Ward Churchill academic misconduct investigation

The Ward Churchill academic misconduct investigation concerned charges of plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification against Churchill at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Churchill was a professor at the time. On May 16, 2006, the investigative committee released its findings that Churchill had engaged in academic misconduct and had been "disrespectful of Indian oral traditions."

The University's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct voted that Churchill should be dismissed. Chancellor Phil DiStefano then recommended to the University's Board of Regents that Churchill be dismissed. After an investigation of Churchill's past research, Churchill was fired by the University on July 24, 2007 for research misconduct, including plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification. Churchill has denied any wrongdoing, and has vowed to contest his firing in the court system.

Background

Main articles: Ward Churchill and Ward Churchill 9/11 essay controversy

In late September 2001 Ward Churchill published a controversial essay about the September 11, 2001 attacks, entitled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens". In that essay, Churchill argued that American foreign policies provoked the attacks and questioned the innocence of 9/11 victims characterizing some as "little Eichmanns". National attention was drawn to the essay in January 2005, when Churchill was invited to speak at Hamilton College as a panelist in a debate titled "Limits of Dissent". This increased attention led to a greater examination of other works by Churchill as well as the man himself. As a result, allegations, both old and new, were raised against Churchill accusing him of academic fraud and plagiarism, and questioning his claims of American Indian heritage.

In response, University of Colorado at Boulder administrators ordered an investigation into the allegations concerning academic misconduct. The committee declined to address the issue of Churchill's ethnic heritage.

In February 2005, during the height of the media firestorm surrounding his "little Eichmans" comments, Churchill publicly challenged anyone to find fault with his scholarship. The media took up the challenge and a number of allegations of research misconduct were reported.

Federal regulations that define "research misconduct" specify three types of misconduct: fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. Churchill was investigated by the University of Colorado's standing Standing Committee on Research Misconduct, which found that he had falsified and fabricated information, and plagiarized two different essays.

Findings of fabrication and falsification

Smallpox blanket genocide

In at least six different essays, Churchill alleged that the United States Army deliberately distributed smallpox-infected blankets to the Mandan Indians in 1837 to spark a smallpox pandemic, and that hundreds of thousands of Indians died of smallpox as a consequence. Other scholars who have studied this episode agree that smallpox killed many Indians in this time frame, but deny that there is any evidence to support Churchill's allegations of deliberate genocide by means of smallpox blankets. They also charge Churchill with exaggerating the death toll and with falsifying the sources he cites in support of his claims. Professor Thomas Brown wrote in the journal Plagiary that, "Every aspect of Churchill's tale is fabricated."

In November 2004, Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, published an essay charging Churchill with misrepresenting his sources. Lewy says Churchill's assertion that the U.S. Army intentionally spread smallpox among American Indians by distributing infected blankets in 1837 is false. "He just makes things up," said Lewy. Lewy calls Churchill's claim of 100,000 deaths from the incident "obviously absurd".

In an article in the journal Plagiary, entitled "Did the US Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indians? Fabrication and Falsification in Ward Churchill's Genocide Rhetoric", Lamar University sociology professor Thomas Brown also accused Churchill of fabricating the incident and falsifying his sources. Brown argues that Churchill's claim that his cited source--Russell Thornton--supports Churchill's smallpox blanket allegations is a falsification of Thornton. Brown also charges Churchill with fabricating the presence of US Army personnel on the scene, with fabricating the distribution of blankets taken from a military infirmary in St. Louis, and with concealing evidence in his possession that disconfirms his allegations.

Three of the authors that Churchill cites in support of his smallpox thesis, Evan Connell, RG Robertson and Russell Thornton, have rejected Churchill's interpretation of their work. Thornton characterized Churchill's smallpox thesis as "fabrication."

Churchill continues to maintain that his description of events at Fort Clark is correct, and that he has obtained new supporting data.

The May 2006 report by the Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado corroborated Churchill's critics. The committee concluded that for over a period of 10 years, Churchill consistently falsified his sources and fabricated claims regarding the Fort Clark epidemic. The committee criticized Churchill for failing to recognize and correct his errors, and for his insistence that he intends to republish his indictment of genocide in the future without substantive changes. The committee also criticized Churchill for answering his critics with ad hominem attacks instead of reason and evidence.

Additionally, the committee found Churchill guilty of serious research misconduct in his claims that John Smith initiated a smallpox epidemic against Wampanoag Indians when he visited New England in 1614. The committee found that the source Churchill cited for his claim (Manitou and Providence: Europeans, Indians, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 by Neal Salisbury) actually gave evidence contrary to his claim, namely that Smith viewed the Indians as a potential source of labor to be exploited militarily (rather than exterminated) and that the epidemic did not break out until at least eighteen months after Smith had left the area. Based on these, and other inconsistencies, the committee determined that Churchill had fabricated this event and cited sources in a misleading way.

