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Churchill verdict and context
Reactions to the University of Colorado's report finding ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill guilty of academic misconduct are a fascinating window into some of the defining schisms of contemporary American culture, particularly when it comes to debates about higher education. Despite a report lodging over 100 pages' worth of carefully amassed evidence documenting Churchill's wilfully fraudulent scholarly practices, there are still those who argue that he is the victim of a right-wing witch hunt, and there are even those who would argue that the report--and the discipline that will follow it--mark a blow against academic freedom.
A telling sampling of such perspectives is on display in the comments section to InsideHigherEd.com's coverage, which notes that two of Churchill's investigators are uneasy about punishing him severely because doing so might "have an adverse effect on other scholars' ability to conduct their research with due freedom" and in which various commenters argue that "he is in the trouble he's in because conservative media and knee-jerk right wing politicans did not appreciate his comments about the victims of the 9/11 attacks," that "the 'trial' of Ward Churchill [is] a blatant witch hunt" run by a "kangaroo court," and that we should all "leave aside [our] feelings about Churchill for a moment and understand this for what it is and for what it portends for academic freedom." It speaks to the quality of InsideHigherEd.com's forum that there is plenty of robust debate surrounding these positions.
Meanwhile, Eugene Volokh takes on both the question of whether there is a constitutional problem with the manner in which Churchill's protected speech led to his being investigated (Volokh says there isn't) and the question of what the Churchill verdict--which centers entirely on Churchill's published scholarship--means for pedagogy: "How can his future students be confident that things he says in class are accurate? (Yes, we try to instill skepticism in our students, but they still rightly expect that they can count on our factual assertions, rather than double-checking every word.) How can his colleagues, and Colorado taxpayers, be confident that his students are learning things accurately? ... It seems to me that keeping him on the faculty would be a substantial disservice to Colorado students, Colorado taxpayers, and the academic fields in which he works. I hope that in its sympathy for a colleague, and its desire to avoid hassle or even litigation, the University doesn't lose sight of that."
Though saying so will no doubt induce apoplectic fits in those who see Churchill as the victim of a right-wing witch hunt, one might readily extend Volokh's points to the broader questions of what is going on in American college classrooms, of how contemporary collegiate pedagogy is tied to the political goals of an overwhelmingly left-leaning faculty, and of what might be done to assess the situation--and manage any problems assessment reveals--while still respecting professors' expressive freedoms.
ACTA's new report seeks to pose just that problem--not by cherry-picking outrageous courses or by attacking individual professors, but by simply documenting in exhaustive detail the kinds of course offerings that are becoming increasingly representative of today's college curriculum. You can read a sampling of these course offerings here. They include:
--A University of Texas course called "American Dilemmas" that teaches that "problems in the economy and political system, social class and income inequality, racial/ethnic inequality, gender inequality and heterosexism" are "natural outgrowths of our existing social structure."
--A Vassar course called "Domestic Violence" that explores how "our culture covertly and overtly condones the abuse of women by their intimate partners."
--A Duke University course that "call[s] into question the dominant Eurocentric diffusionist model-what James Blaut calls the 'colonizer's model of the world'" by showing how "Europe built on powerful older civilizations, at least as advanced as and probably more so than Europe at that time." Assigned texts include Ward Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide.
--An anthropology course at Davidson College that requires students to produce a 15-20 minute skit on one of a select group of topics, including "Five Ways to demonize an ethnic minority," "More Ways than One to be White," and "More Segregation in Integration."
Ward Churchill's public utterances raised legitimate questions about the quality of his academic work. An investigation revealed that this work was indeed gravely flawed. Course descriptions such as those cited above likewise raise legitimate questions about what is happening in college classrooms, and about whether what goes on there bears more resemblance to indoctrination than education. Each description cited is the public utterance of the instructor; each description unapologetically announces the course's intention to deliver a political message. This is a problem. And instead of filibustering with accusations of witch hunts and intimations of the end of academic freedom, defenders of the academy should be putting their heads together to devise responsible ways to address the problems signalled by such course descriptions. If it really is the case that there is no legitimate institutional way to ensure that professors fulfill their professional obligation to teach rather than preach, then academe has an even bigger problem than the one posed by the course descriptions.
