Professor writes poorly

History professor Peter "Work for Peace! Protect Academic Freedom! Defend Critical Thinking in the Academy!" Kirstein posts a picture of a big book to prove that Ward Churchill's speech is being suppressed. He also shows he doesn't know the meaning of the word "irony," misspells the word "trampled" and avers that CU president Hank Brown "should demonstrate some humility and frankly decency and cease his campaign of intellectual conformity and vilification." Smooth.

Saturday Night at the Radio!

Here's NBC Short Story: "Scuttlebutt" (16 May 1952).

And The Halls of Ivy: "15-Year-Old Genius is in Love With Victoria" (3 March 1950).

Weird Bird Friday

Weird Bird Friday Bonus!!

To make up for the fact that I completely missed Weird Bird Friday last week (I have a good excuse--really!), we have a very special Weird Bird Friday this week. It's a find-the-hidden-objects puzzle! Anyone who finds all the hidden objects--and all you have to do is write a comment saying "I found them!" (I'm very trusting)--wins a prize. And there may even be an additional prize for anyone who can guess what the prize is. (Hint: it's the same prize as for all other Weird Bird contests.)

Here it is:

In this big picture find the T-shirt, seashell, fish, hammer, sailing ship, artichoke, sombrero, umbrella, kite, pliers, and lollipop.

Can you find these Hidden Pictures?

Courtesy of Highlights for Children. Used without permission.

--Drunkawife

Gleanings

First time I haven't woken up to a Google alert telling me there was a Wardo story in over a week.

A letter in the News:

It just infuriates me to think that Mike Littwin (“Rock-star Churchill holds court before heading there,” July 26) and Bill Johnson (“Freedom of speech took a hit along with Churchill,” July 27) think that all Americans are stupid when they wrote their columns about Ward Churchill.What is wrong with the decision to finally clean up some of our colleges? Maybe both Littwin and Johnson are OK with fake and phony people teaching their kids, but some of us want credentials that are honest and have some integrity.

One of the comments is kind of funny:

Littwin is a left over from the 60's. He also hasnt bathed since the 60's. If you have ever had the displeasure of speaking to him in person. After gagging from his bad breath you will find that his opinions are truely his beliefs. Littwin lives in a fantasy world of a utopian concept where human reality does not exisit.

No, despite the orthography and grammar, I didn't write it.

Blogger not flag-blinded

Sahuma Minagahet at Voicing Indigeneity spares us:

Its a pretty scary development that militant idiots and right wing fanatics could get a fairly prestigous and tenured full professor fired. The tone of the 9/11 statement that started Churchill's controversy was harsh, but nonetheless true, from any perspective which isn't blinded by an American flag, or choking on the elixir of nationalism. I won't weigh in on my opinions here since I will get fired up, angry and end up typing for the next hour.

Update: Fairly prestigious?

Here, kitty

A Perspective piece in the Post guaranteed to rile the Back to the Earth First! crowd:

I don't like to buy organic food products, and avoid them at all cost. It is a principled decision reached through careful consideration of effects of organic production practices on animal welfare and the environment. I buy regular food, rather than organic, for the benefit of my family.

Me too, but then, as a child I ate lead paint, and still enjoy a bowl of chips in front of the TV now and then.

Writer Jackie Avner, besides living in Highlands Ranch as her bio-line says (and that's it), has a rather interesting job: she works for a company that's genetically engineering an allergy-free (for people) cat:

A biotechnology company intends to alter the genetic makeup of moggies [sorry, this is the BBC] to create the perfect pet for allergic cat lovers.

Transgenic Pets claims sufferers will soon be able to own a cat without fear of a runny nose or streaming eyes . . . .

"We're simply removing a non-essential protein from the cats and it shouldn't hurt the cats in any way," Jackie Avner of Transgenic Pets told the BBC. "The resulting cats will improve the medical health and the quality of life for millions of people."

For some reason the Post doesn't mention Avner's work. Mmmmmm, chips.

Update: Folks have worked themselves into dudgeons high and low in comments to the post. Worth reading, especially the veterinarian who works with food animals and notes that "organic-produced milk in general has more somatic cells (what some people have called pus) than non-organic-produced milk."

