including Mark Bauerlein's "I'm Ok, You're Not Ok," in which we find this (via Drunkablog):
The reason professors can declare such biases so blithely is precisely because they have acquired a disciplinary sheen, the mantle of professional criteria. In the subsequent essay in Academe, "Impassioned Teaching," women's studies professor Pamela L. Caughie of Loyola University (Chicago) asserts, "In teaching students its [feminism's] history, its forms, and its impact, I am teaching them to think and write as feminists." So much for the vaunted critical thinking professors prize, and the injunction that they question orthodoxy and convention. Caughie aims to produce versions of herself. And it's more than an ego trip - it's a professional duty: "I feel I am doing my job well when students become practitioners of feminist analysis and committed to feminist politics" (emphasis added).
Well-intentioned, to be sure, Minding The Campus makes the same mistake David Horowitz makes in believing "intellectual pluralism" can be achieved in the public academy. Like the Left's current stranglehold on the liberal arts in higher education, Minding the Campus and Horowitz can only achieve a momentary grip on ideological prevalence, to be lost in the next spin cycle. You can't counter idiots like Professor Caughie with "luncheon forums" and authors "published by respected trade publishers", or by matching her feminist lunacy with classes on Intelligent Design. Money gives stupidity power. Time to grasp the nettle, and remove public money from education.
David Horowitz writes annoyingly of himself in the third person in the new preface for the newly-released paperback edition of his book, The Professors.
...Speaking of idiots, another essay from Minding the Campus highlights Harvard education professor Howard Gardner, who declares:
"The right wing isn’t just taking over the country, it’s shanghaiing all our values. If there’s a Republican administration after the next election, I would join in efforts for some sort of secession. It’s not the same country anymore."
CNews 11September07
Drunkablog does a tidy round-up of Ward Churchill news, including Commonwealth Times' coverage of The Perfesser's rant at VCU last Friday, wherein Churchill notes that the major difference between European settlers’ genocide of Native Americans and Nazi Germany’s holocaust during World War II was that Germany lost.
Long-winded and providing nothing but the more obvious talking points for professors, the American Association of University Professor's oddly-timed “Freedom in the Classroom” unsurprisingly fails to address the real problems of publicly-financed higher education. (via Inside Higher Education) Luckily, the comments section at IHE does. One particularly good comment, from Paul Kamolnick, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at East Tennessee State University (typos corrected):
I have yet to read the new AAUP positions on permissible academic speech and will withhold judgment until I do. The challenge as I see it—and have experienced it in a modern sociology department dominated essentially by a radical cultural determinist worldview—is how to recognize professional, competent, objective, academic conduct. From the culturally determinist viewpoint, all humans are virtually identical until made otherwise. Inequalities of outcome are sufficiently explained, they believe, by arbitrary and ‘oppressive’ structures of power.
The ‘oppression’ paradigm is so entrenched that entire publication lists cater to it. ‘Race, Class, Gender’ is to my discipline what the catechism is to fundamentalist Christian believers. Add to this the fact that biological illiteracy is rampant, and natural scientific knowledge generally, and you find yourself talking with persons who profess in the classroom about the nature of human societies who themselves couldn’t begin to describe to you what a genotype, nervous system, or even a cell, is. Which is to say that in the supremely empirically ‘underdetermined’ environment of the present-day cultural determinist behavioral sciences, Leftwing ideologues believe, and believe deeply and truly, they ARE being objective. They are the bearers of the secret knowledge that will allow students to first know their oppressors, and then armed with the ‘truth,’ go out and change the system. Ask any reasonably objective person who inhabits a sociology department as I have, and who is no longer part of the Leftist movement, whether sociology departments are not in general simply outposts for ideologues committed to the change of societies based on generally socialist principles.
It is exactly for this reason that the original AAUP 1915 statement was promulgated by social scientists, and the thrust of their concern was with the social sciences being abused by ideologues. The enemy of a carefully taught, nuanced, fair assessment of the facts about how societies are arranged, is not an external enemy attempting to restrict academic prerogative. It is about a movement inspired by Horowitz recently, but going back to the earlier critics of the excesses of the 1960s takeover of universities first by students, and now those students have become faculties (e.g. Seymour Martin Lipset, Sidney Hook). Genuine classical liberalism, with its fallibilism, humility, skepticism, and respect for the academic virtues is about as distant from a modern sociology department as it ever has been. I have thought that a solution to this crisis might be for every campus to create a new college: College of Oppression Studies. And for each department in the college to be assigned a specific ‘victim’ to study. And that crutches should be handed out to students, and ‘I feel your pain’ pins and bumper stickers. And everyone on campus is given a vote as to whether they choose to join this college, or if not, to subject their own professorial vocations to a more stringent criteria of truth that is not simply a retreading of the socialist idea. How utterly refreshing!
So, I will read this AAUP statement to see whether there is at least a recognition that the enemy of genuine Millian and Weberian liberty, and of the scholarly vocation, is not located within the belly of our beast. Ideologues do not give up, and are never wrong. Finkelstein was bounced it seems from reports because he failed to exemplify the academic virtues, not for any particular thing he had said and written. Arrogance, venom, self-righteous indignation, do not an academic make.
