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WARD CHURCHILL, CONTROVERSIAL FORMER UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO PROFESSOR, DIES AT 78.

Churchill was a longtime professor of ethnic studies at CU Boulder. He became a nationally controversial figure in higher education after an essay he wrote that referred to some of the victims of the 9/11 attacks as “little Eichmanns,” a characterization that prompted widespread condemnation and made Churchill a national figure.

The controversy soon expanded beyond his writings about the 9/11 attacks.

In 2005, the University of Colorado launched a formal investigation into allegations that Churchill had plagiarized portions of other people’s work, misused sources and fabricated material. University officials also investigated allegations that he had misrepresented his American Indian ancestry.

Churchill was the subject of many a blogpost at Instapundit back in the day if you wish to scroll through the archives.

TO BOLDLY GO WHERE IRON EYES CODY, WARD CHURCHILL, AND FAUXCAHONTAS HAVE GONE BEFORE: Buffy Sainte-Marie Stripped of Honorary Degree Over Native American Ancestry Dispute.

Buffy Sainte-Marie — the Oscar-winning folk singer who claims to be an Indigenous woman of Cree descent — was recently stripped of an honorary degree over an ancestry dispute.

On Wednesday, May 13, the University of Toronto announced that it had rescinded Sainte-Marie’s honorary Doctor of Laws degree. She received the honor in 2019 for her “excellence in the arts, as a singer-songwriter, actress and visual artist.”

The decision, approved on May 13, came more than two years after the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired a documentary from The Fifth Estate alleging that Sainte-Marie lied about her Native American ancestry. In it, a birth certificate indicated that she was born in Massachusetts to Italian-American parents. Family members also confirmed this.

Flashback to a much more enlightened and tolerant 2023: Rachel Dolezal ahead of her time? The “Pretendian” wave in Academia. “Even eight years ago, I point out, Dolezal justified her posturing as a black woman — who wound up running a local NAACP chapter in Washington — because, as she told Matt Lauer, she ‘identifies as black.’ Was she just ahead of her time? If biology has nothing to do with sexual identity, can anyone argue that it has a role in ethnic identity? And if so, what does that do to the entire edifice of affirmative action in both admissions and faculty hiring, especially in Academia?”

Or as a wise Assistant to the Traveling Secretary of the New York Yankees once said:

THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IS NOT TO PLAY: Cultural Appropriation — You Sure You Wanna Play That Game?

Christian Allaire is upset. As Senior Fashion and Style Writer at Vogue magazine and self-described “champion” of Indigenous stories and artists, he laments the sight of his Native culture being “reduced to a kind of gimmick” and “reduced to caricature” in the fashion world. He calls this “appropriation.”

Per his online biography, Allaire hails from the Nipissing First Nation in Ontario, Canada, from which he derives his Ojibwe heritage. You would never know it from the pictures, which betray a whiter-than-white effeminate marshmallow who looks less like a proud Indigenous “champion” of anything and more like a backup dancer. If Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill had a love child…

Allaire isn’t alone in his outrage. Jeremy Helligar at Reader’s Digest is in a tizzy because Bo Derek wore her hair in cornrows. In 1979. And he’s upset that the crows in the cartoon Dumbo had caricatured black voices. In 1941.

Read the whole thing.

TODAY’S HIGHER EDUCATION: WARD CHURCHILL NATION. The Lack Of Clarity And Courage In Higher Education On Hamas And Israel.

The day after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill penned an essay in which he referred to the victims of the attack as “little Eichmanns.” Churchill believed that the attacks were a “natural and inevitable” response to longstanding American foreign policy. As reported in The Guardian, he intended “to make the case that even those with innocent roles in a system bear collective responsibility for perpetuating it.” The essay initially went unnoticed but resurfaced in 2005, setting off a firestorm.

Churchill’s claim was offensive and absurd. As a public university employee, his speech was protected under the First Amendment. But outside of a tiny number of progressive voices in higher education, his claim was met with overwhelming critique. Most people recognized its patent moral failure.

One might have thought that last month’s Hamas terrorist attack on Israel would have registered similarly to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Instead, far more voices from progressive corners of higher education mirrored the tone and substance of Churchill’s essay, and fewer institutional leaders forthrightly denounced those voices.

Higher education has become a toxic industry.

