The Ward Churchill thing has been flogged pretty hard, by me as much as anyone else. But there's one dimension I don't see discussed very much, namely the role of academicians in helping to create the controversy in the first place.

A few weeks ago I listened, via streaming audio, to an interview with Churchill on a Denver radio talk show. The host did a fairly good job of handling the interview. Churchill himself was fairly articulate except when called upon to explain the infamous "little Eichmanns" analogy. Then he suddenly got sort of quasi-articulate: articulate enough, I thought, that his supporters would find him lucid, but not so much as to deprive his opponents of ammunition. It seemed pretty much the way he liked it.

Toward the end of the broadcast, a Colorado state senator named Tom Wiens called in from the road to ask Churchill a few questions about his salary and teaching load: details he had planned to have his staff track down but if Churchill could offer them over the phone, what the heck. Senator Wiens did not exploit the chance to demagogue, posture or grandstand. He sounded to me like a conscientious public official intent on doing his job. I found that refreshing and sent him an email to say so.

To my surprise, a week later he actually wrote back to thank me. He offered some thoughts on the "free speech" aspect of the Churchill imbroglio, as opposed to all the other aspects that had yet to make much of an appearance: Churchill's Native American identity or lack thereof, his credentials, the charge of plagiarism, and so on. I will not quote from the email because he did not specifically give me leave to do so, and although I asked permission I never heard from him again. But as I began writing this post, I checked Senator Wiens' political web site and found that soon after he got a follow-up email from me--which I'll reprint in a moment--he joined the campaign to get Churchill dismissed.

"[C]hurchill's offensive comments are grounds for dismissal alone," states a press release from his office, "however Wiens also pointed out that the professor's statements show a lack of serious scholarship and questioned why a prestigious university such as CU would choose to hire someone of such questionable academic caliber and entrust him with our children's education. Just like any other state-paid job where competence is expected, Wiens is concerned that Colorado taxpayers aren't getting their money's worth in this case. In addition, this episode could cause CU's commitment to academic excellence to be called into question."

I think the senator is wrong about the offensive comments being grounds for dismissal. It doesn't fit my reading of CU's policies. But judging by the senator's email to me, the idea that "Colorado taxpayers aren't getting their money's worth" is where the rubber hit the road for him. The rest could well be just political posturing of the sort that politicians do.

Here's my reply to Senator Wiens. I have polished the style just slightly; otherwise it is word for word what I wrote:

Hi Tom (if I may),

I think you're on target.  The question is how the enforcement mechanism is handled.

The Ward Churchill thing has served as a wakeup call for a lot of people, not just among public officials and university administrators but also rank-and-file professors like myself.  I didn't run across Churchill's "roosting chickens" essay until a couple of weeks ago, but had I done so in September 2001 my most likely response, as a professional historian, would have been to ignore it.  Every profession has its own characteristic culture.  Physicians think, act, and dress a certain way.  So do lawyers.  So do clergy.  So do military officers.  And so do academics.

Confronted with a piece of shoddy scholarship, the response of most academics is simply to ignore it.  We don't discuss it, don't condemn it.  We  just evaluate it as unworthy of engagement.  Shoddy scholarship doesn't even get reviewed in academic journals, because space is at a premium and why expend space discussing a book or article that is egregiously sub-standard?  True, books and articles do get evaluated negatively, but these nearly always are books and articles that have met some sort of "quality threshold," if you will.  Typically they have been published by a university press or in a refereed journal, which means that at least a couple of experts have read and commented on the book or article in manuscript and said, yes, other historians--at least specialists in a given field--should read this.

It seems to me that a person occupying your office could legitimately pressure the historical profession to revisit this tendency to ignore shoddy scholarship, when shoddy scholarship attempts to gain a hearing by lobbing grenades like the "little Eichmanns" analogy.

Here is how you could do it.  And please forgive me if this sounds obvious or somehow condescending.  I was first exposed to the literature on professionalism and professionalization as an undergraduate, but it was in an unusual context--military professionalism--and I am not sure how common it is for educated people to receive systematic exposure to this literature. I may be telling you much that you already know.  If so, I apologize and ask for your patience.

Professions enjoy a privileged status in society because they serve as a reservoir of skilled talent which society cannot readily supply.  It takes a physician, for instance, to train a physician, and so we give the medical profession wide latitude in choosing those who will receive the chance to learn medicine, in determining how such people will be trained, and in deciding when they will be regarded as competent enough to practice.  We also give the medical profession wide latitude to police its own membership.  We as a society do this because we assume that the medical profession-- so long as it is socially responsible --will recruit, train, and police physicians better than we could do it ourselves.

Presumably, professional (i.e., academic) historians enjoy a privileged status in society according to a similar rationale.  If that profession fails to demonstrate social responsibility, however--if it ignores the Ward Churchills rather than demands that the Churchills produce competent scholarship--then I think that you and your fellow public officials have the obligation to insist that the profession meet its social responsibilities.  And if not, to serve notice that society will have to revisit the privileged status it accords academic historians.

I think that if UC were to fire Churchill for his essay it would be in violation of its own current policies.  If it fired him for "fraud," for not being a "real Indian," no one would be fooled.  We would all recognize that the real reason was, again, that "Roosting Chickens" essay.  Cardinal Richelieu once said that if handed two paragraphs written by any given man, Richelieu would find something in it that would hang him.  Similarly, most middle-aged Americans have something in their backgrounds such that, if you looked hard enough and then squeezed hard enough, would wreck their lives.  Witch hunts succeed because of this.