That's going to ruin my Lucky Charms Experience.

According to Avner, organic milk (now with more pus!) also costs 85 percent more than the regular low-pus variety.

Update II: Another commenter says Avner is employed by the free-marketeering Hudson Institute. This does not sound like something the Post would do. The Rocky, maybe, but not the Post.

Cowtown no more

AP: "Ozzy an outpatient in Denver":

Rocker Ozzy Osbourne was recovering today from a "minor outpatient procedure" in Denver, his management team confirmed.

Monday Night at the Radio!

Information Please, with the Yankees' "Lefty" Gomez and New York's "Li'l Flar" (as he was known in the South), Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia (3 October 1940).

Bonus Info Please! John Gunther and New York Times com-symp Jimmy, er, Walter Duranty (considerably less funny) (4 July 1941; that is, less than two weeks after Germany attacked Russia). Fascinating. [update: a couple of nasty skips, but it gets over them.]

Update: Death Be Not Proud. Sniff.

Update II: Robbie Benson as Johnny Gunther (sorry, couldn't find a pic of Johnny. Let's just say he was a sober-looking young man of the mid-1940s, not a teen idol.)

Prof. makes Capone analogy

John M. Ellis in Minding the Campus says: "Two cheers for Ward Churchill's dismissal":

Al Capone may have been jailed for tax evasion when his far more serious offense was racketeering, but he was certainly guilty as charged, and so is Ward Churchill. Yet in both cases the limited grounds [on which he was fired] had the effect of removing one man from the scene while leaving a larger systemic problem untouched. . . .

An individual was removed, but the larger problems of which he was a symptom remained. A department that thought this an acceptable standard for the professoriate will not be placed in receivership, a dean that let it happen on his watch will not be fired for dereliction of duty, a provost who did not ensure that he had appointed deans of adequate backbone will not be replaced, and so on up the line. The whole corrupted system will be left in place - just as it was when Al Capone's empire survived his jailing on a peripheral charge. That is why we can offer only two cheers for a dismissal that would have been fully justified on other and far more important grounds, grounds which would have amounted to an admission that Churchill was part of an infinitely larger and more serious problem than plagiarism. The university was lucky to be able to solve a problem it could not avoid (Churchill's presence on campus) without touching the wider one; the public was not so lucky.

Columnist makes Capone analogy! Gregory Rodriguez in the LA Times:

The University of Colorado's trial and punishment of Churchill, in other words, was a little like the federal government prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion and then calling its pursuit of gangsters complete. . . .

[T]he problem on campuses isn't rigorous Marxist materialists, as conservative stereotypes would have you believe [sic], but craven emotional warriors in the arena of identity politics.

Ethnic studies departments, such as Churchill's, may be the worst offenders. Created in the wake of the ethnic pride movement in the early 1970s, many simply never had the same kind of academic oversight as more established and prestigious
fields. . . . They earned their "psychic income" -- a phrase coined by former Gov. Jerry Brown -- trying to turn minority undergraduates into activists. (Meanwhile, the quality work on ethnicity was being done in more traditional disciplines.)

Update: PB notes that HE made the Capone analogy way back in June, 2005.

Update II: El President on the aboliton of tenure, Ward Churchill edition.

More firing fallout

Gary Witherspoon presents, in the sneering tone we've all learned to love from such folks, the pro-Churchill case at Inside Higher Ed. Nothing new here:

Research misconduct is in the eye of the beholder. Euroamerican teachers and scholars have taught and written for several centuries that Columbus discovered America. That is a more profound and easily provable case of research misconduct.

Commenter JBM fields this one:

The refusal to even admit the documented misconduct in this case only proves the need for outside intervention to effect academic reform. This piece reads like parody.

David Horowitz on Churchill's firing:

"He is an incompetent, dishonest embarrassment," he says bluntly. "They said that he plagiarized, that he had invented historical data. He had appropriated other people's work without attribution. He had lied about his Indian status in getting the job," says a disgusted Horowitz.