OUT ON A LIMB: Will universities clean house of antisemitic profs? Don’t bet on it.

Or consider elite Williams College, whose German department wants an assistant professor “committed to inclusive and anti-racist pedagogy,” especially in the areas of “migration, race and anti-racism, post- and decolonial approaches.”

These are just a few of the current university job ads in the humanities and social sciences; I have enough to fill a file cabinet.

The irony of the Williams German department seeking a plainly ideological hire is that these centers of virulent antisemitism would have been at home in the pro-Nazi German universities of the 1930s.

University presidents and especially provosts, who are supposed to be the quality-control officers of higher education, could put a stop to this by exercising their authority to veto such ads or disapprove tenure and advancement of politicized professors.

The invertebrates who serve as college presidents will do nothing meaningful beyond appointing a task force to look into the issue, as Harvard has done to cover its shame.

That is to say: Ward Churchill was a one-off.

Our universities are so far gone and the number of professors deserving of dismissal so large that every school will shrink in terror from the controversies any housecleaning will cause.

The inmates run the asylum.

Indeed: The Shame of Academe.

A great school has a strong leader who is willing to say no to the jackals. Ben Sasse of the University of Florida, for example. “Our educational mission here begins with the recognition and explicit acknowledgment of human dignity—the same human dignity that Hamas’s terrorists openly scorn,” Sasse wrote in a remarkable October 11 statement. “Every single human life matters. We are committed to that truth. We will tell that truth.”

Too many of Sasse’s colleagues are dedicated to truth’s opposite. The past two years have seen the world tumble back into the 1930s. America retreated from Afghanistan. Russia launched the largest ground war in Europe since World War II. Hamas, and its Iranian masters, invaded Israel and sparked another war in the Greater Middle East. World order is collapsing, and the consequence is death and misery.

Nor is it only geopolitics that resembles the interwar period. The intellectual climate does, too. As Allan Bloom observed in his 1987 classic The Closing of the American Mind, German universities in the 1920s and 1930s were seedbeds of fascism. The most prominent German philosopher of the age, Martin Heidegger, belonged to the Nazi Party. He never apologized for his affiliation or behavior. Heidegger’s abstruse thought laid the foundations for the postmodern “critical theory” that has dominated the academy since the early 1990s. The result: Two generations of students cannot tell right from wrong, good from evil, justice from terror.

Or if Berlin in 1933 is too strong a model, how about England in 1933? The Harvard Crimson’s antisemitism disturbingly echoes Oxford in the 1930s.

On a cold February evening in 1933, the students of the Oxford Union debated and passed the motion “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” The debate, which took place a week or so after Hitler was named chancellor of Germany, became an international sensation.

The students’ pacifism and lack of patriotism was viewed as emblematic of the degeneracy of an ungrateful and self-indulgent young intellectual elite. Winston Churchill called the vote “abject, squalid, shameless,” and “nauseating.”

The Oxford Union debate was not simply an academic exercise. At the time, many observers claimed it reinforced the view in Germany that the English were soft.

Alfred Zimmern, professor of international relations at Oxford, wrote to the former Oxford Union president who organized the debate: “I hope you do penance every night and every morning for that ill starred Resolution. … If the Germans have to be knocked out a second time it will be partly your fault.” Churchill would later write that as a result of the “ever shameful” motion, “in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations.”

In our own time, just 18 months ago, the academic aristocracy at the Harvard Crimson endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that targets Israel. The BDS movement arose in 2005 as a policy advocated by Palestinian civil society groups to delegitimize and isolate Israel, similar to the anti-apartheid fight against South Africa.

As was the case with the Oxford pledge, the publication of the Harvard Crimson’s editorial immediately attracted national media attention. The editorial argued that BDS could help the Palestinian cause in the same way that BDS helped win liberation for black South Africans.

The breathtaking scope of the proposed academic, cultural, and economic boycott of Israel would, for example, ban Israel from the Olympics, withdraw American and other foreign investments in Israel, and suspend Israel from the U.N. A few years ago, the German Parliament designated the BDS movement as antisemitic.

A principal objective of the boycott is to pressure Israel to agree to a right of return for approximately 7 million Palestinians. While the concept of such a right of “return” may have a superficial appeal to some, such a position, if now implemented, would be a demographic Trojan horse that would destroy Israel.

