By Thomas
Brown
4-06-09
Mr. Brown
is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at
Northeast Lakeview College. He has published
several analyses of Churchill’s research
misconduct. He testified for the defense.
"Well,
anybody who knows me knows I'm no fan of
dictionaries or reference books - they're
elitist. Constantly telling us what is or
isn't true or what did or didn't happen.
Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal
was finished in 1914? If I want to say it
was happened in 1941, that's my right."
-- Stephen Colbert
Postmodernist epistemology battled
empiricism in a Denver courtroom over the
past month, and both came away bloodied. The
University of Colorado fired Ward Churchill
in 2007 for committing repeated acts of
research misconduct, including plagiarism,
fabrication, falsification, and self-citing
articles he’d ghostwritten under other
names. Churchill retaliated with a lawsuit,
alleging that CU violated his free speech
rights by firing him. The court case
culminated last week with the jury finding
for Churchill, and awarding him one dollar
in damages.
CU fired Churchill after three separate
faculty committees all unanimously found him
guilty of misconduct for fabricating details
in his charge of smallpox blanket genocide
against the US Army (as well as committing
plagiarism and various other research
misconduct offenses).
In a story developed across at least six
different essays, Churchill claimed that
Army officers called a meeting with the
Mandan Indians at Fort Clark in 1837, and
gave them smallpox blankets taken from an
Army smallpox infirmary in St. Louis. When
the first Indians became ill, Churchill says
that Army doctors told them to “scatter”,
and “run for the hills”.
None of Churchill’s sources corroborate his
story, and no historian who has studied this
episode has ever even mentioned an Army
presence within eight hundred miles of Fort
Clark – which was a fur trading depot, not a
military installation.
Churchill has since abandoned all of the
fabricated aspects of his story, while
simultaneously claming that he did not
fabricate it, because he still feels in his
gut that the story is correct.
• Churchill now says that when he indicted
“Army officers” for passing out smallpox
blankets to the Mandans, he meant to refer
to the local Indian agent instead.
• Churchill now admits that he has no
evidence that any blankets came from an Army
smallpox infirmary in St. Louis. His new
story is that genocidal blankets were
brought from Baltimore by a disgruntled fur
trader.
• Churchill now says that when he indicted
“Army doctors” at Fort Clark for violating
quarantine in order to deliberately infect
more Indians, he meant to refer to fur
traders doing so.
• Churchill now holds that when he said that
the Mandan tribe had been deliberately
infected, he used the word “Mandan” not to
refer to the actual Mandan tribe, but
instead to refer to all Indian tribes in the
Northern Plains, extending across the border
into Canada.
In other words, Churchill no longer defends
his original indictment of the Army, given
that there is absolutely no evidence of Army
presence anywhere in the vicinity for
hundreds of miles. But he still refuses to
concede that his tale of Army genocide is
fabricated. Churchill holds that because he
had heard stories about the Army giving
smallpox blankets to Indians, he is
justified in holding the Army accountable
for this specific outbreak, and justified in
inventing details of blanket distribution by
the Army – details that he now admits he
cannot substantiate. Churchill’s story still
feels right to him, even though he has no
evidence whatsoever of Army presence, much
less Army involvement.
According to TV’s satirical pundit Stephen
Colbert, “truthiness” is something you feel
to be correct, regardless of inconvenient
facts or reason. Colbert, speaking out of
character, says of truthiness:
"It used to
be, everyone was entitled to their own
opinion, but not their own facts. But that's
not the case anymore. Facts matter not at
all. Perception is everything. […]
Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and
[nothing] anyone else says could possibly be
true.' It's not only that I feel it to be
true, but that I feel it to be true. There's
not only an emotional quality, but there's a
selfish quality."
Churchill built his case against CU on the
epistemology of truthiness. He argues that
the function of Indian Studies is to
challenge “the Master Narrative” of standard
history. This permits Churchill to view
history as a white conspiracy against
Indians. Churchill explains away the lack of
any evidence demonstrating an Army smallpox
blanket genocide by imagining a conspiracy
to cover up the crime. More problematic for
Churchill’s claim is the complete lack of
any genocidal motive on the part of either
the Army, or the fur traders who Churchill
indicts in his more recent versions of his
conspiracy theory.