CNews 9September07
Here's The Perfesser himself, singing his song at VCU (and Debunken promises more, maybe)
CNews 8September07
Professor Peter "Cheerio! Pip! Pip!" Kirstein can't even spell the names of his fellow DBABers (or perhaps he simply can't read, since the name of the author is clearly at the end of the gag-reflex-testing poem he quotes in full.
Excerpt:
Tom Thayer, a professor of sociology, at the University of Colorado was one of the strongest advocates for academic freedom prior to the July 24, 2007 firing of a tenured full professor, Ward Churchill. His poem appeared in the C.U. publication “Silver and Gold Record."Update: Speaking of Peter "Spelling Bee" Kirstein, Marathon Pundit notes that he will be speaking at DePaul University, no doubt to protest the dismissal of Professor Thomas Klocek.
Update II: Peter "Proofreading? We don't need no stinking proofreading!" Kirstein has fixed his post.
The report is unconfirmed, but according to this site, a high school history teacher launched into a tirade during class last week, claiming that the US stole millions of acres from Mexico (with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) and that Mexicans consequently have a right to ignore the US's immigration laws.
CNews 7September07
From our We Just Threw Up A Little In Our Mouth department: Tom Mayer versifies epicly in Silver & Gold Record (ht Leah)
Excerpt:
The good doctors take care
never to offend Caesar,
never to think a thought
for which they might be terminated,
reprimanded,
or even shot a second glance.
A crucifixion in the neighborhood?
No concern of theirs ...
let alone a mere firing.
Perhaps these voiceless inert instructors of the young
even thank the august board
for exorcising
a public embarrassment.
July 24, 2007.
On that date the august board
dispatched the despised professor,
preserving the good name
of the esteemed institution.
June 22, 1633.
On that date occurred another exorcism.
Another august board
fired
another despised professor,
preserving the good name
of another esteemed institution.
Or, to be more precise,
a prior and more authoritative august board
inscribed a despised professor as antichrist,
condemning a man of the planets
to perpetual house arrest.
Galileo Galilei.
"And yet it does move."
What goes around will come around.
CNews 5September07
CU seeks dismissal of Churchill lawsuit
Excerpt:
The University of Colorado filed motions Tuesday asking a Denver district judge to dismiss former CU professor Ward Churchill's lawsuit against the school.
Churchill, who taught ethnic studies, filed a complaint in July, charging that the regents and the school violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and denied him due process in his termination.
School officials responded Tuesday, saying the regents have immunity from a lawsuit over their decision to fire Churchill and that school officials have a right to investigate whether a faculty member violated his duties.
The governing legal framework specifically requires the employer to undertake a reasonable investigation," the motion says.
Churchill's attorney, David Lane, said he hasn't seen the motions but doesn't believe they will get the case dismissed.
Drunkablog discovers the clueless Marxist coprophage (in short, the "Tom Mayer") of DePaul University, making us wonder how many other universities are likewise infested. Plus, Drunka highlights the forthcoming gala 17 hours of Columbusalooza, wherein anti-Columbus Day folk will express their MacOutrage™ amidst harmony and understanding! Sympathy and trust abounding! No more falsehoods or derisions! Golden living dreams of visions! Mystic crystal revelation! And the mind's true liberation....
Ahem. Your mileage may vary.
Update: Drunka reports (channeling Marathon Pundit) that Finkelstein has resigned, rendering the above-noted Brave Little Toaster's exhortation that much more bathetic.
CNews 4September07
Grant Crowell checks in with a video of Ward Churchill's visit to Hawaii back in 1993, when The Perfesser was a member of the Creek Nation (apparently a hither-to unknown prerequisite to joining the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee).
Tim Giago offers his take on the murder of Anna Mae Aquash.
OT: SIU President Glen Poshard announces the department he presently supervises (and which awarded his doctorate 24 years ago) will evaluate charges of dissertation plagiarism (via Inside Higher Education, which questions the propriety of an internal vice external review)
CNews 2September07
From our Now Is The Weekend of Our Discontent department: Step aside, French-Frying Legion! The hot new franchise opportunity in college towns is the Clown Car Attack Battalion! From the interlocking cretinships of the management to the MacOutrage™ of the foot-soldiers, CCAB is sure to be the kidney plaster of the New Millennium!
Professor Peter "Cheerio! Pip! Pip!" Kirstein demonstrates how to judge DBAB chicanery vs. how to judge the enemy's chicanery.
Excerpt (relevant statements highlighted):
In the Ward Churchill matter, I was critical of the REASONS for the investigation of his alleged scholarly misconduct: namely it was a “gotcha” hunt based upon the professor’s writings on the September 11 aerial attacks over New York. Yet I also stated that I felt the arguments by other independent analysts that inappropriate and unprofessional methods were used in the vetting of Mr Churchill’s research, were sufficient to question the degree of academic misconduct and the recommended punishment. Actually suspension not expulsion was ultimately recommended which was exceeded by both President Hank Brown and the C.U. Regents. In [Southern Illinois University president Glenn] Poshard’s case, he has conceded “mistakes” were made. I have seen NO evidence that he did NOT cheat on his doctoral dissertation and that the lifting of entire pages of other sources without quotation marks and apparently on occasion without citations did NOT occur....So, for clarity's sake, allegations of possible inappropriate vetting methods is enough to exonerate "the good guys" but the absence of proof of innocence is enough to convict "the bad guys." Got it.
