Ward Churchill Part Two: Why It Makes A Difference [Updated]

Some friends have asked me why spend any time at all on the Ward Churchill hub-bub and it's a totally legitimate question. What is the point, they ask, of beating up on such a pathethetic element and risk playing into the hands of such right-wing ideologues as O'Reilly-Limbaugh-Instapundit?

Fortunately, Swarthmore history professor Timothy Burke has offered a much more convincing answer than I could come up with. I find his essay on the matter no less than brilliant and it should be must-reading for all fellow lefties. I'm reproducing the entire piece because I love having it on the front page of the blog. Now... This is a smart guy:

I’ve been reading in a few places about the controversy over Hamilton College’s now-rescinded speaking invitation to University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, and Churchill’s resignation as the head of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado.

In a way, it’s a pity that the whole affair has become so consumed by Churchill’s remarks on 9/11, because that’s allowed it to fall into the familiar, scripted form of public controversies over remarks that are deemed to hurt or offend. The remarks get repeated, mantra-like and disconnected from the general work or thought from which they came. Critics cite the personal pain and distress the remarks create. Defenders of the speaker first mobilize behind the figure of free speech, that we may disagree with the remarks but must defend the right of the person to make them. Finally, the speaker issues a non-apology apology, usually in the formula of “I am sorry if anyone has taken offense at my words,” which manages to make it sound as if the real offense lies with those who felt offended. Sometimes the original speaker may also clarify intent by saying that he or she merely meant to “start a conversation” or “make a useful provocation”.

It’s a tired dance on so many fronts. If there’s anyone who should know all the steps in it, it’s Ward Churchill, who is a prolific practicioner of the kind of identity politics that has helped to choreograph many such waltzes and minuets. Now everyone knows how to play that game, particularly American conservatives. Rinse wash repeat.

We lose so much in this pantomime. On one hand, it allows the less thoughtful critics of academia to go away with one more caricature in their bag, to imagine Churchill as a absolutely typical, representative academic. On the other hand, it allows many academics to walk away without having to think about the ways in which Churchill and the invitation to him from Hamilton is also not aberrant. If not representative, neither is he idiosyncratic.

Churchill should frankly be happy if this whole affair is confined to his isolated remarks on 9/11, to be handled with the usual pro forma apology, because his larger intellectual career is the thing that really raises some questions. Not the kinds of straightforwardly bombastic one-liners now descending on Churchill from right-wing pundits, perhaps, but pointed observations nevertheless.

Churchill is prolific in the manner of many careerist academics, meaning, he’s written the same thing in a great many formats again and again. He’s got a very long c.v., but the length misleads. Almost everything he’s written is part of one long metapublication. And what he’s written is highly formulaic kind of identity-based scholarship that expounds unthoughtfully on some of the characteristic themes and ideas of one very particular segment of the left, with particular application to Native American issues and questions.

I stress very strongly, not the left at large or overall. It’s a very small tradition of anticolonial, pseudo-nationalist radicalism that eclectically and often incoherently grabs what it needs from Marxism, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and even conservative thought now and again (though often in unacknowledged ways).

It is also a tradition that is completely unable to face its own contradictions. Churchill’s much-cited remarks on 9/11 are an indication, for example, of the underlying moral incoherence of his writing (and writing like his). The principles that are used to value some lives (Iraqi babies dying under sanctions) and not others (people in the World Trade Center) have no underlying ethical or moral foundation: they’re purely historicist and instrumental. The original sin of modernity is seen as the expansion of the West; it is perceived as a kind of singularity that utterly destroyed or erased historical experience to that point. The only moral vector, the only capacity to act immorally or to commit evil, descends from that original sin. If you’re associated by social structurewith that expansion, you are bad. If you are a victim of it, you are good.

This perspective on history and contemporary global politics is incapable of explaining its own existence. How is it possible to value life in a world produced by the expansion of the West, even the lives of the victims of colonialism? What are the sources, in a purely historicist account of ethics, of a belief in the sanctity of human cultures, or a belief that it is wrong to colonize or practice what Churchill would call genocide? Churchill, like others who write within his intellectual tradition, has no way to explain the genesis of his own political and ethical position. He can in fragmented ways claim an authenticity rooted in Native American traditions—but if it is possible today in the here and now to construct and disseminate a whole ethical practice founded in those traditions, then his claim of genocidal eradication by the West is clearly is false. If on the other hand, the West contains within it the seeds of its own critique, then the expansion of the West is itself a much more complicated phenomena than it would appear to be in Churchill’s writing.

Churchill, like others, constructs the hegemony of global capitalism and Western domination as being near-total. The unmitigated and simplistic totalizing that suffuses Churchill’s writing makes it impossible to explain his own existence and professional success or anyone like him. He is incarnated impossibility of his own analysis. The only contradiction Western domination faces is produced, according to his oeuvre, by the dedicated and militant resistance of its subjects. But how is it possible that a totalizing system of domination permits such an uncompromising practicioner of resistance to publish over 11 books and occupy a tenured position at a university? (I know, I know: doubtless from a Churchillian perspective, the recent controversy is the system finally getting around to slapping him down. Quite a delayed reaction if so.)

