Oh, how frothy my ire becomes whenever the idiocy of Ward Churchill creeps back into the news. In an act of desperation wrapped in a publicity stunt masquerading as a heightened sense of social justice, Churchill is suing his previous employer, the University of Colorado, for wrongful termination.
Aside from his vitriolic attacks on the United States immediately following 9/11 (the we-had-it-coming kind of attacks), Katherine Mangu-Ward in the Wall Street Journal reports that Churchill "ghostwrote an essay and then cited it in his own work as third-party confirmation of his views."
His lawyers are arguing that if Churchill hadn't shot his mouth off after 9/11, then the pressure placed on the university from public outrage wouldn't have yielded what UC's president, Hank Brown, called Churchill's efforts to "falsify history and fabricate history." Such an argument reads like some inbred half-brother of the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree principle.
This principle - very briefly and very loosely - says that evidence discovered because of prior unlawful or unreasonable actions is not admissible. The outrage and subsequent investigation into Churchill's post-9/11 essay (where his infamous charge that the victims of the terrorist attacks were no better than Adolf Eichmann of Nazi Germany holocaust fame) should not have led to any other investigation.
An important principle in criminal law, but with respect to Churchill's publications, any reasonable adjudicator should say: tough.
He wrote inflammatory bile constructed from lies. The misfortunes in his life are the products of his own passive-aggressive stupidity - that is, blaming others with vehemence. The only true injustice here is how long it took to discover the disgusting farce he made of academic research procedures and principles - most glaringly, his suffocation of truth.
Academic publications must be peer reviewed, not just peer skimmed. If there was some dedication to diligence - and I'm speaking about the liberal arts - there just might be less radical lunacy rattling its empty wagon around the hallowed halls of academia. And not just diligence against the longhaired insanity of fake Native-Americans (like this "tenured Tonto" - to hark back to a Dennis Miller ad hominem to harmonize with mine), but against the reader-proof inanity of most modern criticism published by professors suffering from intellectual incest.
Leave a comment 0 Comments Write a letter to the editor
All letters to the editor must include a name, e-mail, daytime phone number and affiliation to Virginia Tech. Affiliation includes: year and major for students; position and department for faculty and staff; current city for alumni and parents.