Is Ward Churchill an Aberration?

While University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill is infamous and controversial for his assertion that the people killed in the World Trade Center attacks shouldn’t be mourned because they were just “little Eichmanns,” that moronic statement is not at issue in the university’s investigation of him. A professor is just as entitled to say stupid things out of class as a retail clerk is entitled to say stupid things on her free time.

The University of Colorado appointed a team of scholars to investigate allegations that Churchill was guilty of plagiarism and academic fraud. Their findings were very clear: Churchill had indeed committed numerous, flagrant violations of the canons of scholarship. Later this year, the university will decide what penalty to impose.

Indicting Churchill for his transgressions against the rules of scholarship is like indicting Al Capone for income tax evasion. It’s something, but not the main thing.

The main thing would be his misuse of the classroom, using it as a platform for spreading his political views rather than for instructing students in a body of knowledge and endeavoring to improve their cognitive skills. From everything we know about Churchill, his classes in “ethnic studies” were mainly exercises in incendiary grievance-mongering. Colorado should have thoroughly investigated whether he was abusing his position as a professor and wasting the students’ time with his rants.

Focusing on the key question, earlier this month the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) released a study entitled “How Many Ward Churchills?” After examining many course offerings at universities in the Big 10, Big 12, Ivy League, and some of the leading liberal arts colleges in the country, the study concludes that Churchill is not an aberration, but rather “an example of academe’s increasingly unapologetic ideological tilt.”

ACTA’s research team plowed through the curricula at leading schools and found many examples of courses that are remarkably open about their ideological agenda. Here are a few examples.

At Indiana University, an English course on “postcolonial novels” is described as focusing on “how Anglo-American cultural hegemony has been ensured not just through the institutions of colonialism but also through the domination of western popular culture in so-called ‘third world markets.’”

“Introduction to Feminist Social Theory” at the University of Kansas seems intent on fostering young activists. Students are told that “by the end of the semester, you will be able to identify the key argument, strengths, and limitations of each theoretical approach, use feminist theory to make better sense of the issues and problems you confront in your personal and political lives, and have a concrete sense of something you can do to help bring about gender equality.”

Dartmouth College offers a course “Prisons: The American Way of Punishment” that treats imprisonment as a form of social “oppression.”

Many, many courses revolve around the same set of topics: race, class, gender, sexuality, the oppressive nature of capitalism and western civilization, and so on. It seems evident that professors in a wide range of disciplines, all of whom have absorbed the litany of leftist complaints about America during their own educations, have decided that they must act as “change agents” and try to get students to see the world the same way they do. One of the tenets of the leftist thought-world is that everything is political, so it’s not surprising to find that courses taught by leftists are saturated with ideology.

If ACTA’s researchers had looked at the ACC schools, they would have found examples in this part of the country. Last December, the Pope Center awarded its “Course of the Month” to a pair of sociology courses at North Carolina State where the readings were exclusively far-left and success on the exams required students to regurgitate the views of the writers on multiple choice exams. The courses were preaching, not teaching.

Former Duke University professor Stanley Fish was right on the mark when he wrote in a Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled “Save the World on Your Own Time,” “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or obedience or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or antinationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk-show host.” The trouble is that many professors insist on trying to “save the world” by dragooning their students into various “movements.”

It isn’t an attack on academic freedom for college and university administrators to rein in egregiously political professors by reminding them that their job description calls for them to present the knowledge of academic disciplines to their students, not to harangue them into political or social activism.

Whether the Ward Churchill phenomenon is extremely rare (as some contend) or is widespread should be beside the point. If it’s a good rule that professors should just teach their subjects and not devote their classes to political activism or proselytizing, then schools should enforce it.

ACTA suggests that colleges and universities should conduct self-studies “to assess the atmosphere in their classrooms” and review their personnel policies “to ensure that scholarship and teaching – not ideological litmus tests – are the foundation for lifelong job security.” That is sound advice, but any president or chancellor who is thinking about taking that step should be forewarned: If you try to take political indoctrination out of the classroom, some of your professors will react just as a 3-year old would if you took away his favorite toy.