General Allotment Act

In two articles published in the 1990s, University of New Mexico law professor John P. LaVelle, an enrolled member of the Santee Sioux Tribe of Nebraska, alleged that Churchill has repeatedly published false claims about the General Allotment Act, mistakenly attributing a "blood quantum" standard of Indianness to the Allotment Act.

Churchill in his defense acknowledges that the term "blood quantum" is not used in the General Allotment Act, but maintains that the term is an accurate summary of the what he describes as the eugenics component of the Act. According to Churchill, "[Under] blood-quantum standard… through intermarriage, future generations of Indians would be of progressively less native blood, until they couldn't meet the legal standard and tribes would disappear altogether."

The Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado, released in May 2006, agreed with LaVelle that the blood quantum requirement is not present in the Dawes Act, and that Churchill had repeatedly misrepresented the requirement as falling within the Act itself. The Committee also observed that most tribes did choose to impose blood quantum standards for tribal membership during the historical era of the General Allotment Act, and that Churchill's larger argument thus had some validity, even though he misrepresented the contents of the Act.

LaVelle agrees with Churchill that the Act represents "a contemptible effort by Congress … to strip Indian tribes of all collectively held lands, force Indian people to assimilate into white society, and generally undermine the tribes' territorial sovereignty." However, LaVelle argues that Churchill has falsified the Act in order to support his eugenics charges. LaVelle notes that the Code of Federal Regulations gave tribes free rein to define their membership in any way they choose for the purposes of allotment, and that the tribes themselves have chosen to set blood quantum standards for membership. LaVelle argues that Churchill's attack on the tribes' standards constitutes an attack on tribal sovereignty. LaVelle complains that Churchill disguises his attack on tribal blood quantum standards by falsely attributing the source of those standards to the Allotment Act.

According to LaVelle, Churchill has not responded directly to LaVelle's specific charges to explain in detail how the Act introduced a blood quantum. LaVelle went through Churchill's works essay by essay, and says that Churchill had not cited evidence for his claim that the Allotment Act imposed a blood-quantum standard: This lack of a supporting citation is explained by the fact that … the (Dawes Act) never contained any such federally imposed eligibility 'code' at all. LaVelle states that part of his initial concern was that Churchill's claims about the Dawes Act—which LaVelle characterizes as a "hoax"—were "seeping" into the scholarly literature.

Churchill responded to LaVelle's critique by comparing the number of times his articles have been cited to the number of times LaVelle has been cited: In academia, you measure the influence of your publications via what's called the "Citation Index," that is, a literal count of the number of times your material is cited by others. Neither of LaVelle's essays on the Allotment Act, the first of which came out in the American Indian Quarterly almost a decade ago, has ever been cited by an Indian legal scholar. Churchill acknowledges elsewhere that LaVelle's work on the Allotment Act has been cited by two scholars; but uses a phrase from Robert Porter, in describing LaVelle's legal interpretation as being designed to "put a happy face on colonialism." Churchill claims of his own citation that he was "as of mid-2001, the most cited ethnic studies scholar in the country".

The Investigative Committee concluded that Churchill had fabricated his claim that the GAA contains a blood quantum, and had falsified his evidence in support of that claim. Specifically, the committee stated that Churchill used as "independent" evidence for his claims two essays that Churchill later described as having been ghostwritten by himself "from the ground up." (See Annette Jaimes and Rebecca Robbins, below) The committee also criticized Churchill for answering his critics with ad hominem instead of reason and evidence.

Findings of plagiarism

The University of Colorado's Research Misconduct Committee concluded that Ward Churchill plagiarized the writing of three different authors.

Annette Jaimes and Rebecca Robbins

John LaVelle was the first to publicly note that several of Churchill's essays share similarities with an earlier essay by Annette Jaimes, Churchill's ex-wife. Additional plagiarism allegations stem from portions of an essay Churchill published in 1993 that closely resemble a 1992 essay published by Rebecca L. Robbins. However, "LaVelle did not accuse Churchill of [plagiarizing the Jaimes passages], one of the most serious offenses in academia. On the contrary, LaVelle speculated that Churchill might have been the author of all the works. The ideology, rhetoric and writing style" of the Jaimes piece are 'interchangeable' with positions that Churchill takes in his books, LaVelle wrote".

