Of Mice, Men, and Ward Churchill
Today, controversial academic Ward Churchill was vindicated in court. A jury of his peers came to the conclusion that he was improperly fired from his position at the University of Colorado based on his political positions. Those positions are extremely controversial with large segments of the American public and have been critiqued rather extensively on all sides.
I’m going to ask you, the reader of this blog, to do two things:
1) I’m going to ask you to read the essay that Ward Churchill is most infamous for.
Link:
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html
2) I’m going to ask you to consider whether or not Ward Churchill deserved to be fired for those positions because that is what the jury found today: that Churchill was fired for holding controversial political opinions that he expressed in that essay.
First, I would like to state that I don’t agree with Ward Churchill’s methodology in his essay. For an academic, this paper reads more like a polemical editorial than an academic paper. Churchill himself states, that the essay was a ”first take” that “read more a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack than a finished piece on the topic.” Despite that attempt to disclaimer his work and insulate it from serious critique or academic scrutiny, it is clear to me that his essay shouldn’t have been released without holding it to higher academic standards, ESPECIALLY given the controversial nature of his arguments. He had to have known it would have an explosive and polarizing effect. In fact, that seems to be one of the primary purposes of such “shock” essays.
Media that is designed to be shocking (whether art or essay) is designed to jump start dialogue in hopes of moving things in a positive, self-critical, and analytical direction. The problem with polemical essays is that they often derail meaningful critiques and analysis because they arouse the passions of those that read them. In many cases, the harm that is done to the dialogue is greater than the gains because the aroused passions of the hoi polloi are irrational and not easily corralled by reason, calm words, or explanations.
Like cattle, most people are quick to stampede and even quicker to pick up pitchforks and torches when provoked in such a deliberately polarizing manner. The only exceptions to this rule seem to be people with a naturally virtuous temperament, people that have obtained wisdom and life experience through their lives (which tends to cool their reactive tendencies) or people that have self-control from a lifetime of controlled academic inquiry and discourse. All of those groups combined seem to represent the minority of people, though and even those groups have personal exceptions to their normal inclinations of restraint and virtue if the issue is close enough to their hearts to evoke their stronger feelings.
Ward Churchill should understand this as an academic and a human being and thus, should have tempered his polemical tone with a heftier dose of academic rigor. After all, it isn’t physically healthy to kick a bull in the testicles, right? The same principle applies here. One doesn’t promote intellectual health and academic discourse by provoking them to the point of seeing red! In Churchill’s defense, the essay he wrote was later followed by a published book that might be more rigorous. However, the essay was clearly lacking academic rigor and as a representative of the University of Colorado, he put it into the public domain.
Another problem with the essay is the fact that It is filled with ad hominem attacks and is also has unsupported assertions that are rather central to the argument he is making.
For example, Churchill states, “Nor were they [the 9/11 terrorists] ‘fanatics’ devoted to ‘Islamic fundamentalism’”
He only supports this by vaguely alluding to “FBI’s investigative reports on the combat teams’ activities”. That is pretty ironic considering the fact that Churchill later claims that the FBI is “a carnival of clowns where its ‘domestic security responsibilities’ are concerned.”
Another key assertion Churchill makes is that “ Had it not been for these evils [active acts of aggression perpetrated by the U.S Government that Churchill cites] the counterattacks of September 11 would never have occurred.”
That assertion also goes completely unsupported and in fact, is inherently unable to be proven or disproven objectively. While I’m not entirely convinced Churchill is entirely wrong on this position, I’m definitely not convinced of his correctness either. At the end of the day, I’m really not convinced that a person like Bin Laden or his followers are primarily concerned with justice or the value-issues that are involved. I’m not willing to assert that they hold no values or lack any sort of value-based framework (however different that might be from Western conceptions of such things) either. The terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks obviously aren’t against using violence and they obviously do so in the name of Islam (an ideology).
However, I’m really not convinced that the terrorists were acting primarily on behalf of Islamic values (extremist or otherwise). In fact, I’m not convinced that they aren’t simply exploiting the principles they claim to be fighting for in order to justify their own inclinations to violence and mayhem. I’m also not convinced that the terrorist’s actions on September 11th weren’t motivated by their own desire for prestige, attention, and celebrity status in the Arab world (which does harbor legitimate anti-American sentiment). In short, I’m not convinced that they weren’t more like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (the Columbine High School killers) than the canonized and sanitized Malcolm X’s that Churchill would have us believe the terrorists were. Since there isn’t really a way to objectively prove that Bin Laden and his cronies weren’t simply attention-seeking sociopaths, the assertion that the absence of evil U.S foreign policies would be enough to keep us safe from terrorism should probably have been left out of the essay. After all, perfectly innocent people are targeted by serial killers or other such deranged people. Why is it logically impossible for a group of such folks to assemble for equally deranged purposes and seize upon legitimate grievances to justify their twisted actions and naturally sick inclinations?
