Leiter on Churchill

[dianahsieh]

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Yesterday, a professor in Boulder's philosophy department forwarded this post by Brain Leiter minimizing and excusing Ward Churchill's dishonesty to the department's "disscuss" list. I was floored by Leiter's remarks. Here's what I wrote in reply:

Brian Leiter approvingly quoted someone who wrote: "Churchill is guilty of occasionally shoddy scholarship and the dubious practice of ghostwriting, and perhaps even more."

The "dubious practice of ghostwriting"?!? That has got to be joke. (Yeah, I know it's not.)

By his own admission, Churchill published his papers under the names of others. As if that's not bad enough, he then cited those papers as independent sources to corroborate false legal and historical claims. That's not some kind of mistake or oversight. It's not merely dubious: it's twice-baked academic fraud. Contra Leiter, it's very serious.

A graduate student would surely be kicked out of the program for ghostwriting papers for other students. Fabricating sources would be a serious offense. So why is that behavior excusable in a professor?

If academic freedom is understood as granting professors freedom to engage in the same kinds of dishonesty for which students are flunked and/or expelled, then academic freedom won't be around much longer.

As for the rest of the blog post, it's not consistent with what I've read in the various CU reports on Churchill. See:

http://www.colorado.edu/.../report.html

http://www.colorado.edu/.../WardChurchillReport.pdf

http://www.colorado.edu/.../ChurchillStandingCmteReport.pdf

Augh. I don't understand how academics can punish plagiarism and cheating in their students while excusing Ward Churchill. Yet they do.

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/blog/archives/002505.html

[DavidOdden]

I don't understand how academics can punish plagiarism and cheating in their students while excusing Ward Churchill. Yet they do.

Surely you do understand how. Once you've learned to embrace contradiction, it's totally unproblematic.

Assignment 1 in my language and law course is to give a precise and enforceable definition of plagiarism in a hypothetical law against plagiarism, the main point being to emphasise the elements of an objective statement. One part of the assignment is to prove that the definition is correct given how the term is used in academe -- the subtle aspect of the assignment is that this will lead students who can actually do research to find that many official plagiarism definitions are plagiarised, and that the standards officially defined (in the university rules of many universities) for academic misconduct in students vs. faculty are radically different. The message is, if you can behave yourself as a student for a few years, then as faculty you have carte blanche.