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Support Academic Freedom
To Whom It May Concern:
As members of academic professions committed to the principle of academic freedom, we deplore the procedures and recommendations of the University of Colorado in the case of Professor Ward Churchill. Responding to a public outcry against Professor Churchill’s constitutionally-protected free speech, the administration of the University of Colorado appointed a special committee to investigate the character and quality of Churchill’s scholarship. The committee recommended his dismissal, a recommendation that is supported by university administrators.
The case against Professor Churchill is flawed on multiple contextual, procedural, and substantive grounds. Some of these are recognized by the university’s own investigative committee. The committee’s final report communicates a profound “disquiet” about the political motivations for the inquiry. Similarly, it worries about the fairness and legitimacy of a process that has the university’s interim Chancellor serving as formal complainant against Professor Churchill while he’s also positioned as prosecutor and judge. In addition to these misgivings about context and process, the report contains other substantive problems. These include (1) an unreasonably broad and elastic definition of “research misconduct”; (2) 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 (3) a failure to fully appreciate the “scholar activist” and “public intellectual” roles—roles that, on balance, expand and enrich the academic and journalistic enterprises—that Professor Churchill was clearly expected to fill when hired by the University of Colorado.
The actions of the University of Colorado in this case constitute a serious threat to academic freedom. They indicate that public controversy is dangerous and potentially lethal to the careers of those who engage it. They suggest that professors—tenured and untenured alike—serve at the pleasure of politicians and pundits. They call into question standards of scholarship and peer review at Colorado ‘s flagship institution. They endanger not only those scholars working in that area where historical inquiry, critical social commentary, and political activism intersect—an area that defines the true locus of academic freedom in an open and democratic society—but also those historically disenfranchised “others” who are struggling to have their perspectives and programs represented in, and legitimized by, the academic mainstream. Thus, 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.
Sincerely,
Teachers for a Democratic Society
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