HOW OTHERS SEE US. The Pseudo-Indian Defense is proving to be unsound, and the repercussions are making the academy, and the academic culture, look bad.

(click the image for Cox and Forkum's commentary and some recommended reading.)

Pirate Ballerina has been following the Churchill story aggressively, most recently offering an Out-of-Context, Nonviolent Churchill Quote of the Day, most of which suggest Mr Churchill is at best a fourth-rate, fourth derivative Barrington Moore, Jr. but who takes his research inspiration from Buffy Sainte-Marie's "My Country Tis of Thy People You're Dying." The Los Angeles Times has the details.

Three professors have said that Churchill reinvented history to suit his politics. In one case, he wrote that the U.S. Army deliberately infected Mandan Indians with smallpox-laden blankets in what is now North Dakota. His source for the story was UCLA professor Russell Thornton, whose own account of the incident is completely different and makes no mention of the Army.

Betsy's Page's coverage of the story discovers the existence of a Center for Academic Integrity. Why not? Underwriters Laboratories destructive-tests toasters so as to better calculate insurance premiums. There is no comparable destructive-testing of ideas in the academy. Alas, that's what's sinking Colorado's departing Betsy Hoffman. Several of her Iowa State colleagues were at the Midwest Economics Association and they spoke well of her as a person. Alas, this Newsweek article suggests she's somewhat clueless about the proper role for academic inquiry.

"A university is a place where you're supposed to think deeply about things, where you're supposed to challenge established thought, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to do that in today's political climate," she says. "We are so deeply divided as a country." This division, she says, threatens the foundation of liberal higher education. "The modern research university is a big and complex place," she says, "but it ultimately is about the generation of new ideas and the transfer of those new ideas to students. If we can't even talk about controversial subjects, we can't make progress."

I'd rather not get into the tu quoque mud where people get offended about heteronormativity or about suggestions that the two sexes are wired differently for spatial and intuitive thinking, to introduce controversial subjects that some of the area-studies types would just as soon not talk about. Belmont Club properly takes Professor Hoffman, and the Colorado academic establishment, to task for that omission.

Ironically, the public glare focused upon Ward Churchill's ideas in the aftermath of his "little Eichmanns" essay provided the scholarly scrutiny that the University of Coloardo itself neglected to supply. Did the US government actually specify a 'blood quantum' for Native Americans? Did US troops really distribute smallpox-impregnated blankets to tribes and with what precautions to themselves? Did Professor Churchill really provide the content of books on which his name appears or did he swipe it from some other scholar? Those are questions which have been dissected at length by persons "outside the campus" and even by "Colorado lawmakers". That they were not raised or even contemplated by academic departments at the University of Colorado constitutes a failure of its most basic mission. Universities not in the business of asking these these questions are arguably not institutions of higher learning at all. That neglect, not the discussion which her University went so far out of its way to avoid, "threatens the foundation of liberal higher education".

Victor Davis Hanson suggests that what we are seeing is more of the same.

The usual exegeses suffice: The contemporary campus has devolved into an Orwellian world in which the ends usually justify the means. Diversity really means no diversity of ideas. Unfettered expression is a code word for groupspeak of the Left. Academic freedom and tenure ensure timidity and monotony of thought. The champions of the oppressed and discriminated are, in fact, the affluent and privileged, whose antics are excused only by the irrelevancy of academic culture and properly deplored solely through the accidental discovery of a forgotten rant or taped remark.

Underneath all this is the disturbing fact that progressive campuses are charging their students tuition whose annual increases exceed the rate of inflation, while vocal professors have plenty of idle time on their hands and live lives that most Americans — or their own college staff members — can only dream of.

That bit about idle time is gratuitous. But there is some truth to the groupthink charge. Dave Kopel, in the Rocky Mountain News, which has been covering the Colorado follies, but in his mind not sufficiently extensively, elaborates.

For all the ink devoted to the Ward Churchill case, the Denver dailies have done virtually nothing to investigate the dysfunctional campus academic culture which led to the Churchill fiasco.

Here are some of the questions the Denver media have not even attempted to probe: Why did the University of Colorado Arts and Sciences administration continue to promote and laud Churchill after the late-1990s publication of professor Thomas LaVelle's articles alleging extensive academic fraud and plagiarism on Churchill's part? Are there other academic frauds and plagiarists at CU whom the administration has protected? How did CU become such a racist institution that a patently unqualified man was pushed for tenure in three departments because he claimed to be an Indian? How many other poorly-qualified teachers have gotten jobs at CU, based on their ethnicity or their pretended ethnicity? To what extent does the extreme left dominate hiring at CU, so that highly qualified applicants for teaching positions are rejected, whereas politically correct hacks get the job? How often do other CU teachers act like Churchill allegedly did by punishing students for expressing opinions contrary to the teacher? Has CU protected other teachers who have been credibly accused of making violent threats and/or perpetrating on- and off-campus violent crimes against people who disagree with them?

