Dr. Ward Churchill: Everyman
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Academia's everyman.
Does Ward Churchill even exist?
Dr., Native American, original artist, serious scholar, combat veteran,
highly recruited and sought-after academic, ex-Weatherman mentor: How
many - if any - of these seven faces of our real-life Dr. Lao are
true?
Professors outside the arts at major research universities are supposed
to have Ph.D.s. The phantom Ward Churchill does not. How he was hired,
promoted, and tenured without a doctorate is a mystery - the
equivalent of a high-school teacher credentialed with an AA degree, or
a medical doctor operating without an M.D.
Ward Churchill proclaimed that he is a Native American of various
tribal affiliations; he is not. Even his ridiculous costumes,
occasional threats, and puerile rants cannot disguise that fact.
He seems to be a pop artist of sorts, but his canvasses are not quite
his own either. Those of like political mind have praised his
scholarship, but much of what he writes seems derivative, or
misrepresents or outright plagiarizes others.
Churchill has spoken of the firsthand trauma of battle service as a
combat veteran, both as a paratrooper and as a sniper - among the
most hazardous of corps in the United States military. Once again,
there is no such evidence that he served in any capacity other than
what his official duties in a motor pool and as a projectionist
entailed.
Embarrassed officials claim Churchill was sought after by other
universities - so they had to reel in this trophy catch before he got
away - but no one can find any proof other than Churchill's own
mendacious claims.
No one knows what to make of his various arrests, boasts of
bomb-making, trip to Libya, angry and traumatized ex-wives, braggadocio
about petty vandalism, tales of phone threats, and the variety of other
sordid stories that surround this fabricated man. Churchill's
presence on campus is like the weaving driver who is pulled over by the
state police, who quickly find no license, registration, or insurance,
but plenty of warrants - and thus wonder how many other paroled
miscreants they've missed out there, one accident away from being a
public-relations nightmare.
So, again, does this Ward Churchill even exist?
Of course not: His faces are made up of whole cloth.
Yet instead of seeing Churchill as no man, it is better to envision him
as an academic everyman. In the alternate universe of the modern
campus, any collective imbalance of wealth, education, health,
happiness, or almost anything is explicable only in terms of deliberate
present discrimination and systematic past oppression.
Any other exegesis - cultural attitudes, individual preferences, bad
personal choices and behaviors, time off for child-rearing, bad luck
- is irrelevant. Indeed, to raise them is prima facie evidence of
one's own discrimination, intolerance, and racism, and can lead to
the academic guillotine. Ask Harvard president Larry Summers.
Instead, equality of result is to be mandated by a government that in
turn is to be instructed on how to do so by the university. Its cadres
of subsidized social scientists and humanists provide both the rigged
diagnosis and the lucrative therapy. Thus, to succeed on campus without
a degree or talent or much of anything, it is absolutely critical to be
an ideologue of the first order.
Churchill's rantings are full of leftist hyperbole, vicious Nazi
allusions, and calls for violence against the United States ("more
9/11s are necessary") and an end to America itself ("There's no
U.S. in America anymore"). Should Churchill have been such a vicious
court jester of the Right and slurred gays and minorities as he did the
victims of mass murder, he would have been fired long ago.
Rule 1: Profess to be as far left as possible, understanding that
extremism in the service of utopian virtue is no vice.
Most academics are retiring sorts. They enjoy the tranquility of the
campus and its isolation from the conundrum of society at large. But
like peaceful sheep grazing in green pastures, they are easy prey for
rapacious wolves. Professors are especially vulnerable to a bully and
showman like Churchill, whose record of both oral and written
intimidation leaves most disturbed, frightened, or at least convinced
to steer clear of this loose loud popgun when he goes off.
Note then his evocation of past bomb-making, his photo-ops in fatigues
with obligatory machine gun, and his occasional brushes with the law.
Rule 2: Among the nerds and dorks, act a little like a Brando, Che, or
James Dean, a wild spirit that gives off a spark of danger, who can at
a distance titillate Walter Mitty-like admirers and closer up scare off
the more sober censors.
