THE CASE AGAINST WARD CHURCHILL. Milt Rosenberg links to a Claremont Institute document outlining a dismissal for cause action against Ward Churchill. Although the Claremont Institute might not be the most objective observer of the academy, their bill of particulars is in the correct form with respect to professional incompetence, moral turpitude, and failings of professional integrity. The document also notes that a review panel including several individuals who may have been involved in Mr Churchill's prior reviews is unlikely to conduct a proper hearing, as those individuals have a strong incentive to validate their earlier decisions. The document also correctly notes, "It need not and cannot be based on his well-documented disdain for the United States of America - as offensive as that is."

I have had some experience with for-cause proceedings, as some years ago the university brought such a case against a member of the economics department, and two senior members of the personnel committee decided to resign, citing health reasons, and the chairmanship of the personnel committee fell to me. (There are some interesting stories about the election of additional, less senior members, to serve on that committee, but you'll have to buy me lots of Sprechers first.) Claremont's case is somewhat stronger. The colleague, who might have been discharged for cause or might have taken early retirement, had not published any research for years and had a poor track record as a teacher, but no history of plagiarizing, engaging in retaliatory grading, or falsifying his credentials.

Power Line links to an interview with Mr Churchill that they characterize as misleading.

My favorite Churchill quote is "I'm struggling desperately to be able to deliver to my students what they signed up for." Which is, it seems to me, the heart of the issue: the taxpayers of Colorado, the parents who pay tuition, and the students who sign up for courses at the University of Colorado should be assured of some minimal effort at quality control. Churchill, like lots of bad employees who are in danger of being fired, prefers to cast himself as a victim, saying that the campaign against him is a "pretext for a broader campaign to discourage critical thinking."

I'm going to put that in context. The paragraph from the article reads:

He said the inquiry is not merely an investigation of his work but a pretext for a broader campaign to discourage critical thinking and reduce higher education to "an advanced vo-tech" where students are taught skills useful to corporations.

Let's break that down. Many academicians equate "critical thinking" with questioning the dominant paradigm. But that's relatively new. Find me an economics department in which the errors of the New Deal receive the same treatment as the Fair Labor Standards Act, Social Security, or fiscal policy. To be fair, the regulatory agencies of that era have been recognized for the cartels that they were, but who worries about infrastructure anyway? And, for those of us with a long memory, to what extent were the errors of the Great Society ever discussed in those days shortly after its enactment? One need not buy all the premises in this Opinion Journal article (via Post-Modern Clog) to see that critical thinking about incomes policy ought involve more than the recitation of Democratic Party cliches.

The War on Poverty rests on a false premise: that capitalism creates a permanent class of poor. And War on Poverty attitudes have a deeply harmful effect on those entrammeled in America's current welfare state. So the second Bush term is bringing the War on Poverty--demonstrably a cataclysmic mistake--to an end. A glance at the administration's recent budget shows the ongoing dismantling of antipoverty programs: a sharp reduction in the Community Development Block Grant, the main conduit for funneling federal money to cities; the reduction in HUD money for Section 8 subsidized housing vouchers, which abets the formation of dysfunctional single-parent families and destabilizes respectable working-class neighborhoods; and the shrinkage of ever-expanding Medicaid. Welfare is now temporary assistance in adversity, not a permanent way of life; and we can expect welfare reform's conditions to become even stricter when the 1996 Act finally gets reauthorized.

Milton Friedman was asserting that if the government paid people to be poor, it would face a rising supply of poor people, to much scorn from the avatars of the Welfare Economics Paradigm. Where was the serious discussion of his objections in those days, before the damage became more widespread?

And let's think about that "advanced vo-tech" argument. It's the higher thinking skills that bring the highest incomes, and it's the higher thinking skills that are going missing from much of the workforce, whether degreed or apprenticed. But the mathematics component of those skills has been badly damaged in recent years. The writing component is also missing in many cases.