Marc Bousquet: The Churchill Case Goes to Trial

[Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of cultural studies and writing with new media at Santa Clara University. His book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has just been released by New York University Press with a foreword by Cary Nelson.]

Sometime in early 2009, the Denver District Court will begin to hear testimony in Ward Churchill’s lawsuit against the University of Colorado.

It will be a very different national political climate than the one in which Churchill’s reference to Hannah Arendt’s classic study of the banality of evil*, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) set in motion events that led to his termination on charges of “plagiarism” and “research misconduct.”

The processes of shared governance at the University of Colorado’s flagship campus will themselves be on trial. The result may raise questions about the integrity of those processes not just at UC, but at many other campuses with similar (or lesser) degrees of faculty participation in decision-making.

My own views** are consistent with those of the national American Civil Liberties Union, and Eric Cheyfitz, Cornell’s Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters.

Cheyfitz, who examined the investigating committee’s report and testified about it before a UC panel, concluded that the charges were “fabricated” and “fundamentally baseless,” and flow from “problems in the investigating committee’s own flawed scholarship.”

The “research misconduct” charge is that Churchill didn’t provide enough evidence relating to his account of the origins of a 19th century smallpox epidemic. Whether or not one agrees with Churchill’s account, I found in reading the investigators’ report that I had to share Cheyfitz’s opinion that “what is properly an academic debate about the relationship of Native peoples to United States history was turned into an indictment…. The research misconduct charges disappear when you start looking at them closely.” The use of the “research misconduct” charges to discredit Churchill should be particularly troubling to all of us–as Churchill supporters made clear by promptly filing “research misconduct” charges against the investigating committee, using the same standards for “misconduct” that they employed against him (and which future observers may well find more convincing!)

The “plagiarism” charges are 1) that the prolific Churchill cited articles that he had ghostwritten, 2) published a piece in which a co-author’s name was omitted by an editor and 3) copyedited a piece in which another person, unknown to him, had plagiarized. Of course there can be serious disagreement about these choices and the degree of personal responsibility that Churchill bears for them. But the plain fact is that neither the investigating committee or the appeals panel felt that they merit dismissal. And it’s fairly clear that neither committee was stacked in Churchill’s favor. Indeed, the constitution of the committees will likely represent a key element in the lawsuit....