Which would make academia extremely happy: ‘Columbia Is Lost:’ President of Columbia U. Is ‘Grateful’ For The ‘Persistence’ of Pro-Hamas Students.

IS HE RELATED TO ELIZABETH WARREN? WARD CHURCHILL? Chief of Shawnee Tribe says KU professor falsely claims Indian descent.

IRON HORSE CODY, WARD CHURCHILL, FAUXCAHONTAS: PIONEERING TRENDSETTERS! Dolezal ahead of her time? The “Pretendian” wave in Academia. “Even eight years ago, I point out, Dolezal justified her posturing as a black woman — who wound up running a local NAACP chapter in Washington — because, as she told Matt Lauer, she ‘identifies as black.’ Was she just ahead of her time? If biology has nothing to do with sexual identity, can anyone argue that it has a role in ethnic identity? And if so, what does that do to the entire edifice of affirmative action in both admissions and faculty hiring, especially in Academia?”

CHRISTINE KEELER, FORMER MODEL AT HEART OF BRITAIN’S PROFUMO AFFAIR, DIES AT 75:

Keeler, then a teenage model and showgirl, became famous for her role in the 1963 scandal that rocked the establishment when she had an affair with the Tory cabinet minister John Profumo and a Russian diplomat at the same time at the height of the cold war. Profumo was eventually forced to resign after lying to parliament about the affair.

Keeler’s son, Seymour Platt, 46, told the Guardian she died on Monday at the Princess Royal university hospital in Farnborough: “My mother passed away last night at about 11.30pm.”

She had been ill for several months, and suffered from the lung disease COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).

The past really is a foreign country, given John Profumo’s response to the scandal, particularly in light of this fall’s endlessly recurring headlines. As Mark Steyn noted in his obit for Profumo (which also addresses Keeler’s sad later years), who died at age 91 in 2006:

There was no comeback, and no attempt at one. He accepted that his career was ruined and never sought public sympathy. As extraordinary as his downfall was, the aftermath was unique. On June 5th 1963 he resigned from the government, from Parliament and from the Queen’s Privy Council. Not long afterwards, he contacted Toynbee Hall, a charitable mission in the East End of London, and asked whether they needed any help. He started washing dishes and helping with the children’s playgroup, and he stayed for 40 years. He disappeared amid the grimy tenements of east London and did good works till he died. And, with the exception of one newspaper article to mark Toynbee Hall’s centenary, he never said another word in public again.

* * * * * * * *

In 1963, “Profumo” was shorthand for establishment hypocrisy. Across 40 years, he reclaimed the narrative, as a story of shame and redemption, of acting honorably, making the best of a sticky wicket and all the other allegedly obsolescent virtues of his class the sex and hookers had supposedly rendered risible. Had Stephen Ward not thrown a teenage girl’s bathing suit into the topiary, John Profumo would have been noted as the last surviving member of the House of Commons to vote in the confidence motion of May 8th 1940, after the fall of Norway. He was one of only 30 Conservative MPs to join the opposition in declining to support the continued leadership of Neville Chamberlain and thus to usher Churchill into Downing Street. That vote changed the course of the war. But instead his place in history is as the man who saw a call-girl naked in a swimming pool.

Profumo was a word that defined the British establishment for the pre-swinging London era, if not the entire 1960s. Today, the scandal would just be a blip in the news cycle, as the ’60s sexual revolution concludes by descending into a 21st century repeat of the French revolution.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What Is the Alt-Left?

The Obama victory of 2008 had a profound effect on the Democratic Party, suggesting that the “power” of getting elected twice gave “truth” to Obama’s polarizing brand of organizing groups based on ethnic and racially based grievances, in concert against a supposedly fading and bigoted establishment. (This axiom is in need of some postmodern revisionism after the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the loss of most governorships, state legislatures, the Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court.)

The Alt-Left largely dismisses the old liberal idea of 1960s Civil Rights. Liberals once promoted integration and the goal of an American melting pot empowered by the time-honored traditions of racially blind integration, assimilation, and intermarriage. The liberal goal once was a common American culture and experience where race became subsidiary. Yet we hear little from liberals any more about non-discrimination and integration. Instead, preference, diversity, and segregated safe spaces become the new discriminatory and reparatory agendas.

