A sad look at a sick academic bubble
Clay
W. Churchill
By Mark Goldblatt
The recent controversy over the writings of Ward Churchill, radical
activist, faux Indian, and tenured professor of ethnic studies at the
University of Colorado, raises a number of serious academic issues -
which, let me underscore, does not mean that Churchill himself is in
any way serious. On the contrary, Churchill is as unserious as anyone
ever paid to stand in front of a classroom, an intellectual
featherweight whose ideas are less politically scandalous than
buffoonishly wrongheaded. Case in point is his assertion that the
victims of the World Trade Center attack got what was coming to them:
"If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of
visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little
Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd
really be interested in hearing about it."
Churchill's own attempt to clarify what he meant by this is telling: "I
have never characterized all the September 11 victims as 'Nazis.' What
I said was that the 'technocrats of empire' working in the World Trade
Center were the equivalent of 'little Eichmanns.' Adolf Eichmann was
not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of
the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German
industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies."
To make sense of Churchill's clarification, a reader has to accept the
following premises: 1) the United States government is actively and
intentionally engaged in genocide; 2) the hijackers, contrary to their
own claims, were attempting to defend individual freedom rather than
advance a totalitarian spiritual regime; 3) the ideological agenda of
the hijackers represents the true aspirations of the people on whose
behalf they claim to act.
Each of these premises is false based on a preponderance of evidence.
But that understates the point; all three are so utterly false that
failure to recognize their falsehood, in effect, betrays a cognitive
disability. Yet I'd estimate ten percent of American college professors
- and I'm low-balling that figure - would accept them as probably
or at least partially true. (If you substitute "corporate capitalists"
for "the United States government" in the first premise - i.e.
"Corporate capitalists are actively and intentionally engaged in
genocide" - assent among college faculty probably rises to 25
percent.) These are credentialed adults who are initially hired to
instruct, and who are eventually tenured to profess...yet they're
professionally, stupendously, tenaciously, defiantly, demonstrably
wrong.
That is the gist of the problem.
If we take as axiomatic the principle that colleges exist in order to
pursue and disseminate the truth, it follows that no accredited
mathematics department would employ a teacher who denied, say, that
base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal; that no physics
department would employ a teacher who denied the force of gravity; that
no chemistry department would employ a teacher who denied that protons
and neutrons are found in the nuclei of atoms; that no biology
department would employ a teacher who denied that green plants convert
light energy into chemical energy by photosynthesis. The hard sciences,
in other words, are bound in their fidelity to truth not only by
traditional logic and empirical evidence but by a demand for coherence
within a framework of what is already known. Faculty in hard sciences
seek to push the envelope of knowledge, not to "deconstruct" it.
(Deconstruct v.t. To affect intellectual depth by teasing out secondary
and tertiary senses of a term until it belies its original meaning.) It
is exceedingly rare, therefore, to find a professor in a hard science
espousing irrational, unsupportable theories.
Not so in the social sciences. To be sure, no history department would,
in the current academic climate, employ a teacher who openly argued
that the Holocaust never happened. But this is a matter of political
expediency, not material certainty. On the contrary, many history
departments employ teachers steeped in postmodern thinking, who hold,
for example, that the perception of a reality existing independently of
thought and language is illusory, that "reality" is in fact a
linguistic construct of the phenomena of subjective experience which is
continually adjusted in response to a fluid social consensus. But if
there's no such thing as an independent reality, then there can be no
reality check. There's no test for truth. And that, my friends, is
Holocaust denial - one step removed. Postmodern thought has taken
root across the social sciences, spawning all manner of loopy
theoretical posturing in history, psychology, sociology, anthropology,
linguistics, political science, and even philosophy itself.
Still further down the epistemological food chain come literature and
art, pseudo-disciplines hoist on the ouija-board wonkery of aesthetic
judgment. The truth value of a work is gauged neither by correspondence
with an independent reality nor even, for the last quarter century, by
it coherence within a canonical framework; rather, truth value is a
function of whether the work pleases the teacher. Subjectivity,
therefore, rules. Literature and art departments often employ faculty
members whose theories are not just at variance with one another but
are mutually exclusive. It is not unusual, nowadays, for two students
at the same college to sign up for the same survey course the same
semester with two different professors and discover they're learning
nothing in common.
But the epistemological nadir of any university is found in the wacky
world of ethnic and gender studies: black studies, Africana studies,
Chicano studies, Latino studies, Puerto Rican studies, Middle Eastern
studies, Native American studies, women's studies, gay and lesbian
studies, et al. The suggestion that "studying" is involved in any of
these subjects is laughable; they are quasi-religious advocacy groups
whose curricula run the gamut from historical wish fulfillment (the
ancient Egyptians were black; the U.S. Constitution was derived from
the Iroquois Nation) to political axe grinding (the Israelis are
committing genocide against the Palestinians; the U.S. is committing
genocide against the people of Cuba) to gynocentric self-help
(reasoning from verifiable data is a tool of male domination, to which
the experiential impressions of women are a necessary antidote) to
circumstantial special pleading (Lincoln was gay because, well, he was
a nice guy; Hitler, not so nice, therefore not gay). Contesting the
status quo is the raison d'etre of these departments. No idea is beyond
the pale - except, of course, the suggestion that the status quo
might somehow be valid.
