May 28, 2007

Ward Churchill Should Be Fired, U. of Colorado President Says in Report to Regents

Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado, will recommend firing Ward Churchill, the ethnic-studies professor whose comments about victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks ignited a national controversy, the Daily Camera reported. The Boulder, Colo., newspaper obtained a copy of Mr. Brown’s 10-page report, which has not been officially released. According to the newspaper, Mr. Brown believes the controversial professor should be fired for a number of reasons, including “conduct which falls below the minimum standards of professional integrity.”

Mr. Brown told the newspaper that his report must still go back to the university’s Privilege and Tenure Committee for a last review before being sent back to him for final approval. That committee had recommended this month that Mr. Churchill should be suspended for a year but not dismissed, despite an investigative panel’s finding that he had committed research misconduct. The regents will make the final decision on the professor’s fate. —Charles Huckabee

Comments

1. Hi,
   I had the misfortune of reading the committee’s findings, and I was not at all impressed with the methodology. Since Ethnic Studies lacks any clear consensus regarding the appropriate styles and avenues of research pursued by its contributors, the committee superimposed its own criteria, serving as standards upon which Churchill’s work would be retroactively evaluated. Worse, the committee when elucidating the standards it was to impose, ad hoc, employed ostensible definitions, such as an ethnic studies scholar’s work must conform with rationality, as if rationality – and its preemptive understandings – is entirely a matter left adjudicated a priori.
   The one thing that I have learned from keeping a close eye of this sorted affair is the process that is deployed for getting rid of politically unpopular tenor faculty: First, make the President resign; next, appoint a political lackey as a temporary; then, instruct the lackey to pursue dismissal; select political cabal as investigatory committee; wait for predetermined determinations; finally, fire tenor faculty under pretenses that a credible review process had been executed.

   — Russell Cole    May 31, 06:15 PM    #

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