Horowitz questions the statement by the chairman of the regents that firing Churchill was not an easy decision to make. "Oh? To fire someone who has been shown to be dishonest and incompetent is not an easy decision to make? ...and by the way, defiant in his incompetence and dishonesty," says Horowitz.

The New York Post comes out in support of Churchill (kidding):

IT'S said that a "picture is worth a thousand words." For more than 25 years, conservative writers have been telling anyone who would listen that our higher education system was broken - that indoctrination was trumping education and our kids were throwing away their tuition dollars propping up vicious relics of the '60s and supporting universities that were increasingly repressive.

Enter Ward Churchill. One could not paint a more perfect picture of a spiteful, out-of-control leftist academic. Certainly his words were shocking - comparing the civilian victims of 9/11 to a Nazi leader was not only shockingly vicious, it was shockingly stupid.

The piece concludes, sensibly:

The academic left decries the "chilling effect" of Churchill's firing, but the only individuals who should feel "chilled" are those professors publicly spewing deranged invective at that same time that they conceal a professional past rife with fraud and abuse. In reality, there was no chilling effect in Churchill's case - only a cleansing effect as higher education scrubbed itself of the man who, more than anyone else, proved that something is very wrong with our universities.

Historian Deborah Lipstadt asks a question many have asked before: "[W]hy didn't anyone look at his credentials, articles, and claims (about Native American ancestry for example) before this whole thing blew up?"

Over at PB, Patti Jo King recounts Carole Standing Elk's nasty 1994 experience with Ward in detail:

We were headed for the door, when suddenly there was a scream that sounded like a wounded animal, and some crazy woman hit Carole from behind. Fern and I stopped to prevent Bertha from stumbling, but Carole faltered forward. Then this woman rushed around in front of us and started punching Carole in the face, screaming at the top of her lungs. . . .

We stood on the sidewalk in front of the club while Sergeant Madden cuffed the woman and put [her] in the back of the patrol car. Carole’s face was bleeding, her glasses damaged, and her wrist was broken, but while the officer was busy with the woman, Churchill came and stood in front of Carole. He is a very tall, big man, and he stooped over and got face to face with Carole, called her a filthy name I would never repeat, and spit in her face.

"The woman," of course, was Churchill's then-frau, M. Annette Jaimes. Where does he keep digging up such nasty pieces of work?

As for the "but-for" argument, jazz bassist Art Eckstein points out in comments at Inside Higher Ed:

At the risk of invoking Eurocentric standards of scholarship and the cult of objective facts, the complaints against Churchill began a FULL DECADE before 2004, and they came from the national American Indian Movement (not a right-wing organization). National AIM complained bitterly to the CU administration at that time that Churchill was (precisely) a fraud, for he was falsely claiming to be an Indian, when there was not the slightest evidence that he was one. The response of the then-Chancellor of CU is typical of how far CU at that time was prepared to go to defend Churchill: “Ethnicity at CU is self-defined.”

The cult of objective facts. That's a good 'un.

(Art Eckstein is actually a professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park.)

More: Morgan Liddick in the Summit Daily News (CO) supplies the Thought for the Day: "A vicious, abusive sociopath will create problems for his institution, given a soapbox and a guaranteed job."

Wonders of Denver

The Dragon Boat Festival! At Sloan Lake!



Left foreground, nose; center, dragon boat.



The end of a race. You have to snag the flag.

The Post tells how dragon boat racing began:

When Chinese poet Chu Yuan, a warrior and loyal aide to the old emperor, fell out with the new one, he is said to have drowned himself to save face. His followers wandered the Mi Lo River, banging the water with paddles to keep fish from eating their master's remains.

Dragon Boat Festival. Isn't that political correctness for you? Until just a few years ago it was called the "Human Chum Festival."


Cliché.



Lots of chum.

A demonstration of the ancient Chinese martial art of Electric Bugaloo.


It rained a couple of inches Friday evening, so it was like Woodstock.




See?
All kinds of Asian food stands, of course, but luckily I didn't have any money.

The far side of the lake was almost deserted.


Geese.