Churchill also asserts that he himself is the original author of the material in question, and thus has not plagiarized either Jaimes or Robbins: "I'm free to make disposition of my ideas and my material any way I see fit… That's my understanding of the situation… If there's an issue around that, then there's an issue around that." Churchill says that he ghostwrote the material to help Jaimes' career: "All you need to do is take a piece of Annette Jaimes' material, which is published—and she's published things that I didn't (write) - take her stuff, stack it up next (to mine), set it side by side, and read the two… You tell me who's writing this. We don't need to get into forensics to do it."

Jaimes denies that Churchill wrote the material in dispute, and calls him "a liar." Jaimes complains that Churchill is jeopardizing her career to defend himself from the plagiarism allegations, and said "He's despicable." Robbins has refused to comment publicly on the matter, but Jaimes says that she saw an early draft of Robbins' essay, and that the matter in question is original to Robbins.

Because both Robbins and Jaimes refused to testify for the committee, it took Churchill's word that he was the original author of the essays published under Robbins and Jaimes's names. However, the committee still found Churchill guilty of "serious research misconduct" with regards to the Robbins and Jaimes essays, for failing to follow accepted practices of attributing authorship, and for citing in works published under his own name to these essays that he had ghostwritten, as if they were independent sources.

Dam the Dams

University of Colorado's Research Misconduct Committee also investigated allegations that Churchill plagiarized a pamphlet entitled "The Water Plot"—originally published by Dam the Dams, a Canadian activist group in 1972—and republished it under his own name several times.

Churchill first re-published the "Water Plot" essay in 1989, when he credited the piece both to the original authors as well as to the "Institute for Natural Progress." In three subsequent publications, twice in 1993 and once in 2002, Churchill took sole credit for substantially the same essay. Churchill says that he did not plagiarize the essay in 1993, but rather that the editors of Z Magazine incorrectly excised Dam the Dams from the byline. Churchill also says he did not plagiarize in 2002, because he added additional material of his own to the essay, and because he cited Dam the Dams as one of his sources in the footnotes.

The University of Colorado's investigative committee determined that Churchill repeatedly plagiarized the Water Plot pamphlet, and that Churchill's "misconduct was not accidental, but deliberate.".

Fay Cohen

The University of Colorado's investigative committee determined that Churchill had plagiarized the work of Professor Fay G. Cohen of Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and republished it in a book edited by his wife Annette Jaimes. The previous year, Churchill had edited his own book of collected essays, which had included Cohen’s chapter on fishing rights. Churchill then solicited Cohen’s essay for republication in his wife’s book. Cohen refused to grant Churchill and Jaimes permission to republish the essay.

In Jaimes’ book, the essay in question is attributed to the "Institute for Natural Progress," the same pseudonym under which Churchill had previously published the disputed "Water Plot" essay. In the back matter, Jaimes writes that Churchill "assumed the lead role in preparing" the essay; he characterized his role as similar to a newspaper’s "rewrite man," who takes materials gathered by others and works them into a final version for publication.

After the Jaimes book was published, Cohen asked lawyers at her university to assess her rights in the matter. An internal Dalhousie University report concluded that "[t]he article … is, in the opinion of our legal counsel, plagiarism," Dalhousie spokesman Charles Crosby said, summarizing the report's findings in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News.

Churchill says that he has not committed plagiarism because he never said he wrote the essay. The CU investigative committee found Churchill's defense "implausible," observing that Churchill did claim authorship of the essay in his official Faculty Report of Professional Activity for the year 1991, followed by the parenthetical notation "for the Institute for Natural Progress." The committee concluded that Churchill's involvement in plagiarizing Cohen's essay constitutes an act of research misconduct.

Result of Investigation

Seven misconduct charges against Churchill have been investigated by the University of Colorado's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct. The Committee has defined its jurisdiction narrowly in Churchill's case, limited to the three dimensions of research misconduct that are specified in the federal regulations. The Standing Committee has declined to pursue the various charges of copyright violation that do not meet the legal definition of "plagiarism" and are not covered in the federal misconduct regulations. The Committee's investigative subcommittee has completed its investigation into the various charges of plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification, brought by Professors Brown, Lavelle, and Cohen, a charge of fabrication published by Kevin Vaughan of the Rocky Mountain News, as well as Churchill's alleged plagiarism of the "Water Plot" pamphlet and the Fay Cohen essay.

The University released its investigative committee findings on May 16, 2006. The committee agreed unanimously that Churchill had engaged in "serious research misconduct," including four counts of falsifying information, two counts of fabricating information, two counts of plagiarizing the works of others, improperly reporting the results of studies, and failing to “comply with established standards regarding author names on publications.”