The Alt-Left also believes that racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious identity is essential not incidental to character—as evidenced from the profound by the recent racialist statements of would-be candidates to head the DNC, to the ridiculous, as the careerist-driven and invented identities of a Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Ward Churchill or former white/black activists such as Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King attest.

Blatant appeals to racial chauvinism such as those of La Raza (“The Race,” a phraseology popularized in Franco’s Spain in imitation of Hitler’s Volk) or “Black Lives Matter” (that went to great lengths to reject counter ecumenical arguments that “All Lives Matter”) are not just tolerated as useful political props, but institutionalized by the Alt Left to the degree that the Obama Justice Department used fines collected from financial institutions to redistribute to such Alt-Left radical identity political groups.

Another tenet is the age-old left wing idea that the noble ends of “fairness”—equality of result, and government mandated redistribution—justify almost any means in obtaining them. . . . The Alt-Left also does not really believe in free speech, at least as it was calibrated by the New Left of the 1960s that mandated “free speech” zones on campus, wrote academic handbooks outlining the need for protected expression, such as the Yale University’s highly regarded Woodward Report, or, in hippie fashion, equated free speech with advocacy for obscenity and pornography. Reading Mark Twain is hurtful and should be banned, screaming “F—k you to a Yale professor’s face is free speech and to be encouraged.

I remember describing the Critical Legal Studies movement to a judge when I was in law school. “Crap,” he said. “I thought that shit died with Marcuse.”

SHOCKINGLY, IT TURNS OUT TO STINK: Someone actually read Steven Salaita’s scholarship.

University of Illinois’s behavior in this matter seems rather sketchy. But as with Ward Churchill, the scandal is two-fold, and begins with the scandal of his being offered a job in the Native American Studies Department in the first place. Instead of expressing concerns about civility, which I think is at best a poor justification for not rubber-stamping a tenured lateral offer, perhaps the Illinois administration should have, as a commenter on a previous thread suggests, “called the faculty hiring committee to the mat to justify the appointment, demanding that they explain in detail precisely why Salaita was not barely qualified but the best qualified candidate for the position, address concerns about possible classroom bias in the light of his extracurricular rants, and potentially require an extended probationary period before granting him tenure.

Yeah, but if you started requiring quality scholarship in grievance-studies departments, that would threaten the whole feedlot.

IN TODAY’S FAKE-INDIAN NEWS: Ward Churchill Loses Again. From the comments: “This case is fascinating not only for its political drama, but even moreso because it points out just how flawed the whole peer review and tenure processes have become. It appears that Churchill was hired for political reasons, accepted for publication for political reasons, and tenured for political reasons. It is only fiting that as this political house of cards collapsed around him that he should be fired for those same political reasons.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: CU tuition plan: 9.5% hike next year, up to 9% for four more years. At a time when inflation is reported as negligible, can the market continue to absorb increases like this? Or will people seek lower-cost alternatives?

UPDATE: Reader Amy Ready writes:

Our local 9 news reported that the current freshman class at CU-Boulder had decreased 6.5% and is the smallest since 2005. The best part was that CU’s financial chief, Ric Porreca, told the Board of Regents it was due to glitches in the online student management system which frustrated students so they enrolled elsewhere. Certainly couldn’t have been the rapidly increasing tuition and/or tenured Professors like Ward Churchill…

Certainly not. The fact that they’re closing dorms because of a shortage of freshmen has nothing to do with it.

Meanwhile, reader Danielle Emery notes that the Colorado School of Mines isn’t raising tuition: “Are they blessed with a fantastic endowment? Or could it be that they know how to run a business, deliver value, or simply that they can do math and therefore balance a budget?” I’m going with the math. But that’s actually a really good school, teaching really useful stuff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A couple of readers point out that Mines may be raising tuition, just less than the 9% that triggers legislative oversight.

ANALYSIS: Press Largely Ignored Incendiary Rhetoric at Bush Protest. Gee, do you think?

When Bush visited Portland, Ore., for a fundraiser, protesters stalked his motorcade, assailed his limousine and stoned a car containing his advisers. Chanting “Bush is a terrorist!”, the demonstrators bullied passers-by, including gay softball players and a wheelchair-bound grandfather with multiple sclerosis.