UPDATE 5/18: The report is now online.
Posted by acta online at May 17, 2006 03:32 AM
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Comments
Does the report you reference offer serious quantitative analysis that supports the claims that the type of courses describe are "increasing" within college curricula? Over what time period are they "increasing"? What percentage of the total courses offered do they constitute, and has that percentage changed over time? How many, if any, are requirements?
Does the report link to or collect the syllabi for the courses described above, or does the report just cherrypick the course catalog descriptions? If it's just the course catalog descriptions, why not reprint the entire description rather than selected sentences? Did the report investigate what was actually taught in these classrooms in any way?
Did the authors of the report investigate what is actually meant by some of these descriptions? For example, the description that mentions James Blaut's work: did the ACTA report look into what Blaut's argument actually is? That might give more insight into what the class is doing than simply noting that Churchill's work is assigned. (Blaut's book is part of a long-running and deeply scholarly debate about the explanation for European expansion after 1450; Blaut argues that this expansion was largely the consequence of causes exogenous to Europe itself, such as the structure of the world economy in 1300, the geographical relation of Western Europe to the Atlantic trade winds system, and so on.)
Posted by: Timothy Burke at May 17, 2006 09:10 AM
Tim,
The report does not do quantitative analysis; it does reprint entire course descriptions and, where relevant, it provides links to online syllabi. The report is clear about its own parameters and the limitations thereof; it's also quite careful about the manner in which it frames the problem and poses ways of addressing it. You should request a copy and see for yourself.
Posted by: Erin O'Connor at May 17, 2006 10:35 AM
I'll give ACTA a 10 on the Horowitz Chutzpah Scale for trying to capitalize on the release schedule of the Churchill investigation report with a paper on a topic that was entirely unrelated either to the substantive investigation or to Churchill's public remarks about 9/11—a paper that, as far as I can tell, isn't available publicly but is only having smidgens excerpted in this blog and on the ACTA site, so we can't tell anything about the quality of the research.
Erin, I hope at least you insisted on reading the entire thing before being willing to blog about it. And if you did, you should be able to answer Timothy's questions
Posted by: Sherman Dorn at May 17, 2006 10:36 AM
Sherman,
Of course I've read it. You should ask for a copy and read it too.
Posted by: Erin O'Connor at May 17, 2006 10:45 AM
I will be reading the whole thing as soon as I can (where can I request a copy, and might I ask why ACTA doesn't put their reports online?)
If it doesn't do quantitative analysis, why does the report, even in summary, use words like "increasing" or "abounds"? Surely these are quantitative claims.
Just to try out one: I looked over every single course synopsis for Spring 2006 in Duke's Department of History. History 75 is about 1.5% of the courses taught in a single semester. I can't see a single other synopsis which might raise concerns from the perspective of ACTA. So in this case, we're asked to be concerned about 1.5% of the courses offered in the Duke University Department of History. Sort of fails the proportionality test, doesn't it? That's especially once you look at the WHOLE course synopsis (not even the syllabus) as opposed to the selective quotation used in the ACTA press release: I'm not even clear how History 75 itself is transparently "political" in an egregious way, save for its assignment of Ward Churchill's book. (And of course, without the syllabus, we don't even know what was being done with the book: perhaps it was being set up as an example of problematic arguments.) I don't get the impression from the excerpt linked to here that the ACTA report has the faintest idea what Jim Blaut's book is or what it argues, only that it "sounds" political. The History 75 synopsis is more or less repeating Blaut's argument that the dominant position of the Chinese and South Asian economies in 12th and 13th Century world trade, which was strongly reinforced by the Mongol Empire in its brief existence, was the single most important precondition of the emergence of European economic and political domination after 1550 or so. Is that some kind of wild-eyed "political" claim which breaks the bounds of academic professionalism? If the full ACTA report wants to argue that at length, I'll be very interested to see how that argument is made.
Posted by: Timothy Burke at May 17, 2006 10:47 AM
Why isn't it available online, or am I misreading the website?
Posted by: Sherman Dorn at May 17, 2006 10:48 AM
The press release gives you a number to call if you want more information about the report.
Posted by: Erin O'Connor at May 17, 2006 10:56 AM