University of Colorado's
decision to fire Ward Churchill and the decision by Yale to not hire Juan Cole after publicly recruiting him, casts a chill on academic freedom.
While, the two cases are very different, as the details become blurred in the simulacrum of news, media and myth, it will create an environment a little less safe, especially for non-tenured faculty, and graduate students and this chips away not only at education in this country, but also at freedom of expression.
Ward Churchill's firing is a sad moment and a blow for academic freedom. Even sadder, is that, from what I've seen and in the absence of new information that exonerates him, Churchill is entirely to blame. (For what it is worth, his 9-11 essay horrified me, and I will fight to the end for his right to publish it and keep his job despite that essay. That is a basis of academic freedom. As soon as horrifying someone is grounds for dismissal, we've lost the foundation of academic freedom.)
Every semester, I bust at least one kid for plagiarism. And sometimes I'm 'nice' and only fail him/her on the assignment (if it is a paragraph or less, I am unlikely to fail for the entire course unless this is not the first incident). Some of them will claim they 'didn't know.' And it may be that some of them really didn't; I fail them anyway. I tell them they are 'lucky' that it happened now, because if it happened in the real world, well there are no second chances out there.
Academic honesty is the cornerstone of what we do. It is absolutely extraordinary that I would say "sure, use my
___, for free--all I ask is that you acknowledge it is mine" but that is the cornerstone of academic freedom--we absolutely must acknowledge people's ideas.
Now if he really did write things for his wife and another woman, which I doubt (so you know my bias--I think that there have been a lot of women who have written a lot of things for the men they loved and not gotten credit--see Brecht and Company for a classic example of this; it is less likely to happen in this day and age, but I seriously doubt someone would say 'sure honey I'll write this for you, but I'll plagiarize from it and then humiliate you to cover my back when I get caught'; of course there is collaboration among partners, but you don't just sit down and write something for somebody else), that too would be wrong. And there seems to be a pattern beyond those contested cases.
So from what I can tell, Ward Churchill is guilty of plagiarism, or at the very least "indifference to the proper attribution of scholarly work to its genuine author" pg 95.*
But there are parts of the report that really scare me because it seems to argue that failing to observe the difference 'between scholarship and polemic' is the basis of the fabrication charges and I question who can make that statement and what that precedent could lead to. The committee is very careful to define it as things where he made up evidence to back conclusions, but it is a precedent that is far broader than that. And the committee's implication that segregating his CV by 'referred' and 'unrefereed' articles seems a minimal way of looking at this issue. Who can look at work on global warming, or Victorian morals and say where the line between scholarship and polemic lies? Having done the referee process I know that good stuff gets shut out and bad stuff gets allowed in anyway. But Churchill did shoddy work and he is creating a controversy that would not have happened if he had behaved in a more ethical way.
That doesn't mean the attacks weren't politically motivated. It doesn't mean that he wasn't put under a microscope for political payback. But if you would expel a student for doing something, you should be able to fire a teacher for doing it. And the scariest thing of all is that it doesn't mean that it won't have a chilling effect on other people, which the representative from the committee and the report, page 4 both mention.
Yale choosing not to hire Juan Cole is complicated on several levels, and I expect there were two elements working in conjunction. I don't know the political decisions, and I haven't seen anyone convince me that they really know what happened. But many people believe it was politically motivated: The Jewish Week speculates that
Cole has attracted a visibility that has made him a favorite target of several conservative commentators. When Cole's potential hiring became publicly known, several of his detractors, including the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin and Washington Times columnist Joel Mowbray, took various steps to protest the decision. They wrote op-ed pieces in various publications and Mowbray went as far as to send a letter to a dozen of Yale's major donors, many of whom are Jewish, urging them to call the university and protest Cole's hiring.
As Cole rightly notes, "the concerted press campaign by neoconservatives against me, which was a form of lobbying the higher administration, was inappropriate and a threat to academic integrity."
But I don't think that is entirely what is going on here. When Cornell West seemed too controversial for Harvard, Princeton delighted in taking him in. Edward Said easily found an academic home that let him do whatever he wanted. And in all honesty, one of the elite schools will probably hire Cole soon because high profile, slightly controversial appointments always bring a certain stature to the institution: "Oh, Yale was too scared to hire him, but..."
The unmentioned issue here is Old Media versus New Media. Juan Cole has not published any books for four years and he's 'only' published three books that he authored (although he has edited and/or translated much more). However, Cole's influence extends far, far beyond books! He is reaching probably at least a hundred thousand people through blogs, and I expect that the senior appointments committee may have been more traditional in its make-up and really viewed only referred journals and academic books as worthy of consideration for appointment. (Based on total speculation and conjecture and no knowledge whatsoever of that committee but knowledge of committees and academia, I wouldn't be surprised if Cole's blogging hurt him--if people were reluctant to set a precedent, which brings us back to University of Colorado's "refereed" versus "unrefereed" comment.)
However, these two issues taken together will place a damper on academic freedom and, sooner or later, the blogs needs to crash the gates of the universities. Not everyone will take the appropriate lesson from Ward Churchill's saga and the Juan Cole debacle will scare many people.
The hardest battles for academic freedom are not being fought by the Juan Coles--they are fought by the Joe and Jane Schmos, who don't have tenure and are working at no name schools. And the current climate is driving people out and scaring people from going in and it will affect all the education in the country, the freedom to think and the commitment that we, as a country, have to the pursuit of truth.
*The Churchill PDF doesn't number its first page--I went with the number in the PDF reader, rather than the printed numbers, which are one page less.