Churchill’s oppositional stance towards the
Master Narrative also gives him license to
use data in any way he pleases. For example,
he has variously claimed that the 1837
epidemic killed 125,000 and 400,000 Indians.
None of the sources that Churchill cites
give these estimates. In trial testimony,
Churchill argued that he is justified to use
either figure, depending on his mood that
particular day. Churchill also argued that
his sources “suggest” these numbers to him,
and that he is therefore justified in citing
sources that disagree with him in order to
validate his own estimate.
Churchill and one of his witnesses – Michael
Yellow Bird, a social work professor at
University of Kansas – also claim the right
to invent data when it is convenient. They
complain that conventional histories of the
1837 epidemic blame Indians. There were two
theories advanced by eyewitnesses.
One said that an Indian swam aboard the
steamboat and stole a blanket from a sick
passenger. Another held that three sick
Arikara women were passengers, and that they
infected their tribe when they disembarked.
Churchill and Yellow Bird transform the
blanket thief into an “Indian Chief”, and
transform the three Arikara women into
“prostitutes”. However, none of the primary
sources identify the blanket thief as a
chief. Nor do they identify the three sick
women as prostitutes.
Thus Churchill and Yellow Bird feel no shame
in falsifying the Master Narrative in order
to condemn it. Yellow Bird even argued that
that a "fabricated, made-up account promotes
truth." Another Churchill witness, Derrick
Bell, pointed to his fictional tale of space
aliens capturing African Americans as an
example of the enlightening qualities of
fabrication.
Perhaps. However, an honest scholar is
expected to distinguish his fictions from
his facts, and to disclose which is which to
his readers. Churchill was fired for
presenting his fictions as conclusive,
“documentable” facts – even though the
sources he cites contradict his assertions.
Eric Cheyfitz, a Cornell English professor,
is another Churchill defender who is willing
to falsify his sources to mean what he
wishes they meant. Cheyfitz relies on
Richard Posner’s conception of plagiarism,
in order to excuse Churchill. Cheyfitz
quotes the following passage from Posner:
"The reader
has to care about being deceived about
authorial identity in order for the deceit
to cross the line to fraud and thus
constitute plagiarism."
Cheyfitz then says: “If I follow Posner
here, in order for the reader ‘to care about
being deceived by authorial identity’, the
reader must feel that there has been intent
to deceive with ‘intent’ implying for gain.”
But of course Posner says nothing whatsoever
about the author’s intent to profit. For
Posner:
"Plagiarism
is a species of intellectual fraud. It
consists of unauthorized copying that the
copier claims (whether deliberately or
carelessly) is original with him and the
claim causes the copier’s audience to behave
otherwise than it would if it knew the
truth."
Cheyfitz feels free to imagine that Posner
defined plagiary in terms of the author’s
intent to gain. But Posner makes plain that
he defines plagiary in terms of the reader’s
reaction to being deceived. The CU faculty
made plain that they objected to Churchill’s
deceit, but Cheyfitz dismisses their
concerns.
Cheyfitz then falsely states that none of
Churchill’s plagiarized essays “were written
for the purpose of building an academic
career.” In fact, Churchill listed them on
his CV, and on his annual faculty report,
and sold them in edited collections to his
students out of his office.
It would seem from the examples of Yellow
Bird and Cheyfitz that unabashed
intellectual dishonesty is a prerequisite
for supporting Churchill’s claim to
innocence. Yellow Bird says that fabrication
is acceptable. Cheyfitz says that plagiarism
is acceptable so long as you don’t intend to
profit – and falsifies his own source in the
process.
For Churchill and his postmodernist
defenders, facts simply do not matter.
Instead, truthiness is the new standard.
"Jerry,
just remember, it's not a lie … if you
believe it." -- George Costanza
http://hnn.us/articles/73909.html
PART FIVE
By
Alex Constantine
