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Scott Jaschik,"The Ward Churchill Verdict," Inside Higher Ed, 16 May, reports the findings of a University of Colorado committee of inquiry into charges against Ward Churchill. Thanks to Professor Thomas Brown of Lamar University, here is the committee's report.* There will, undoubtedly, be further discussions of the committee's findings and recommendations.
*Update: Rather than posting something additional this morning, I'm taking time to read the UC committee's extensive report of its findings and recommendations. See also: Scott Smallwood,"Ward Churchill Conducted Research Misconduct, U. of Colorado Panel Finds," CHE, 17 May, which appends Churchill's response to the report; Jaschik,"Truth and Consequences, Inside Higher Ed, 17 May; and Eugene Volokh's initial reactions here (and scroll down).
At the same time, I want to call attention to"How Many Ward Churchills?" a report of The American Council of Trustees and Alumni. At acta online, Erin O'Connor has been posting excerpts from the report. The ACTA report was, apparently, timed to coincide with the release of the CU report on Ward Churchill and to take advantage of the publicity whirl that it would generate. It seems to me, however, that ACTA's title and methods are enormously irresponsible. Insofar as they are to be judged at all, and I think they should be, faculty members are assumed innocent until found guilty – found guilty by their peers and, then, only on a case by case basis. ACTA's claim that"Ward Churchills Abound" is highly irresponsible. You can dress David Horowitz in an academic gown and call him respectable, if you will. He's still a demagogue and I'm sorry to see ACTA, Erin, and the Phi Beta Cons trying to dignify his tactics.
I agree with you completely that temperamental conservatism rather than a political motive for faculty explains the lack of posting of syllabi--and yes, though I've never really looked, I doubt the situation is any different in fields other than History.
And I also agree completely that a report should seek out syllabi that aren't publicly available. Even then, however, I'm doubtful that lots of faculty would supply syllabi to ACTA, and certainly faculty wouldn't supply lecture notes or other items that would give a rich sense of what's being taught.
Duke's department is more pedagogically balanced than many History Departments, and so it doesn't surprise me that it wouldn't have a lot of courses ACTA doesn't like. My sense is that ACTA doesn't target Duke in the report, at least from what I've heard of it.
S J -
5/17/2006
Hello again,
I just thought I'd add that The Denver Post featured the Churchill story as the lead this morning.
I'm under the impression that writing a report includes doing research beyond clicking links.
So, breathtaking though it might seem, I'd suggest that the ACTA author (I'm waiting for my copy to come via fax) ought to have emailed the relevant professors for copies of their syllabi. Maybe even emailed the departments from which those courses come for a comprehensive selection of syllabi of all courses, so that some kind of quantifiable overview might be done. If they don't provide them, then you might be able to say something interesting about that, just as reporters can make something of a refusal to comment.
But even within the constraints of doing online work, I've already noticed that there is only ONE course synopsis in Spring 2006 at Duke in the Department of History that might inspire any comment at all, in my judgement, and I've already noted my doubts about that reading--even from the excerpt, I doubt that the person writing the ACTA report has even the faintest idea who Jim Blaut is or what Jim Blaut's arguments are. That's 1.5% of the courses taught by the Department of History at Duke in Spring 2006. So some numbers are possible even with limited, online evidence. Erin's already said that the report has no quantifiable evidence at all, and this might be why: if you start to quantify even crudely, you end up in a situation where the courses of concern aren't "increasing" or "common", but instead, "a miniscule proportion of the whole".
Now I do think you can raise some really powerful questions about why faculty don't put their syllabi online routinely. But the reluctance to do so isn't about "politics" in the crude way it is routinely characterized in these complaints: you're not likely to do any better looking for syllabi from economics departments, biology departments, linguistics departments and so on. Which leads me back to a favored point: the legitimate issues here have more to do with the relative tempermental conservatism and hostility to innovation among faculty of ALL political and intellectual persuasions, and less about a story of insidious leftists poisoning the vital fluids of the body politic.
Robert KC Johnson -
5/17/2006
As I said in the comment, I expect the ACTA report (which hasn't been fully released yet) to be mostly anecdotal, and I'm not defending it (and certainly not its title). I also didn't mean to suggest that assigning Ward Churchill for a class makes a professor a Ward Churchill. It does, however, raise some questions about the professor's judgment, just as the mandatory promotion of an activist group raises some questions about the Ohio State course.
I agree with you completely that, in the ideal world, any such report would contain "detailed investigations of the syllabi for such courses, some kind of look at what was actually taught, and some kind of quantifiable evidence." The problem is: how can an organization such as ACTA (or an individual blogger like me) obtain such evidence? Apart from UCLA (one reason I've written on it so frequently), I'm not aware of any major History Department, much less college, that requires all faculty to even put their entire syllabi online, much less provide information that would allow anyone from outside the department to see specific evidence of what was taught.
