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Ward Churchill — When Affirmative Action Hits Rock Bottom

Paul Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, has written a timely piece for the Rocky Mountain News about how Ward Churchill represents the “rock bottom” of affirmative action:

The University of Colorado hired Churchill onto its faculty because he claimed to be an American Indian. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with research universities can glance at his résumé and state this with something close to complete confidence.

How else do you explain that a man with only a Master’s Degree from a questionable university (Sangamon State University) is tenured and made the head of a department at a serious research university? When that position is held by someone with a PhD at nearly every other university or college in America?

Campos doesn’t argue that Churchill didn’t have the right to make those remarks about the victims of the World Trade Center. Rather he just points out the myriad reasons that Churchill never should have been hired, or should now be fired:

Churchill thus represents the reductio ad absurdum of the contemporary university’s willingness to subordinate all other values to affirmative action. When such a grotesque fraud - a white man pretending to be an Indian, an intellectual charlatan spewing polemical garbage festooned with phony footnotes, a shameless demagogue fabricating imaginary historical incidents to justify his pathological hatreds, an apparent plagiarist who steals and distorts the work of real scholars - manages to scam his way into a full professorship at what is still a serious research university, we know the practice of affirmative action has hit rock bottom. Or at least we can hope so.

Bottom line: A bunch of tenured Professors, who supposedly operate in an environment that protects their ideas and freedoms of speech, were too cowardly to stand up against an obvious fraud. But now it’s too late, and the U of Colorado must sleep in the bed that they wet.

Posted by Robbie Cooper on Tuesday, February 15th, 2005 | Trackback |

7 Responses to “Ward Churchill — When Affirmative Action Hits Rock Bottom”

I hope some of Austin’s academic aristocrats are listening!

Keep up the good work!
T

Left by Travis Fell on February 15th, 2005 at 9:40 pm

I doubt it Travis. Do you remember this map?
Red Map

That little dot of blue in the middle of Texas? Yep. That would be Austin.

There’s more absurd, off-the-wall Liberalism running amok on our campus than there is at a Democratic happy hour hosted by Teddy Kennedy.

Left by Robbie on February 16th, 2005 at 11:03 am

Must…not…respond….damn…I keep this up and I’m going to be called political….yeeck!

Define questionable in the context of SSU. It’s a small university, now called U of Illinois-Springfield, that specializes in graduate-level programs. Until like ‘95 when the U of I gobbled it up, it was solely a senior college, offering 3000 and 4000 level classes (or above) only (a Bachelor’s involved transferring credits in from elsewhere).

Too much SSU history I know….Sorry. Grew up in Springfield, Dad received his MPA from SSU. It ain’t UT-Austin or Harvard, but it ain’t the “Assemblies of God” college in Florida (which was granting credits to college athletes like they were on clearance) or U of Phoenix Online.

Such a person like Churchill working a CU however is such a fit, given their recent histories. I wonder if he ever played in Neuheisel’s NCAA pool.

Left by Tony Bender on February 16th, 2005 at 5:49 pm

you are a dumb ass

Left by Anonymous on February 19th, 2005 at 11:00 pm

And ‘anonymous’, you are a coward. Which probably also makes you a democrat.

But I’ll humor you: what part of my argument against Churchill do you refute? What about Ward Churchill are you prepared to stand behind? Publicly.

Left by Robbie on February 20th, 2005 at 6:20 pm

Define questionable in the context of SSU

Churchill’s critics have charged (and their charges have never been rebutted) that Churchill’s BA and MA from Sangamon State in Illinois entailed almost no course work and very little studying.

SSU was an alternative-education experiment before becoming U of I-Springfield.

From “Radical University” to Handmaiden of the Corporate State:

In 1970 Sangamon State University, the smallest of Illinois’ 12 state universities, was a different kind of place. Many students were not graded, for example, but received individualized evaluations instead. There were no large classes. No deans or department chairs–in fact, no departments. Interdisciplinary courses were the norm. Faculty were hired for their interest in teaching–without teaching assistants–and had no publish-or-perish requirement. SSU was designated “the public affairs university of Illinois” at a time when public affairs, for many of the faculty at least, meant opposing the war in Vietnam and devising alternatives to mainstream institutions. It was an upper-division institution designed for older students transferring in from community colleges and traditional four-year institutions less suited to their needs; the average age of undergraduates was over 30. Faculty and students who were around at the time describe those days with obvious affection.

In the interests of truth in advertising, though, SSU might more accurately have been deemed a university with at best radical potential and at worst radical pretensions.

Left by Robbie on February 22nd, 2005 at 4:06 pm

Just thought I would clarify a couple things. I’m a graduate of Sangamon State University (M.A. Psychology), and I have to say, it was a wonderful experience. I was privileged to be in one of the better clinical psychology programs in the midwest. There are a lot of misunderstandings about SSU. I personally was quite saddened to see it sucked into the University of Illinois system, because it lost some wonderful qualities. I don’t recall much of what is being charged these days. My coursework was not alternative. They were full blown courses taught by Ph.D.s. I did a very extensive thesis, which I had to defend. My thesis is now on file with the university. The only alternative component was the “Public Affairs Colloquia,” which required all students to take at least 8 hours from a list of socially relevant courses. I took one called “Issues on the Left,” which I found quite enlightening. There was a program which allowed students to design their own major, which apparently Churchill did. And it likely did not require a thesis because the entire program was writing and research intensive. I have a friend who designed a program called “Astro-Archeology.” He is now quite famous in the field, and for twenty years has been NASA’s only archeologist. I recently seen him interviewed on an episode of NOVA. So, regardless of what the uninformed are saying, I can attest that SSU was a wonderful place to go to college. It is now a very large modern university that has lost most of its earlier flavor. Too bad. For me they were the best of times…

Left by Bill Harmening on June 19th, 2005 at 8:32 pm

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