Genociding Ward Churchill for over a 20th of a century

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Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do.

[...]

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

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"You just basically sit there for eight hours," said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. "I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.' `I've been sitting here for six months.' That sort of thing."

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Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

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Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six.

CNews 23June09

From our Little-Known Penumbra Of The US Constitution #17 department (ht Terry Hastings)
Excerpt:

Rather than simply deciding that the change in the handbook altered what was a "vested right" [to tenure] of the professors, Denver District Judge Norman D. Haglund ruled that "the public interest is advanced more by tenure systems that favor academic freedom over tenure systems that favor flexibility in hiring or firing." He also noted that "by its very nature, tenure promotes a system in which academic freedom is protected."

CNews 22June09

From our You Know You've Made It When Cracked Considers You A Celebrity department (ht Waldo Pepper)
Excerpt:

When questioned about his heritage, Churchill mentions he was a member of a tribe called the United Keetoowah Band. It turns out this [is] a tribe who [sic] gives out cards to many non-native celebs, including Bill Clinton.

The University of Colorado, where Churchill taught, found itself in a bind. The hiring of Ward based on Indian heritage was hush-hush, so firing him for not being [an] American Indian posed many problems. In fact, they bypassed the usual six-year probationary period and Ph.D. requirement in order to "snap up" Churchill, making them look like fast-acting idiots.

Then, things began looking extra grim for the university when Churchill published a paper comparing 2001 WTC employees to the orchestrators of the Holocaust.

CNews 16June09

The Perfesser's web of historical deception and fraud continues to metastasize, and "America's Holocaust Denial" is a near-prototypical instance of it. Rev. Chuck Freeman cites Doctor Professor Indian Ward Churchill's claims of Native American genocide, then goes on to support that with a quote from an essay by Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr.—failing to note, of course, that Churchill has admitted to ghost-writing the Stiffarm and Lane piece (according to page 89 of CU's investigative report),

"[Churchill] claimed that he actually wrote ('from the ground up,' as he puts it) five of the essays attributed to others in The State of Native America, including not only the essay credited to Robbins, but also those credited to M. Annette Jaimes (the volume’s editor) as sole author, to Jaimes and Theresa Halsey as co-authors, to Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. as co-authors, and to Jorge Noriega.").

"Ward Churchill is a man looking for trouble. Of course, anyone familiar with his voluminous writings during the past two decades—on subjects such as racism in American film and literature, New Age spiritual hucksterism and counterfeit Indians, U.S. government death squads, the damage done to indigenous peoples by the forces of capitalism and Marxism, and a great deal more – know [sic] that Churchill quite audaciously has been courting (and finding) trouble for some time now. [...] It is only because of trouble-makers like him that the deadened conscience of this nation might some day begin to stir. May his kind multiply.”

Even if Churchill et al. are quacks and frauds it is tough to look at the evidence in any objective manner and not refer to what happened to the American Indians as a holocaust.

Soulfully,

Chuck

Go find Dan Rather, Chuck. Ask him how that "fake but accurate" defense is working out.

Update II: Rev. Freeman emailed us this morning asking our view on the subject of genocide and holocaust, and we responded:

Chuck:

I suspect a combination of white guilt (as "JD" noted over at The Seminal), an innocent willingness to trust academics, and a resonance to your own historical beliefs led you to accept Churchill's polemics uncritically. As a real historian, Russell Thornton, has pointed out (commenting about Churchill's willful miss-citation of a Thornton essay): "The history is bad enough. It doesn't need to be embellished."

The field of Native American history is full to overflowing with frauds like Churchill and second-handers who echo his fabrications as gospel. Historical laymen such as you and me can be forgiven, I suppose, for accepting what academics write as true—at least provisionally, and until someone shows that writing to be fraudulent.

In any case, my own view is that the clash of two cultures (one hopelessly outmatched in terms of firepower) over possession of land is a complex history featuring tragic misadventure, wrongheaded charity, and yes, some willful evil—just like all history. But the terms genocide and holocaust assign every Indian death to just one of those factors: willful evil. Was the director of a Christian mission school on a reservation willfully evil? Was the smallpox-infected passenger of a steamboat that moored near an outpost that traded with the Indians willfully evil?

I'd suggest a reading of some of the essays on PB, which in turn will link to other writers, many of whom are historians, all of whom have something to offer the conversation. Read each one with the same skepticism you should have applied to Churchill's outlandish claims; you'll come away with a more clear knowledge of the tragedy of Native American history—and the disservice Churchill and his ilk have done it.

JW

...to which we might add our hearty agreement with a portion of another citation in Rev. Freeman's blog post—that of John the Baptist: "Brood of vipers! [...] Every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." To belabor the point with a return to our initial analogy at the top of this post, no treatment, however heroic, can save the cancer-ridden corpus of Native American history. Time to bury it, salt the earth around its grave, and start over.

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CNews 5June09

Race To The Bottom has posted several new items of interest concerning Teh Trial, including (ht Leah):

CU's reply to Churchill's response to CU's motion for judgment. Our favorite line: "Professor Churchill Confuses Eleventh Amendment Immunity and Quasi-Judicial Immunity"

A joint stipulation signed back in December '07 by both Churchill and CU administrators, along with some exhibits pertaining to same

...and a rather brief overview of the post-trial paper-shuffling, which for some reason is on the main RotB site but not on the Churchill-specific portion of the blog.

CNews 4June09

What is entirely overlooked by CU [...] is that whether Churchill is the best or worst scholar in the world is entirely beside the point givent that the only relevant inquiry from this Court's perspective was resolved by the jury when it found that a) CU violated the Constitution of the United States and; b) Churchill would not have been fired but-for this Constitutional violation.