I think colleges should provide such evidence (one reason I post all my material, including lecture notes, online). But given current conditions, the choice seems to be between working with what's available or with nothing at all.
Timothy James Burke -
5/17/2006
I will read the full report with interest.
Because what we're seeing now IS just anecdotes. I can't tell so far how the ACTA report makes any quantitative claims at all, whether it's Ward Churchills "abounding" or the notion that the courses it describes are an "increasing" share of college curricula.
I'm not suprised you view it sympathetically, KC, since it pretty much follows your own methodology for criticizing other people's courses: cherrypicking the descriptions out of an online course catalog. That's arguably ok for a blog entry: it's not ok for a long report that apparently wants to make the claims that ACTA wants to make. If the full report doesn't include detailed investigations of the syllabi for such courses, some kind of look at what was actually taught, and some kind of quantifiable evidence, then it's not worth much in relation to the claims it wants to make.
I mean, take the Duke course described.
Let's look at the FULL description of History 75. It's part of a two-course sequence. It's taught by different faculty on a rotating basis.
The full synopsis reads:
"The core of this semester’s reading will focus on the formation of the early modern world as a result of trade, conquest and migrations. It will call into question the dominant Eurocentric diffusionist model—what James Blaut calls the ‘colonizer’s model of the world.’ The class will seek to build an alternative understanding showing that Europe built on powerful older civilizations, at least as advanced as and probably more so than Europe at that time. In supplanting them by force and conquest Europeans also gradually erased the memory of those cultural links and the criss-cross diffusion of innovations and ideas.
In questioning the notion of a European miracle, this course will also give those older Eurasian and original American cultures their place in the narrative of an alternative conception of the world, and bring to the fore the amnesia that has informed mainstream views of world history. This course will examine, inter alia, the development of ideologies that purported to explain European dominance and provided a framework for thinking about the world; the emergence of a Eurocentric philosophy and historiography that posited a unique combination of qualities that made European domination of the world unavoidable, necessary and even beneficial to those who were dominated by Europeans; and, last but not least, the development of various forms of cooptation and resistance to European hegemony and what it means for identities and identity politics today.
In the process, we will attempt to understand how the terms — the West and the Third World — emerged into everyday consciousness and use, and their role in shaping our understanding of the politico-economic and cultural realities of the colonial and post-colonial world."
The FULL list of readings is:
"James Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World; Tariq Ali, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree; Thomas C. Patterson, Inventing Western Civilization; Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History; plus selected chapters from: Michael Adas (ed.), Islamic and European Expansion; Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race; Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World; and Marcus Rediker & Peter Linebaugh, A Many-Headed Hydra:…the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic"
Now, I too think assigning Churchill is a stupid thing to do. I could spend my life looking at other people's syllabi and second-guessing some of their choices. But every single one of the other books assigned are mainstream, deeply scholarly works which do NOT reflect a single orthodox perspective.
In fact, the Churchill is so much the odd man out that I'd actually want to know how it's being used or taught. Maybe it's being held up as an example of the excesses of an identarian or pseudo-nationalist historical vision, even. Thornton's book on Africans in the Atlantic world is pretty strongly critical of a certain kind of Afrocentric vision of the slave trade and precolonial Africa, for example. Reddiker and Linebaugh underline the "hybridity" of the Atlantic world. Blaut's book, which the ACTA report evidently thinks is "Churchillian", is a careful work of scholarship well situated within very mainstream debates in world history about the underlying causes of European expansion.
It's not to say that I wouldn't have an argument with that class: it *does* have a slant of a sort. But it's a completely legitimate slant, as far as I can see from the synopsis, SAVE for the inclusion of Churchill. If I wanted to say more, I'd feel obliged to read the syllabus, contact the professor and maybe even try to get a sense of what actually happened in class. And again, if one weak choice for assigned work makes you a Ward Churchill, or even someone worth complaining about in a report about academia, then we're all screwed. That's a bizarre standard.
Robert KC Johnson -
5/17/2006
I agree that the title, while savvy p.r.-wise, is probably not defensible.
I have been glancing through some of the courses the report profiles, and there are troubling items. For instance, Duke's "Third World/West” assigns Churchill’s own A Little Matter of Genocide. You'd think after all the negative publicity about Churchill's scholarship, profs wouldn't be assigning his books. Ohio State's “Introduction to Women’s Studies” requires students to research an activist organization and then make a class presentation “arguing for student support of the issue(s) and activism.”
I suspect that the final report will contain lots of comparable examples. Critics can point out, correctly, that these are anecdotes--but troubling ones, nonetheless.
