Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Ward Churchill Is Still An Idiot

Via Pirate Ballerina, the long, rambling, accusatory response of Ward Churchill to his firing by the University of Colorado. The key segment of the response is at the end:

The interim vice chancellors strikingly duplicitous comportment over the past 16 months will not go unchallenged. I will file an appeal of the whole charade with the Faculty Senates Committee on Privilege and Tenure (P&T) within the next 10 days.

Far from putting the "final touches to the Churchill story," as fantasized on Denver editorial pages, the interim chancellors elaborate subterfuge has merely set the stage for the taxpayers to waste another quarter-million dollars while I go through the P&T process.

Hopefully, the members of P&T who review my case will display the sort of integrity conspicuously lacking in their predecessors on the investigative panel and the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct.

This could kill tenure for everybody. It seems that every faculty member who has reviewed Churchill's work has found it deplorable, though not all of them favored dismissal. I don't see why he thinks a new group of faculty members will come to a different conclusion: I don't see any faculty putting their reputations on the line for someone whose work was so shoddy.

Going to the P & T Committee of course contradicts what his lawyer said the other day, but perhaps Churchill wants to be vindicated by a group of scholars instead of a jury full of those "little Eichmanns" that so obsess him.

Thank you to Marathon Pundit for the tip.

UPDATE: Pirate Ballerina has removed the text of the Churchill statement due to its "questionable provenence," as outlined by some commenters at that site. I'm not sure I entirely follow their logic, but note the result. Here's a link to a news source, the Denver Post, that carried essentially the same statement.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

McKreck:

My reasoning for removing the text has as much to do with who Churchill gave the statement to (if he in fact wrote it, which I believe he did) as it did with any questionable provenance.

It does appear that the AP/Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News had the same source for the statement, since all versions were missing the same punctuation, while the try-works version was appropriately punctuated; in addition, the try-works version was the first posting on the web by at least an hour.

This leads me to suspect that Churchill wrote the statement for try-works to post--and I while I have no interest in promoting that blog, I have less interest in participating in the unattributed lifting of content from a website.

Hope that clears up the confusion.

JP

McKreck said...

JP,

I appreciate the explanation. I'm going to leave the post as it stands and let your explanation speak for itself. After reading the comments at your site I, perhaps wrongly, am less certain than you that the statement went exclusively to try-works.

Let me also say that I appreciate your original reporting on Ward Churchill and all of the work you've done at your site. If it had been a post originally at your site that was possiblly lifted then I would not be giving the Denver Post the benefit of the doubt.