Duck, duck, goose, pelican (at extreme upper left, goose butt, buoy).



Another lost frisbee: Billy Bob just kept on across the lake and got a shish kebab.

It was okay.

Reminder

Carole Standing Elk and Patti Jo King in a (now-highlighted) comment at PB:

As two of the four older Indian women Churchill and his ex-wife, Professor M.A. Jaimes of San Francisco State University, assaulted in 1994 at the San Francisco Press Club, we are intimately familiar with the problems Churchill creates and leaves in his wake. While we hold CU ultimately responsible for licensing, nurturing, and supporting his plagiarism and deceit, we also understand how he misled them with skillful hucksterism. We would also like to remind the public that CU was contacted repeatedly about Churchill's fraudulent and volatile activities years before he made the "Little Eichmann's" comment.

CU turned a blind eye to his spurious, often violent activities toward Indians, on and off campus. They turned their back on the many complaints they received with typical Ivory Tower lack of respect for Indians - but also out of fear.

As he has demonstrated during this investigation, Churchill goes on the extreme attack when confronted. In California he and his former wife assaulted us - Indian women between the ages of 42 and 86, to try to stop us from distributing a statement denouncing his fraudulent activities in the Bay Area Indian Community.

Ward's always been a mite fractious. Read more . . .

Non-existent settlement declined

Ron Zappola conducted a truly dumb interview of Ward Churchill Saturday night. Sample question: "You're a guy I can look in the eye and ask, is there any way you'll take a settlement as we wait for this trial?"

Oh, Wart claims "several" scholars have already turned down offers from CU because of its investigation of him, and calls Hank Brown a "professional liar."

Does David Irving write for the Post?

The Rocky's Vince Carroll on the Post's strange minimization of Adolf Eichmann's role in the Holocaust:

On Tuesday, the Post explained Ward Churchill’s use of the term “little Eichmanns” as a “reference to Nazi figure Adolf Eichmann, who some historians have speculated wasn’t anti-Semitic but was an ambitious foot soldier for an evil cause.”

On Wednesday, the paper defined “little Eichmanns” as “mindless bureaucrats in a larger campaign like World War II war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who helped manage the logistics of the Nazis’ mass exterminations.”

And on Thursday, yet another article dubbed Eichmann “a World War II Nazi technocrat.”

But that isn't true, of course:

Far from being a foot soldier, Eichmann was chief of the Gestapo’s Jewish office in charge of implementing the annihilation of an entire people. He was one of the few privileged Nazi insiders asked to attend the Wannsee Conference in 1942, which formalized the extermination policy and where he functioned as confidante to the vicious Reinhard Heydrich, who chaired the proceedings.

Why id dat important, Vinnie?

So that we remain faithful to history, of course. But also so that we understand the meaning of “little Eichmanns.” If someone calls you that, he’s not equating you to a mindless foot soldier in an ugly cause. He’s comparing you to an architect of genocide.

You, maybe, but not the janitors in the towers. So shut up.

Update: I guess Carroll was being polite in not naming the reporter who wrote those stories, but I checked: good ol' Allison Sherry, who also characterized Teeny Trot Tom Mayer and School of Education powerhouse Margaret LeCompte as constituting "many" professors who were "crushed" by Churchill's firing.

She's a chutch-symp.

Ward, cornered

In comments over at PB, lawyer Paul Wolf clearly outlines the legal issues involved in the Churchill court case. Good stuff, but Wolf places due emphasis on the most important point (to me, anyway): Churchill will have to take the stand. And it won't be pretty:

Normally a lawyer examining a witness can only ask questions relevant to something at issue in the case. For example, it wouldn't be relevant to ask him about one of his wives who was found dead on the road in front of his house, in another unsolved mystery. The university did not fire him for that.

However, Churchill is guaranteed to be a bad witness. He will want to use the witness stand as a political platform to talk about racism, the war in Iraq, and whatever else. Every time he goes off track, he will have "opened the door" to those issues.

