stanley fish comments on ward churchill
In the New York Times, Stanley Fish claims that Ward Churchill did not deserve to be fired (though he doesn’t defend Churchill). Click here for a summary of the controversy around Churchill. A few clips from Fish’s column:
Last Thursday, a jury in Denver ruled that the termination of activist-teacher Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado had been wrongful (a term of art) even though a committee of his faculty peers had found him guilty of a variety of sins.
The verdict did not surprise me because I had read the committee’s report and found it less an indictment of Churchill than an example of a perfectly ordinary squabble about research methods and the handling of evidence. The accusations that fill its pages are the kind scholars regularly hurl at their polemical opponents. It’s part of the game. But in most cases, after you’ve trashed the guy’s work in a book or a review, you don’t get to fire him. Which is good, because if the standards for dismissal adopted by the Churchill committee were generally in force, hardly any of us professors would have jobs.
Fish asks why Churchill was actually fired and provides this answer:
These incendiary remarks [about 9/11 victims] were not widely broadcast until four years later, when Bill O’Reilly and other conservative commentators brought them to the public’s attention. The reaction was immediate. Bill Owens, governor of Colorado, called university president Elizabeth Hoffman and ordered her to fire Churchill. She replied, “You know I can’t do that.” (Not long after, she was forced to resign.)
The reason she couldn’t do it is simple. A public employee cannot be fired for extramural speech of which the government (in this case Gov. Owens) disapproves. It’s unconstitutional. A public employee can be fired, however, for activities that indicate unfitness for the position he or she holds; and after flirting with the idea of a buyout, the university, aware that questions had been raised about Churchill’s scholarship, appointed a committee to review and assess his work, no doubt in the hope that something appropriately damning would be found.
There is a deeper point that a commenter raises. Churchill said something in public that was beyond the pale of normal academic debate. The fact is that a public servant said something extremely distasteful about the victims of 9/11 and it’s hard to imagine any school teacher or professor keeping their job after doing that.
As Fish himself argued in an earlier essay, academic freedom is not a divine right. It is most meaningful when it is attached to the profession of research and teaching: “To those professors who turn freedom into license by using the classroom as a partisan pulpit, or by teaching materials unrelated to the course description, or by coming to class unprepared or not at all, you can say, Look, it’s freedom to do the job, not freedom to change it or shirk it.” Though we should be tolerant of faculty with unorthodox views, we should be equally conscious of the danger we might face when cross the line from controversial to hysterical.
A public employee can be fired, however, for activities that indicate unfitness for the position he or she holds
Would that mean that a historian like David Irving (if he were an academic) could be fired for holocaust denial but an engineering professor like Arthur Butz could not?
teageegeepea
April 7, 2009 at 1:39 am
TGGP: That’s a weird case, and it follows from the principle. For example, I remember when I was a math student that there are some famous scientists with similar opinions, but they didn’t suffer because their outrageous opinions weren’t related to their ability to prove theorems.
fabiorojas
April 7, 2009 at 1:51 am
That line between controversial and hysterical is very fine, and fairly arbitrary. Part of the Fox agenda is to push it back as far as they can. If Churchill had not said “little Eichmanns” would his speech have been more acceptable? Churchill was just the start. I now see O’Reilly and his minions are stalking a professor at Columbia for some pretty banal (and factually accurate) statements in a textbook he wrote. His writings, however, don’t line up with their jingoistic worldview – and so now he’s the target. To keep this line getting pushed back any farther, we should be taking a stronger stand: Churchill’s tenured status means he gets to make any public statement (short of libel) that he wants – no matter who finds it “hysterical”.
musa
April 7, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Musa: I think you and I agree on a fundamental point – tenure carries with it the right to say just about anything. But I also add “pick your fights carefully.” Comparing 9/11 victims to Nazis is way different than saying “sometimes our foreign policies creates serious problems.” It’s way easier to defend someone on the 2nd point than the 1st.
fabiorojas
April 7, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Agreed. In the context of producing a civil dialogue about the causes of 9/11, Churchill’s comments are counterproductive to say the least. His actions have negative consequences for other academics more interested in debate and dialogue than polemics. This does raise an interesting question of how much self-policing within academia there is, or should be, about outrageous, attention getting statements like this. I’m not referring to the administration here, but rather, the existence of a cultural taboo among professors against being too outrageous. I know virtually nothing about Churchill, but I’m curious how he is received within his own field, department, and cognate fields.
musa
April 7, 2009 at 7:44 pm
[...] his tenured faculty position at the University of Colorado (and presumably will be reinstated). Fabio’s post this morning reminded me of the biggest puzzle about this whole thing: How on earth did a person without a [...]
My Question About Ward Churchill « Organizations and Markets
April 8, 2009 at 5:54 pm