Which returns us to Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies,
University of Colorado. In one sense, he's like a thousand other
burnt-out refugees from the 1960s who avoided a full-time job long
enough to acquire multiple university degrees. Along the way, however,
he convinced lots of people that he was a Cherokee Indian -
apparently on the basis of an honorary tribal membership - and thus
tapped into the vast reservoir of white liberal guilt flowing through
the halls of academia. Most critically, he found outlets to publish
crypto-Marxist rants and thereby distinguished himself from the vast
majority of his invincibly ignorant peers. That publishing record, in
turn, allowed him to command not only his tenured professorship, but
activist committee posts and lucrative speaking engagements at campuses
nationwide.
So who published Ward Churchill?
Well, there's AK Press. Publisher's mission statement:
AK Press is a worker run book publisher and distributor organized
around anarchist principles. . . . Our goal is to make available
radical books and other materials, titles that are published by
independent presses, not the corporate giants, titles with which you
can make a positive change in the world.
Then there's South End Press. Publisher's mission statement:
Since our founding in 1977, we have tried to meet the needs of readers
who are exploring, or are already committed to, the politics of radical
social change. . . . In this way, we hope to give expression to a wide
diversity of democratic social movements and to provide an alternative
to the products of corporate publishing.
Finally, there's City Lights Books. Manuscript submission guidelines:
City Lights Books is a publisher of fiction, essays, memoirs,
translations, poetry, and books on social and political issues. We
publish a dozen new books a year and are committed to providing the
finest works of vanguard literature and oppositional politics.
In other words, Churchill hooked up with like-minded lefties, networked
himself into book contracts, parlayed these into academic prestige and
political name recognition - and thus a wholly unserious man who says
wholly unserious things wound up being taken very seriously. In a more
rational world, Churchill would be an amateur conspiracy theorist with
a chip on his shoulder, the type who spends an hour on hold with CSPAN
to spew 15 seconds of venom before Brian Lamb cuts him off.
In our world, Churchill is a cause célébre.
So what's to be done with him?
The fact that he has tenure must, I'm afraid, be taken into account.
Firing him, or forcing him to resign, might be morally satisfying but
would be a tactical error. It would confer martyr status on him, and it
would be interpreted by his students, and by Churchill himself, as
punishment for speaking the truth to power. Besides, the fault here
does not lie with Churchill; he's a symptom, not a disease. The fault
lies, generally, with the sick academic culture in which he has
thrived, and, specifically, with the administrative weasels at the
University of Colorado who have repeatedly rewarded his dubious
critical achievements. What should be done with Churchill, therefore,
is...nothing. His notoriety should stand as an ongoing monument to the
decay of intellectual standards in higher education, and his
professorship as an ongoing monument to the intellectual cowardice of
the school which hired and tenured him.
Thus, inadvertently, Ward Churchill might teach us all a lesson.
- Mark Goldblatt's novel, Africa Speaks, is a satire of black hip-hop
culture.
fairandbalancedhyco-limbaughfartdetector
>February 09, 2005, 7:53 a.m.
>W=2E Churchill
>
>By Mark Goldblatt
>
>The recent controversy over the writings of Ward Churchill, radical
>activist, faux Indian, and tenured professor of ethnic studies at the
>University of Colorado, raises a number of serious academic issues -
>which, let me underscore, does not mean that Churchill himself is in
>any way serious. On the contrary, Churchill is as unserious as anyone
>ever paid to stand in front of a classroom, an intellectual
>featherweight whose ideas are less politically scandalous than
>buffoonishly wrongheaded. Case in point is his assertion that the
>victims of the World Trade Center attack got what was coming to them:
he never said that
his argument was that under the standards the US uses to set its own
military targets, -- i.e., presence of command and control, despite
proximity to civilians, make it fair game -- the attack on 9-11 passed
muster, becasue of the prsence of CIA offices at the site
this is the argument the guy made
he did not "justify" the 9-11 attacks
>"If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of
>visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little
>Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd
>really be interested in hearing about it."
the little Eichmans referred tot he CIA and not ordinary people
>In our world, Churchill is a cause c=E9l=E9bre.
bval...@aol.com
ever paid to stand in front of a classroom, an intellectual
featherweight whose ideas are less politically scandalous than
buffoonishly wrongheaded. Case in point is his assertion that the
victims of the World Trade Center attack got what was coming to
them:>>>>
>>>he never said that>>>
That's EXACTLY what the lying sack of shit said. When called on what
he said, Churchill tried to backpeddle, to no avail.
Cheeks
A sad look at the goddam Noble Republicans and their
gestapo mentality and methods. All staunchly defended
by that little toady Bill Vallely.
You have no trouble with the right wing trying to shove
their particular style of "christian" belief down our
throats, Vallely Boy. Is that simply because you are
such a goddam hypocrite and liar?
--
MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
by George W. Bush
I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shacked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where
our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize Society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!
fairandbalancedhyco-limbaughfartdetector
wrote:
This ought to be called "Conservatism Disease," a major symptom of
which is to make up things someone says, and then make a big
who-struck-john about the stuff nobody said.