He's made so many public statements in his life, that if they go into those areas, Churchill will find himself explaining why he advocates "fragging" (soldiers murdering their superiors to protest war), why he claimed to be a Vietnam war commando when he was really a truck driver, what was his job at Soldier of Fortune Magazine, who is Lee Hill, and on and on and on.

And on.

If he doesn't remember then there is endless bizarre material to refresh his recollection. The skeletons in his closet may rival those of Jeff Dahmer. It will be like one of his interactions with the news media where he loses his temper and asks the reporter if he even knows how to spell "CIA". Yet unlike a news interview Churchill will not be able to run away nor will he be able to intimidate the person questioning him. He will be totally out of his element.

Why, poor Wart won't even be able to accuse opposing lawyers of pedophilia!* Or have a dimwit thug threaten their lives! He'll be lost!

*From the stand, anyway.

Friday Night at the Radio!

Quite a week. A good one, but a little hectic. Did you hear that Ward Churchill was fired?

Anyway, for the Major's assistant, how about an episode of I Was a Communist for the FBI. This is "Word Game" (11 March 1953).

And Pat Novak: For Hire: The ludicrously hard-boiled detective runs into "Sam Tolliver" (9 April 1949).

And finally Vic and Sade: "Uncle Fletcher's Easy Chair" (1 July 1941)

Newsweek interviews Churchill

Pointlessly. The man really needs to change the tape. He's starting to sound like Grandpa Simpson. Newsweek doesn't help, of course, asking hard-hitting questions like:

But how can you possibly compare the victims of 9/11 to that of a man shipping the gold fillings from murdered Jews?

Click, snap, creeeeeeaaaaakkkkkk:

Those (9/11 victims) who were engaged in the international-financial operations, which were the motive cause for U.S. policy … in full knowledge of what effects were on juvenile populations, sweatshops, and so forth—that’s the anchor here. Implement policy for profit, to maximize profit, to increase dividends, blah, blah, blah.

Blah, blah, blah.

A few other good 'uns:

[The Standing Committee on Research Misconduct] was as much of a jury of my peers as the (1950s) all-white juries in the southeastern states in regard to black defendants.

Blacks agree! Well, Shareef Aleem, maybe.

Newsweek: Will you stay in teaching?

I’ve been teaching all my life. And I guess you can say in a way that I’m engaged in teaching right now.

Sick bag! Sick bag! Sick baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, aaaaaaaaaaack! Bleeeeeeggggggghhhhhh.

Newsweek: Do you think you did anything wrong at all, or are you just a victim?

I’m not a victim. Never, ever call me a victim. OK? Don’t call me embattled either. I’m beginning to think that’s my first name (from its use in press reports).

Well, it's definitely not "professor" any more.

It’s ridiculous. I’m a target, not a victim. And you may notice, I don’t tend to roll over and get stepped on.

But you do tend to roll over and blow water out your nose like a hippo. Churchill does say one true thing:

I’m considered—rightly, wrongly or indifferent—at the forefront of this particular line of historical interpretations of indigenous understanding.

No question about it.

Because you asked for it . . .

A new feature, probably short-lived.

Caz demands:

"Show us his teeth!"

All right, Caz, here they are: Ward Churchill's teeth!

(via Instapunk, whose accompanying two-and-a-half-year-old piece is still funny.)

Slowly I turned . . .

CU professor of religious studies Ira Chernus strains to find a peg:

It's appropriate that Churchill was fired just after the release of the last Harry Potter book. Both generated huge media circuses, because they are both what the public always craves: stories full of colorful characters, some good and some evil, in a plot that creates nail-biting excitement because there must be a definite winner. There can be no compromise between good and evil. But no one knows which side will win until the very end.

Is Ward Churchill Harry Potter or is he Voldemort? That's what make it such a great media story. You can have it either way. The mainstream media don't really care.

But there's dope, er, hope!

My university can be a great one. But its administration and Regents have made the task a lot harder. They've let the university be turned into a media circus tent blown by the political winds, chasing a chimera of certainty more elusive than any wind [niiiiiice]. It may look like free speech, academic creativity, and the University of Colorado have been dealt a mortal blow. But remember, you've only read the first book.