I could point out other logical issues with the essay or other issues I have with it, but suffice to say, I think it is substantially lacking in academic rigor and I think it falls very flat in several areas.
Ultimately, I think that is rather unfortunate because the anger at the U.S government that Churchill feels is justified, righteous, and proper. The laundry list of immoral, coercive, degrading, and evil acts perpetrated by the United States government is quite long and widely documented by historians and Churchill does a nice job scratching the tip of the iceberg by citing numerous examples of such illegitimate and appalling behavior that the United States has perpetrated in the name of the American people. Unfortunately, he channels this legitimate and righteous anger in a very ineffective manner and dilutes legitimate arguments and positions with his poor methodology and tone.
I think Common Dreams’ Anthony Lappé really says it best with this quote here:
“Consider the professor’s twisted logic. First one has to ignore the fact that the main crime he accuses the U.S. of – the embargo of Iraq under Saddam which resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths – was an act of the U.S. government and was likely unpopular, as most limits on commerce are, with the financial community. Let’s grant him that the bankers are complicit in America’s global corporate domination. We can all agree on that. But where do you draw the line when it comes to doling out the professor’s brand of tough justice? What about the secretaries who serve coffee to the little Eichmanns? They keep the evil system caffeinated, should they die? What if you own stock? Does earning dividends on GE mean your apartment building should be leveled with you in it? What if you keep your money at Chase or Citibank? Buy stuff at Wal-Mart? Pay federal taxes? Or better yet, what if you work for the government? Churchill himself works for a state university. He takes a paycheck from an institution that in all likelihood does military research and is probably ten times more complicit in the actual machinery of war than any junior currency trader.
If Churchill’s intent was to merely challenge us – to get us to look in the mirror and ask if maybe we all have a little Eichmann in us, then I applaud him. In some ways, we all do – no matter how hard we try to buy recycled toilet paper or not to buy Air Jordans. As Americans, we are all complicit in varying degrees in an exploitative system. It’s the acknowledgment of my special responsibility as a privileged person on this planet that keeps me doing what I’m doing. But Churchill, no matter how he later tried to spin it, was clearly trying to do something more than ‘shock the yuppies.’ He was pinning a target on the backs of a very specific group of people, the ‘technocrats,’ and saying they deserved what they got that clear September morning. It was a vicious, sloppy polemic that he deserves to be called out on. To argue that a commodities trader (which many WTC victims were) deserves to pay with his life for buying pork bellies low and selling them high is simplistic, unprogressive, and I dare say, fascist – even if, as he later tried to argue, he was merely applying America’s standards back on itself.
It’s a shame to see such a great champion of the repressed as Ward Churchill succumb to such wrongheaded logic – the very logic that has led to the belief that certain groups of people could be annihilated for their perceived complicity in the acts of the larger group.”
(cited from this essay: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0204-32.htm )
Personally, I couldn’t agree more.
With that said, should Churchill have been fired from a public academic institution for expressing controversial essays through the medium of a poorly articulated essay?
I tend to think that no matter what Churchill’s views were, he should not have been fired for them, so long as he maintained proper academic standards when representing the University of Colorado. If he seriously wanted to argue that Barney the Dinosaur was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, he should be able to do that so long as he actually provides a reasoned and well-supported argument in favor of that. That includes proper academic citations and legitimate primary research. Academia has it’s own standards for such things and so long as Churchill abided by such standards, he should be free to say what he wants. After all, academic does tend to police itself through the peer-review and academic publishing process. However, the second he deviates from that, he should be subject to termination. The real question for me was whether or not this essay represents a piece of scholarly work or personal opinion vented in a public domain. Was this essay akin to this very political blog or was it more akin to a journal article? To the best of my knowledge, Churchill’s essay was self-published and not published in an academic journal. As such, that should exist outside of the University of Colorado’s jurisdiction and regulation so long as Churchill doesn’t conflate his own personal opinions with official university positions and opinions (which he did not).
What do you guys think? This would be an excellent time to use the new comment feature!
-Evan