Following the sub-committee report's release, Churchill called the report "self-contradictory" and "patently false".

The Standing Committee on Research Misconduct disagreed on what sanctions should be imposed on Churchill. Six members voted for dismissal. Two members voted for a five year suspension without pay, and one voted for a two year suspension without pay. Churchill's actual punishment was determined by the University Chancellor, who recommended to the Board of Regents that Churchill be dismissed. The Chancellor relieved Churchill of his duties on June 13 2006 pending the outcome of this process, Additional charges of misconduct were tabled pending the outcome of the initial investigation. Churchill was fired in July, 2007, thus mooting any investigation of the additional charges.

Lawsuit by Churchill

Following his dismissal, Churchill immediately filed a lawsuit against against the university claiming that he had been fired for exercising his right to free speech. His lawsuit, filed in Denver District Court, charged that after the essay came to light, “the university vowed to examine every word ever written or spoken by Professor Churchill in an effort to find some excuse for terminating his employment.” The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages although reinstatement was one of its goals. University spokesman Ken McConnellogue said the school stands by the decision to fire Churchill and "we will not be settling the lawsuit.” The case is reportedly scheduled to go to court in sometime in early 2009.

Support for Churchill

Churchill has been praised and has received support from a number of sources.

Emma Perez, the new chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado, wrote that the firing of Churchill was part of ” the neocon battle for dominance in academe” through “forcing and then manipulating this "investigation" of Ward's scholarship.” She also wrote “there are faculty who have problems with his being American Indian or who have something against Ethnic Studies”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also expressed support for Churchill, stating that the ““poisoned atmosphere in which this investigation was launched…[has] irretrievably tainted the process. The investigation of Professor Churchill’s scholarship cannot be separated from the indefensible lynch-mob furor that generated the initial calls for his termination.”

Noam Chomsky wrote that "[I] regard the attack on [Churchill] as scurrilous - and by now craven cowardice as well, as the state authorities and other critics pretend that the issue is (suddenly) his academic credentials and ethnic origins. That’s a real disgrace." Chomsky added that if the plagiarism charges against him serious, they would have been brought up sooner and that they are being brought up now "by cowards who are desperately seeking to conceal what they are really doing."

Hamid Dabashi wrote that Churchill, "in my estimation today stands for all of us in the U.S. academy" and that "every single professor teaching in the remotest parts of this country with an abiding conviction in the moral duty of democratic dissent is Ward Churchill. In the company of that magnificent chorus of hope for the democratic future of this country, I too am Ward Churchill."

Richard Falk wrote that "All of us who value academic freedom should now stand in full solidarity with Ward Churchill. The outcome of his case at the University of Colorado is the best litmus test we have to tell whether the right-wing’s assaults on learning and liberty will stifle campus life in this country.

Howard Zinn wrote that "to defend [Churchill] is to defend the principle of academic freedom" and that "the attack on Ward Churchill comes at a time in our nation's history when constitutional rights are under attack by the national government."

In 2005, three departments at the University of Hawaii launched a fundraiser to bring Ward Churchill to Hawaii. Haunani-Kay Trask of the Hawaiian Studies Department stated that she has great affinity for Churchill and considers to be like a “brother.” Trask stated that professors like her and Churchill have become targets for removal from their tenured posts and that they are scrutinized by what they “do, write or wear” … “even down to examining our underwear” and that Churchill "would have never been investigated in the first place had it not been for his statements and essay on 9-11 victims." Trask added that his academic record and accuracy of research was irrelevant and that what was at issue were his First Amendment rights.

Opposition to Churchill

Churchill was criticized a varity of sources.

Condemnations of Churchill came from a number of politicans. Specific examples include:

• the Colorado Legislature labeled Churchill's remarks "evil and inflammatory."
• Colorado Governor Bill Owens stated Churchill should be fired
• George Pataki called Churchill a "bigoted terrorist supporter."

University of Colorado President Hank Brown stated that the firing of Churchill was necessary to protect the integrity of the university's research. Brown also stated that Churchill "did not express regret, did not apologize, did not indicate a willingness to refrain from this type of falsification in the future."

External links

• "The Seven Faces of Ward Churchill" by Victor Davis Hanson writing for National Review.
• "The General Allotment Act "Eligibility" Hoax: Distortions of Law, Policy, and History in Derogation of Indian Tribes" (by John P. LaVelle) (PDF file).
• "Did the U.S. Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indians? Fabrication and Falsification in Ward Churchill’s Genocide Rhetoric" by Thomas Brown, published in "Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification".