View From a Height

Summers V. Churchill

Some comment has been made of the differing reactions by academia and faculty to the Lawrence Summers case and Ward Churchill's. Reader Eric Johnson, an attorney who's also a CU Law School alum, sent this off to the AAUP:

Does it not bother you at all when considerations of academic
freedom supercede any expectation of academic integrity? There is
absolutely no point in maintaining any program of higher education that
sacrifices rigorous scholarship in favor of advancing the mystical
imagination of a demagogue. If Ward Churchill's was a rare example of
academic malfeasance, one might be inclined to pardon the academy's
perfidious support of the unjustifiable. Unfortunately, Ward Churchill
is just the latest (and probably the dumbest) in a long line of
professorial charlatans.

By the way, where was the AAUP when Lawrence Summers was being
castigated for his measured and reasonable exercise of academic freedom?
Were the pleas for restraint muted in humble deference to the
ideological superiority of his attackers?

You are the only one who can be relied upon to protect your own
credibility. Honor and nuture what little you have left.

and got this rather snippy response from Ruth Flower of the AAUP:

We did talk about intervening on behalf of Summer's academic freedom; but no one was firing him or disciplining him, or threatening to kill him. People were just disagreeing with him. If that's all that was happening in Ward Churchill's case, there wouldn't be a problem, would there.

Leave aside for a moment the spectacle of a woman professor objecting to supposed sexual stereotyping by threatening to faint. I spoke to a CU professor about the two, and when I brought up Churchill, in very measured tones, I was assured that nobody else on campus agreed with him. When I brought up Summers, I got a slightly snappish, "Oh right, he said women can't do math," which isn't at all what he said, and if she could do math, she would know that.

Still, there's a lot to unpack here. Johnson points out that she didn't address at all the questions of Churchill's blatant dishonesty. While their initial statement on the matter came when the only thing at issue was his politics, since then, enough has been uncovered for the AAUP to at least release a statement admitting that those would be ligitimate grounds for dismissal. They could add all the "due process" and "if proven" clauses they wanted.

Moreover, one of the tenets that the AAUP has agreed to is that professors shouldn't introduce extraneous, irrelevant political material into their classrooms. Given the nature of Ethnic Studies, I suppose they'd claim that the orbit of the moon was relevant, but any sensible reading of that clause would put Churchill well over the line.

I do think that the whole death threats thing is a little overblown. Churchill himself has never complained about them, at least in part because his students were making them up. But really, professors have been saying stupid things for decades, and truly outrageous things since 9/11, and the only ones getting killed are by the Islamofascists.

Remember that Churchill and Summers were both administrators, and Churchill has had to give up his administrative position. In that sense, academic is being consistent. However, it's obvious where their heart is.

Other than that, there seems to be an assumption that tenured professors can humiliate and embarass their universities with abandon, all the while commanding $95,000 salaries, and trading on the names of those very universities to get book deals and speaking engagements. I'm sorry, I simply don't see where academic freedom plays a role in destroying the institutions that nurture you.