Chernus, his bioline tells us, is author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Ideal and the forthcoming Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. Not that it's required for a professor of religion, but: how much you want to bet he doesn't believe in God?

Here come the letters! In the Colorado Springs Gazette:

We should not be afraid of people like Churchill in a free country. We might even say that rabble rousers, despite their frequent insults [hey, I'm a pedophile!], are refreshing and positively necessary contributors to honest and open debate. They force us to look at things from perspectives that are often outside the bounds of polite discussion. This is not a bad thing.

Dean somebody or other ominously remarks:

The CU Board of Regents has sent an important message: Watch what you say.

At the Post/News citizen-journalist site Yourshlub, "The Subversive Liberal" opines sensibly:

[Churchill's] supporters try to use examples of the criminal justice system. Pointing out that if evidence is obtained illegally it is tossed out. This wasn't a criminal investigation however. And his speech only made people look at his academic record more critically and they didn't have to look far to find enough evidence to prompt a serious investigation by the University. This flawed logic apparently gives Churchill a pass for all his unethical behavior because he has written something controversial and that's what prompted the University to scrutinize his work.

Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent tells of how he saw "firsthand an example of Churchill's research method, the most egregious contempt for fact or truth I've ever encountered." It concerns "bad-jacketing" in Churchill's account of the FBI and the Black Panthers, Agents of Repression:

I was particularly interested in the role of one Panther leader who oversaw the torture and murder of [fellow Panther] Alex Rackley. In my research I came across passing references to this Panther having served as a government agent. Tracing those references inevitably led to one source: Ward Churchill.

Specifically, the led to a passage in a book Churchill coauthored entitled Agents of Repression. Churchill wrote there that the Panther, "as it turned out, had been a paid FBI informer for a period of time never disclosed by Bureau." (The passage appears in a section titled, "Fabrication of Evidence," meaning fabrication by the FBI.)

That statement is footnoted. It refers to a paper written by late Panther leader Huey Newton that in fact presents no evidence that this Panther was a paid agent.

So I e-mailed Churchill to ask him the basis for the claim. He wrote back on Dec. 2, 2004.

"I've no official paper naming [the Panther] as an FBI operative. The case for his having been a provocateur is entirely circumstantial, but overwhelming," Churchill wrote.

That may sound like an admission of error. It wasn't.

Keep reading.

PB links to a piece by KC Johnson of the fine Durham-in-Wonderland blog on the Churchill case:

Churchill was hired through a "special opportunity" position, designed by the university to help "recruit and hire a more diverse faculty." He had an M.A. from little-known Sangamon State University and no Ph.D at all. As documents from the time noted, his qualifications included only two items: strong lobbying from Evelyn Hu-DeHart, the chair of the Ethnic Studies program, and the now-disputed fact that "Ward is a Native American," meaning his hire would contribute "to increasing the cultural diversity on campus."

In a 2006 report that she prepared for Williams College, she contended that as "the opportunity to hire [under-represented minority] candidates is only as good as the pool," elite institutions needs to change their pool. Ph.D. programs from Ivy League schools, or from institutions such as Stanford or Michigan, might not have enough "diverse" candidates to go around. As a result, they need to target less prestigious institutions, such as Churchill's Sangamon State . . . .

Sangamon State! Slowly I turned . . .

Update: Hu-DeHart! Hu-DeHart! Raaaaaaaaaahhhhhh, Hu-DeHart!

Update II: In the august pages of Counterpunch, Churchill's frau, the disgusting Natsu Saito, pretends to care about anything but her smoked-and-dried little self:

Some have said it's a bad day for academic freedom. . . .

For me, the bad days are when we sit by and let the attorney general intimidate us into a collective silence; when we allow torture, disappearances and arbitrary detentions to become routine; when we insist that this is a democracy, but refuse to accept any responsibility for the actions of the government. The sad days are when our kids are punished or humiliated in school for refusing to celebrate this country's genocidal history; when we get glimpses of other people's children being reduced to "collateral damage."

Nutso, the schtick is wearing very thin.

(via the man with the styrofoam peg-leg)