Petition drive to defend Ward Churchill wins modest support

A group of professors — many of them brought together somewhat ironically by David Horowitz — have joined forces to say that the officer’s motives do matter, and may matter more than the speeding. And they are organizing a petition drive, drawing support from some big-name academics, against Churchill’s dismissal. The group is called Teachers for a Democratic Society and its original members were all among those included in Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

The group (now only a subset of those Horowitz attacked and joined by many other professors) states in its petition that there are numerous problems with the way Churchill has been evaluated, including “an unreasonably broad and elastic definition of ‘research misconduct,’ a near-obsessive interest in dissecting a small number of paragraphs and footnotes from an otherwise ‘impressive’ and ‘unusually high volume’ of academic work, an analysis that virtually guaranteed the discovery of errors, misrepresentations, and inconsistencies even as it reaffirmed the validity of several ‘general points’ and a core of ‘historical truth’; and a failure to fully appreciate the ’scholar activist’ and ‘public intellectual’ roles” Churchill played.

As a result, the petition states that “the actions of the University of Colorado in this case constitute a serious threat to academic freedom” and suggest that “public controversy is dangerous and potentially lethal to the careers of those who engage it.” The petition concludes by saying that “for a variety of reasons that go well beyond the scholarship and politics of a particular individual, we urge the University of Colorado to reverse its decision to fire Professor Ward Churchill.”

Signatories include a mix of big name scholars (CUNY’s Stanley Aronowitz, Stanford’s Joel Beinin, NYU’s Andrew Ross); people who have been touched by the Churchill furor (Nancy Rabinowitz, who lost control of a center at Hamilton College when the center invited Churchill to speak); and others who have been involved in academic freedom disputes (Nicholas De Genova of Columbia who famously wished for “a million Mogadishus” and Timothy Shortell, who lost a chairmanship at Brooklyn College over his comments about religion).