Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Empire as Egalitarianism

Report of the Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder concerning Allegations of Academic Misconduct against Professor Ward Churchill
May 9, 2006

A. Context
Before addressing directly the contents of those allegations, the Investigative Committee ("Committee") notes its concern regarding the timing and, perhaps, the motives for the University’s decision to initiate these charges at this time. While the history of this matter is not before the Committee, it is well known that these charges were commenced only after Professor Churchill had published some highly controversial essays dealing with, among other things, the 9/11 tragedy. While not endorsing either the tone or the contents of those essays, the Committee reaffirms, as the University has already acknowledged, that Professor Churchill had a protected right to publish his views. In the Committee’s opinion, his right to do so was protected by both the First and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of free speech. The aggressive pursuit of knowledge cannot proceed unless scientists, social scientists, and other researchers are permitted - and indeed encouraged - to present alternative and sometimes heretical positions and to seek to defend them in the court of academic opinion. Thus, the fact that Professor Churchill published those controversial essays was not part of the charge to the Committee and played absolutely no role in its deliberations.

The Committee further notes that the Regents of the University of Colorado expressly recognize the importance of robust and free debate in arriving at truth in the governing documents of this institution. The Laws of the Regents of the University of Colorado characterize academic freedom as follows: "Academic freedom" is defined as the freedom to inquire, discover, publish and teach truth as the faculty member sees it, subject to no control or authority save the control and authority of the rational methods by which truth is established. Thus, in conformity with the Regents’ Laws, the Committee understands its role as limited to determining academic misconduct under scholarly norms of research and does not conceive itself as an ultimate arbiter of the truth or falsity of the claims made by Professor Churchill that sparked some of these charges. The Committee was careful to distinguish the question of "misconduct in research," which is addressed by the University of Colorado’s Administrative Policy Statement on Misconduct in Research and Authorship, from the issue of "truth" addressed by the Regents’ Laws’ definition of academic freedom. The Committee views the primary vehicle for achieving truth to be what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called the free marketplace of ideas, i.e., scholarly debate among those knowledgeable in the field. In this case, as noted in the next paragraph, some of the alleged charges brought against Professor Churchill had already produced published scholarly refutations before the University filed the present charges.

The Committee notes that this investigation was only commenced after, and perhaps in response to, the public attack on Professor Churchill for his controversial publications. Some of the allegations sent to the Committee related to events that apparently had been well known by scholars in the field, although perhaps not by responsible University personnel, for years before the University took any action whatsoever concerning them, and it did so only after the controversy over Professor Churchill’s essays became national news. For example, Professor John LaVelle had first published the claims that form the basis for Allegation A discussed below in a book review in 1996; he further elaborated on them in a larger article published in 1999. That allegation, therefore, dates back almost a decade before these charges were initiated. At least one other claim was brought to the attention of responsible University officials a decade ago, but the University, after preliminary investigation, decided to take no further action. Thus, the Committee is troubled by the origins of, and skeptical concerning the motives for, the current investigation. The Committee’s disquiet regarding the timing of these allegations is exacerbated by the fact that the formal complainant in the charges before us is the Interim Chancellor of the University, despite the express provision in the Laws of the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado that faculty members’ "efforts should not be subjected to direct or indirect pressures or interference from within the university, and the university will resist to the utmost such pressures or interference when exerted from without." ...

"Professor Churchill is one of the most widely read and influential writers in this country who deal with American Indian issues. His books are well known in Indian country as well as on college campuses. His academic publications are nearly all works of synthesis and re-interpretation, drawing upon studies by other scholars, not monographs describing new research based on primary sources. That approach is an appropriate and potentially valuable type of academic work. His writings, which generally include a strong historical component, cover a wide range of topics. Central themes are racism and what he sees as deliberate genocide against Indian people in the United States, but he has also written on how Indians have been presented in films, how Indian children and young people were affected by compulsory boarding schools run by the United States government, and how Indians have resisted ecological damage.

Professor Churchill’s work frequently challenges established narratives and conventional interpretations of previous and current events. Articulating an Indian perspective, he argues forcefully and bluntly on behalf of the positions he presents. He has been a major figure in promoting the argument that Indians have been the target of racist policies by the United States government and racist actions by individual whites over a period of nearly four hundred years, causing the deaths of countless indigenous peoples and the destruction of many aspects of their earlier cultures. The members of this Committee concur with that general assessment. We will nevertheless focus our report, as we were charged, upon seven specific allegations concerning how he has used evidence and other people’s writing to support his claims."


Report and Recommendations of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct Concerning Allegations of Research Misconduct by Professor Ward Churchill
June 13, 2006

"On May 9, 2006 the Investigative Committee issued its report. The Investigative Committee concluded, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Professor Churchill had committed research misconduct in the following forms:

* Falsification with regard to his description of the General Allotment Act of 1887, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, the 1614-1618 smallpox epidemic in New England, and the smallpox epidemic at Fort Clark in 1837-1840.

* Fabrication with regard to his description of the 1614-1618 smallpox epidemic in New England and the smallpox epidemic at Fort Clark.

* Plagiarism of Professor Fay Cohen and of a pamphlet by the Dam the Dams group.

* Failure to comply with established standards regarding author names on publications, as discussed most fully in the Investigative Committee’s description of work attributed to Rebecca Robbins but also with regard to his description of the General Allotment Act of 1887, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, and the smallpox epidemic at Fort Clark.

* Serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research, as discussed in his account of the smallpox epidemic at Fort Clark.

Moreover, the Investigative Committee concluded that the misconduct was serious, repeated, and deliberate.

On May 15, 2006, the SCRM accepted the report of the Investigative Committee and its findings. We are now completing our final duty: to provide the Provost and the Dean of Arts and Sciences with our recommendations regarding disciplinary actions ... "


COMMENTATOR'S NOTE: Documents quoted above from
http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/



COMMENTARY:

Whether such smooth talking gendarmes of populist justice in the end eventually do (by their own statements, reluctantly, and compelled by political pressure), or do not, succeed in tarring and feathering this particular outspoken professor by whatever means possible that serve to justify their scripted ends in the University of Colorado at Boulder's theatrical tribunal is emblematic of a troubling and shallow populist desire and demand for conformity of thought to the self-proclaimed crucible of the day - that the conquerors of the continent of the Americas (whose present advantage and privilege is, in fact, largely based upon their exploitation of less fortunate peoples of the world), are purely virtuous victims of undeserved tyranny and the subject of entirely baseless animosities.

That the conquerors themselves (that's us) would accuse one who asserts Native American heritage (like Churchill, most of us could not rigorously prove our own partial ethnic heritage, either) of twisting and playing around with "the facts" (relating to how the conquerors essentially destroyed the original peoples of this continent along with their culture, and with extreme prejudice), where our own legacy as the conquerors is one of near total dishonesty, deception, and denial to this day, rings with an extraordinary irony that would be laughable, if not for the fact that it remains painfully tragic to this day, as it should to any person possessing even a superficial knowledge of history.

Our present day society's evident willingness as a populace to selectively abandon it's most valuable constitutional principles of freedom of thought in public discourse says a lot about the nature of our hearts and minds, calling into question the substance and integrity of our intentions, acts, and omissions as society. A society obsessed with largely self-serving rationalizations.

Perhaps the next time we ponder just how our tax dollars are spent by government, we might be wise to examine the truly disturbing miltary-industrial complex and political machine for undefined war without end (ultimately upon ourselves, via the fear we favor) that our populace has dangerously equated with world peace and divined justice, as opposed to engaging in the ritual demonization of the thoughts of one professor who dares to express his personal outspoken opinions in a fearful and jingoistic society that purports itself to be a free one to be emulated by all, yet hurries to shield it own eyes and ears from open and unfettered public discourse.

War (better put, delusions of dominance as a panacea to fear), said by some to be the most powerful narcotic, far exceeds the ability of any fruit or flower to strip us of our humanity when we find ourselves making averments, by mere rhetorical declaration based upon a calculus of fear, that the pre-emptive initiation of destruction and death upon those we fear in the rhetorical name of peace constitutes a sound and moral choice for human beings to make, or constitutes a modus operandi identifiable by any other descriptor, save the term "empire".

History (it is sometimes said) is written by the winners. That our nation, regardless of the diversities of the manifested destinies which prevailed over this continents original peoples, was built upon a history of the physical and spiritual genocide of those original peoples and their thoughts and beliefs, by both church as well as state, and the exploitation and enslavement of original peoples from continents far and wide, might serve to give us pause, were it not for our own persistent amnesia regarding the past, as well as our own myopic world-view as seen from the top of the heap. Thus, the particularly (USA) American belief that all persons share common opportunities (and thus simply must try harder to succeed) belies the age-old and much darker realities surrounding human nature that we tacitly know inside, and which constitute a basis for our fears.

As one person's freedom throughout history has stood on the shoulders of another person's enslavement, when a society purports that "freedom" is a state of being that can be imposed by militant might upon another society's peoples, this is a claim that clearly only makes sense to the dominant populace, often embracing omnipotent delusions of compassion for the exploited.

Sadly, in the luxury of retrospective vision we often recognize the overt moral folly of feudal empires and totalitarian states of the past that saw fit to self-righteously and self-servingly endeavor to shove "objectivity" down the throats of other peoples - yet see fit to fancy ourselves and our own flocks as somehow charting a new and virtuous chapter in the annals of human nature as we attempt to rationalize our own privilege as in some manner divined by some special virtue beyond question and debate. Yet, there cannot be a conqueror(s) without the continued assent and willing assistance of those conquered, and their forced recognition of the conqueror as so entitled.

No market (of commercial goods, or of human ideas) can truly be called a free one when only dominant parties can play and profit. Dominance at the time present does not, and never has, constituted virtue - except for within the pages of the very historical accounts authored by the winners themselves. In the words of Thomas Gray, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise".

"If it is the winners who are presently visible,
it is the losers who are invisibly past."

"Evil is not the acquisition of power,
but the expression of power.
It is the forced recognition of a title -
and therein lies the contradiction of evil,
for recognition cannot be forced."

- James P. Carse

Shall we then endeavor to relegate those seen as heretical to our dogmas to invisibility, while seeing ourselves as possessing the clear light of wisdom residing in the center of objectivity?

If so, what is there, if any, genuine meaning in so speciously promoting such an alleged state of "freedom" to and for all humankind - and what price may we all, in the end, pay, should our greed and fear, our desires and our terrors, our myopia and self-serving amnesia, rule our hearts and minds as we proceed relentlessly in profoundly and permanently alienating the world around us.

A shared devolution of human value and dignity itself; war without end; peace without honor.