Victimization is essential to academic man. Under the warped tenets
into which affirmative action has devolved and the existing protocols
of the blame industry, at first glance this put a pink heterosexual
American male like Churchill in a seemingly tough bind. What cover or
exemption, after all, is there when his scholarship, teaching, or
academic citizenship is found wanting?
That dilemma Churchill solved brilliantly when he endowed himself with
two new unimpeachable personas: the noble but victimized Native
American, and the half-noble but nevertheless traumatized Vietnam
veteran.
Both costumes were eerie in their cleverness: In Colorado, with its
Western heritage and abundance of Native Americans, the frontier past
is especially touchy and ripe for exploitation. And while it is harder
for a pale white man to simply declare himself one day black or
Hispanic, fraudulently identifying oneself as a quarter, eighth, or
sixteenth American Indian has been a roguish American pastime since the
onset of affirmative action. Even before that, 1950s Hollywood showed
how quite a lot of white people like Ward Churchill can indeed pass as
Indians, if they grow their hair long, get a beaded headband, and put
on some tassels and buckskins. But instead of the 1950s Kemosabe lingo,
by 2005, the script had evolved to add shades and scream about
massacres, genocide, and getting even.
If Malibu and Burbank actors playing braves and chiefs once taught
suburban Americans how to reinvent themselves as Nez Perce warriors, so
too Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Rambo reinvented the Vietnam
veteran as the misunderstood anti-hero. Under the changed protocols,
the once-slurred "war criminal" of the 1960s was in the '70s and
'80s reinvented as a sympathetic "victim" who was "used" by
the military-industrial complex.
Indeed, the only other persona more faked by American con artists than
the Native American is the tortured Vietnam War combat veteran -
especially on the campus, where military service is rare and first-hand
revelations of its horror are at a premium, lending a hard masculine
edge felt to be sometimes lacking in the world of Volvo fender-benders,
elbow-patched tweed, and seminar droning.
In short, Churchill's Indian and Vietnam-veteran pseudo-affiliations
- replete with long hair, camouflage, and sunglasses getup - were
worth at least a Ph.D. from Harvard.
Rule 3: Whenever possible, reinvent yourself as anything but a white,
straight American male.
The short resurrected career of Bill Ayers, the former 1960s terrorist,
showed how nostalgic the tenured class is for the barricades of the
1960s. The only thing that cut short Ayers's glitzy book tour in
autumn 2001 was the catastrophe of 9/11. That coincidence unfortunately
reminded even the most diehard SDS fans that terrorist killers and
bombers are hardly idealists but rather repulsive thugs and two-bit
murderers.
Although most American males at the plant and office nearing their 60s
are thinking of grandchildren, Social Security, paying off the
mortgage, and Vioxx and Viagra, a post-menopausal Churchill sensed the
romanticism of the 1960s that lingered among his colleagues and the
mystery the period connoted for a new generation of upscale,
rite-of-passage college students.
Recalcitrant, unbending, immobile, a throw-back to a better, more
idealistic age - this is the rock-cut image that the perpetual '60s
professor taps into. And Churchill, with his photo-studio manufactured
profile, pageboy locks, occasional fake Indian name, hip street lingo,
and sassy banter did it better than any we've seen in quite a while
- or at least well enough to wow the flabby university committees
that allowed him to cash in.
Rule 4. Don't worry about the anti-capitalist's embarrassing
six-figure salary, plush job, lifelong guaranteed employment, and
fondness for jet travel and hotels. Just keep acting like an ageless
denizen of the Woodstock nation, professing to be a timeless dagger
pointed at the heart of money-grubbing square America.
So who really is this strange creature who calls himself Keezjunnahbeh?
The Paris Hilton of the campus, a Peter Sellers-like fraud in his own
Being There, or a Tony Randall turning into all sorts of strange beasts
in Dr. Lao's circus? He is nobody in fact, but also everybody in
theory.
Perhaps it is best to think of Churchill as our aging portrait of an
academic Dorian Gray, in whom all the once-hallowed university's
vices and sins of the last half-century are now so deeply etched and
lined.
- Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at
the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is
victorhanson.com.