A news article in the same paper suggests that Mr Churchill's tenure, a special case of defeat, is nontheless an orphan.

University of Colorado regents want to know how ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill was granted tenure without going through the usual process.

The people who made the decision have either gone to other positions or crossed the final summit. But their chickens have come home to roost. Calderon's Call takes a rather polemical look at how those chickens hatched and at their nesting instincts.

The Churchill affair neither is one of academic freedom versus an intolerant thought police nor a problem of tenure. It is the predictable outcome of a decades-long higher educational policy of creating, promoting, and tolerating Leftist-oriented niche programs that serve as outlets to every aggrieved, victim-hood-pleading, second-rate, so-called advocacy-scholar and activist “revolutionary”, crackpots who grow like barnacles on the flagship institutions ostensibly committed to higher learning. The best that can come out of the Churchill Affair is a thorough reevaluation of these niche programs by the consumers of higher education, namely students, parents, responsible scholars, trustees, provosts, alumni and alumnae, and only as a last resort, state legislators who of course funnel billions in taxpayers’ dollars to support
higher education in their respective states.

Tell us how you really feel. But leave aside that "consumer" talk, and learn the Principle of Derived Demand. Naw, better to rant.

Niche programs today run the gamut of aggrieved victimology groups and offer victim-hood courses in departments like African-American Studies; “Black” Studies; Chicano and Chicana Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Studies; Hispanic Studies; Middle-Eastern Studies; Multi-cultural Studies; Native American Studies; Asian-Pacific Islander Studies; “Queer” Studies; Transgender Studies; and of course the venerable standby, Women’s Studies (alternately spelled “Womyn’s” Studies by the more radical, man-hating lesbian-feminist separatists). A collective of mediocrities and hardcore ideologues has gained access to full employment largely at taxpayer-funded state colleges and universities, mediocrities that otherwise would have ended up selling books at radical “cooperative bookstores” or herbal tea potions and organic food at any number of communes scattered across the United States.

Face it, these are departments in the Division of Cooling Out The Mark. Their presence gives the academy a bad name, and their graduates can contemplate their oppression while asking "want fries with that," while the serious work on cultural bias or discrimination or power can be done by the departments of long-standing. The Denver Post's Ed Quillen has a modest proposal: turf 'em out.

There's also the "Ward Churchill Problem," which could quickly be solved by eliminating the entire ethnic studies department. It's hardly a necessity, since the university managed to operate until 1993 without one.

It's misnamed, because its focus is on "Afro-American studies, American Indian studies, Asian American studies, Chicano/a studies," where "students gain substantive knowledge and expertise in one of the four specific racial/ethnic fields," according to the department's website.

Other ethic groups in Colorado history - the Irish miners of Leadville, the Italian quarry workers of Salida, the Slavs of the steel mills in Pueblo, the Jews trying to farm in 1882 near Cotopaxi, the Volgadeutsch of Weld County, the Balkan coal miners slain at Ludlow, to name a few - are apparently unworthy of study, or even mention, at CU these days.

So the ethnic studies department does not bother to study more than four ethnic groups, which is made clear in a required class, Foundations of Ethnic Studies. The catalog says this course "applies analytic perspectives, especially racial formation theory, to the experiences of the four principle (sic) peoples of color in the United States."

He'd like to toss the football program, too.

For starters, the new president should eliminate the football program. Without it, there aren't recruiting scandals that involve minors, alcohol, sex and drugs. Without football, no football-camp cash boxes. No football, no players subject to rape allegations. No football, no assistant coaches to be accused of having sex with student trainers.

But doesn't a big-time university need a big-time football program? The University of Chicago enjoys a good reputation, and it hasn't fielded a football team since 1939.

Yes, and that's the same Chicago that inspired the line "champions of the West" in the most-overplayed tune in the least creative college band's repertoire, and the line used to be "run the ball around Chicago" in On! Wisconsin!, and Chicago has been competing, in football, in a lower division, for the last few years. (We build nukes underneath our grandstands!) But I digress. Perhaps, as this commenter to this post notes, the university ought not be a Club Med with a few more books and Power Points than the usual resort.

But if that university is to be neither a Club Med nor a grievance factory, what sort of destructive testing of destructive ideas will it engage in?