A sad look at a sick academic bubble.

[Jeffrey C. Dege]

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/goldblatt200502090753.asp

February 09, 2005, 7:53 a.m.
W. Churchill
A sad look at a sick academic bubble.

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.

--
Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's
supposed to do.
-- R. A. Heinlein