The better course would be to encourage the historical profession to do in the future what it failed to do in 2001, when Churchill first published the essay;  and again in 2004, when Churchill republished the essay in book form.  What we should have done goes something like this:

You call this an indictment of American foreign policy?  Such indictments are a dime a dozen.  Who on the left has not argued that 9/11 is a reaction to American foreign policy over the past 20-30 years?  Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, and Gore Vidal are only three names on the long list of people who have made this case and made it more eloquently, rigorously, and persuasively than you.

You might say that no one else compares the WTC "technocrats" to "little Eichmanns."  But you can't get your "little Eichmann" analogy to work, because you fail to explain clearly Eichmann's defense in his trial for war crimes that the Final Solution was bureaucratized, and that his responsibility was merely to round up and transport Jews.  His responsibilities ended at the Auschwitz gates.  Had you done so, your readers might have seen that, arguably,  the "technocrats" in the World Trade Center worked on financial deals that ultimately harmed people in the developing world and did so without realizing it, because as bureaucrats they were trained to think in terms of the job in front of them, not in terms of its larger consequences.  Of course, in that case your analogy would fail because Eichmann assuredly knew the entire design of the Final Solution.  He kept the minutes at the Wanssee Conference in January 1942.

Calling the terrorists "combat teams":  Nice try.  We need, for purposes of analysis, a vocabulary concerning terrorism that is less fraught with moralistic overtones.  But you cannot possibly be serious to frame the attack on the World Trade Center within the structure of strategic bombing under the laws and usages of war.  For one thing, that structure contemplates the use of force by state-level actors, and these were non-state actors.  More importantly, the structure arises out of just war doctrine, and I somehow doubt the hijackers understood and justified their acts within the framework of a Judeo-Christian ethic of war.

Three years have passed. You wrote the original essay the day after 9/11, when we could only guess at the hijackers' identity and had few specifics about those who died in the attack.  At this point, however, much new information has emerged by which you could test the ideas in your original essay and add specifics and nuance.  Have you revised the essay in order to incorporate the wealth of information on Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda?  Have you investigated what the firm of, say, Cantor Fitzgerald was actually doing the morning of 9/11?  Identified and developed a case study or studies to show how a specific trade deal created in the Twin Towers played out in a specific place and affected a specific group of people?  There is a fairly substantial literature on the adverse consequences of globalization, you know.  Have you  incorporated any of it into your scholarship?

I thought not.

-- That, Tom, is what we ought to have done.  We failed to do it, and we owe you an apology for that.  As professionals we are now necessarily obliged to defend Prof. Churchill's right to free speech, and as professionals we warn of the baneful effects that would fall upon controversial but sound, rigorous scholarship if Churchill were to be stripped of faculty status as well as his chairmanship of the ethnic studies department.  But as professionals we could and should have stopped this train before it ever left the gate.  We should have fixed this problem.  You should never have had to spend a moment of your time with it.  You have a right to insist that we clean up our act.  I won't mind a bit.  The next time I defend some controversial bit of scholarship, I don't want to feel my face redden when I do it.

Best,

Mark

The recent laments about the stepchild status of academic military history have spurred me toward a project I've had in the back of my mind for some time: an historiographical review of the field. Through the miracle of blogging, I'm not obliged to present this in linear order. Nevertheless, my point of departure occurs fairly early--almost fifty years ago in fact--when historians Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr. and Tyson Wilson squared off at a joint session of the American Historical Association and the American Military Institute (the forerunner of the Society for Military History). The session, entitled"Military History: Pro and Con," took place at the annual meeting of the AHA on December 30, 1956, somewhere in the bowels of the Hotel Sheraton-Jefferson in St. Louis, Missouri.

Thirty-seven year old Richard C. Brown served as chair. A professor at the State University of New York College For Teachers, Buffalo, he had recently produced a 61-page pamphlet, issued the Air University, entitled The Teaching of Military History in Colleges and Universities of the United States. He would eventually revise his 1951 University of Wisconsin doctoral dissertation into Social Attitudes of American Generals, 1898-1940 (Arno Press, 1979).

Ekirch, who passed away in February 2000, was in 1956 a forty-one professor at The American University in Washington, D.C., having studied at Columbia under the great intellectual-cultural historian Merle Curti. Ekirch was drafted during World War II but served out his enlistment in a camp for conscientious objectors. Lawrence S. Wittner, who wrote Ekirch's obituary for the AHA Perspectives, observed that Ekirch, far from home and compelled to perform hard labor," considered himself 'a political prisoner.' For the rest of his life, his personality and views were deeply marked by the experience."

At the time of the AHA/AMI session Ekirch had published three major works: The Idea of Progress in America, 1815-1860 (whose page proofs he corrected while in the camp for CO's), The Decline of American Liberalism (Longmans, Green, 1955) and The Civilian and the Military (Oxford University Press, 1956). A few years hence he would help found the Conference on Peace Research in History, nowadays called The Peace History Society.

Of Tyson Wilson I know much less, save that in 1956 he was on the faculty of the Virginia Military Institute and is today an Emeritus Professor of History with the rank of Colonel. At the time of the session he would have been four years beyond his B.S. from New York University; he would eventually receive an M.A. from Yale University in 1985.

The titles of the two presentations are suggestive:"Military History: A Civilian Caveat" (Ekirch) and"The Case for Military History and Research" (Wilson). Both were published by Military Affairs the following summer; I have supplied stable URLs to each, though you will need access to JSTOR in order to read them online. The traditional citations are:

Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.,"Military History: A Civilian Caveat," Military Affairs, vol. 21, no. 2 (Summer 1957), 49-54.

Tyson Wilson,"The Case for Military History and Research," Military Affairs, vol. 21, no. 2 (Summer 1957), 54-60.