One protester even brandished a sign that seemed to advocate Bush’s assassination. The man held a large photo of Bush that had been doctored to show a gun barrel pressed against his temple. . . . Although reporters from numerous national news organizations were traveling with Bush and witnessed the protest, none reported that protesters were shrieking at Republican donors epithets like “Slut!” “Whore!” and “Fascists!”

Yes, I remember the Bush-assassination chic. But it was different. All in good fun, you know.

Related item here. “It’s interesting though, when discussing responsibility and accountability, that STILL nothing is said about Kenneth Gladney on the left – oh, aside from the same ol’ same ol’ racist uncle Tom comments from people who are more eager to defend a liberal black man than an independent one. I guess that independence is what gets them. They excuse the bad behavior for the advancement of liberalism but freak when things exponentially unequal to those offenses occur on the right. Because their silence and ridicule condones that action, their credibility on other issues is compromised. . . . Yes, LET’S have the discussion as to who has been statistically more violent and rabble-rousing at protests. I think what you find may shock you. Or not. Listen …. crickets.”

Plus, from Victor Davis Hanson:

At one time not so long ago, those on the Left, and mainstream Democrats as well, apparently believed inflammatory language, Hitler parallels, and perverse expressions of real hatred were acceptable means to the noble end of discrediting the Bush presidency.

During the bleak days of Iraq, demonstrators carried swastikas and Hitler portraits of Bush habitually. Nicholson Baker wrote a novel in which characters are contemplating killing Bush. Films were praised imagining the assassination of the president. Michael Moore, courted by the Democratic elite, lamented that bin Laden on 9/11 had hit a blue state — and once compared the killers of Americans in Iraq to Minutemen.

Al Gore customarily used excessive language like “brown shirts.” Senators Durbin, Kennedy, and others compared our soldiers to Saddamites, Pol Pot’s killers, and Nazis. Ward Churchill compared the victims in the Twin Tower to “little Eichmanns.” Sen. Robert Byrd likened Pres. George W. Bush’s policies to what transpired in Nazi Germany. Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros agreed with Fidel Castro, the Iranians, and North Koreans in comparing Bush to Hitler.

Jonathan Chait wrote in the New Republic on why “I hate George W. Bush.” Garrison Keillor likened Bush’s Republicans to “brown shirts in pinstripes.” Even old hero Sen. John Glenn said of the Bush agenda: “It’s the old Hitler business.”

There’s more.

UPDATE: Reader Julie Carlson thinks the townhalls are tame:

I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, but it occurred to me with all the media wetting themselves over the tenor of the town hall meetings, haven’t they ever watched Question Time on C-Span? I realize the ones doing the questioning are other politicians, but the whole atmosphere is hardly polite. Lots of jeering, laughing, shouting out, and the Prime Minister has to stand there and take it and dish it out as well. And these are the Brits! I thought we Americans are the ones who were supposed to be so rough around the edges. Our politicians act like a bunch of hot house flowers at these meetings. My son does middle school debate – one of the time-honored traditions during your opponent’s speech is to knock on the desk and shout “shame!”. If a bunch of middle-schoolers can handle it why can’t a seasoned Congressperson?

Our guys aren’t used to being challenged.

JURY SAYS WARD CHURCHILL WRONGLY FIRED, awards one dollar damages.

IOWAHAWK: Gift-giving tips from Barack Obama. “The Prime Minister brought a few housewarming gag gifts including a pen set made from a boat, a framed paper thing from another boat, and some old books by Churchill (not Ward, but that English guy). Obviously we wanted to return the nice gesture so I sent my interns out on a scavenger hunt for an appropriate present. They couldn’t find anything in the West Wing, but luckily Costco was open and was running a 25-for-the-price-of-10 clearance sale in the DVD department.”

IRAQ WAR VETERANS — “TOO CONTROVERSIAL.” Ward Churchill: Educational!

K.C. JOHNSON ON the real Ward Churchill scandal:

Beyond illustrating the flawed conception of academic freedom too prevalent in the contemporary academy, the Churchill case illustrates what happens when universities abandon excellence as the primary criterion in the personnel process. Well before Churchill ever uttered his “Little Eichmanns” line, the University of Colorado – a Tier I research university – had hired, then tenured, and then promoted to department chairman a woefully underqualified academic charlatan. In this respect, the affair provides a case study of “diversity” hiring practices gone awry.

And the result was trouble.