Churchill’s scholarly oeuvre is practically a guided tour of every trope of identity politics: polemical extensions of the concept of genocide into every possible institutional or social interaction between the colonized and colonizer, erasures of any historical or programmatic distinctions between colonizers in different eras or systems, reduction of all history and contemporary society into a sociologically and morally simple binary schema of colonizer and colonized (hence the remark that the people in the Twin Towers were “little Eichmanns” while Iraqis are literally infantilized into starving babies and nothing more), pervasive indictments of systems of representation, and aggressive assertions of exclusive cultural, moral, political and economic ownership of anything and everything connected with a particular identity group (Native Americans in this case).

Anything and everything can be fed, often with appalling casualness, into the polemic machine he builds: other scholars become, if not heroic comrades, mere “crypto-fascists” (there is no other possible position or posture). Mickey Spillane’s novels are part of a cohesive infrastructure for global hegemony. All power is endlessly and floridly conspiratorial. And so on.

The thing of it, there are very thoughtful people who take some or all of these positions. Churchill isn’t: he’s prolific but he’s also something of a hack. Herein lies the deeper problem that Hamilton College, Ward Churchill and many academics might be perfectly happy to escape notice, and that shouldn’t be reduced to one more example of right-wing polemicists beating on lefty academics.

Hamilton College’s first instinct, the first instinct of all institutions (including conservative ones) that get caught up in this well-rehearsed minuet, is to cite free speech as a defense. I think that’s perfectly proper in a highly limited way. Once an invitation has gone out, I think you generally have to stick by your guns. Everyone does have a right to speak and say what they want, whatever it might be.

But academic institutions also insist in many ways and at many moments that they are highly selective, that all their peculiar rituals—the peer review, the tenure dossier, the hiring committee, the faculty seminar—are designed to produce the best, most thoughtful community of minds possible. In response to criticism from conservatives who complain at the lack of conservatives in the academic humanities and social sciences, a few scholars even had the cheek publically (and more privately) to suggest that conservatism is one of those things that academic quality control quite legitimately selects against, that if the academy is liberal, that’s because it’s selective. Anybody has the right to speak, but nobody has the obligation to provide all possible speakers a platform, an honorarium, an invitation.

In that context, it becomes awfully hard to defend the comfortably ensconsed position of someone like Churchill within academic discourse, and equally hard to explain an invitation to him to speak anywhere. There’s nothing in his work to suggest a thoughtful regard for evidence, an appreciation of complexity, a taste for dialogue with unlike minds, a proportionality, a meaningful working out of his own contradictions, a civil ability to engage in dialogue with his colleagues and peers in his own fields of specialization. He stands for the reduction of scholarship to nothing more than mouth-frothing polemic.

We cannot hold ourselves up as places which have thoroughly and systematically created institutional structures that differentiate careful or or thoughtful scholarship from polemical hackery and then at the same time, have those same structures turn around and continually confirm the legitimacy of someone like Churchill. We can’t deploy entirely fair and accurate arguments about the thoughtless cruelty and stupidity of a polemicist like Ann Coulter only to fill our bibliographies with citations to Ward Churchill, not to mention filling our journals with highly appreciative reviews.

Certainly if you study contemporary Native American politics, you’d have to cite Churchill, but as a phenomenon who is part of that which you study, not as scholarly creator of useful knowledge who guides and instructs you in your own arguments or findings. There is a distinction.

That’s the deeper problem here: not Churchill’s particular remarks, but the deeper wellsprings of his legitimacy. Conservatives should not necessarily welcome a turn to those deeper issues: it seems to me that Glenn Reynolds, for example, would have to be held a hack by any standard that held Churchill to be one. Nor would I want to raise the banner of higher standards only to have that quash interesting, provocative, exploratory writing and thinking on behalf of dour, cautious and bland scholarship. But there is more here than just some callous remarks on 9/11 to worry about. Churchill has said before that his main critics are on the left, not the right, but far too many academics remain timid in the face of the retaliatory capacities of identity-based activism within the academy and therefore too silent in the face of thoughtless choices by their colleagues about whom to value, whom to canonize, whom to invite to speak. It might be a good thing to make Churchill's characterization the uncontested truth.

UPDATE:  At some point this mid-afternoon I felt a warm trickle around my ankles when I realized that I was getting peed on by a yelping hairless chihuahua. Up on Alex Cockburn's Counterpunch website, someone I never heard of named Joshua Frank was ruthlessly attacking me for criticizing Ward Churchill (but then again this guy recently blasted the Green Party for moving too far to the right!). Frankly, (no pun intended) I preferto be attacked by more substantial opponents -- but I'll take what I can get! I have a policy of not linking to the Counterpunch site (I don't promote crackpots) but I'm making an exception in this case. I invite you to read this crud from Mr. Frank and compare it to the essay above. We report. You decide.

                                                                                                                                          

Comments

[GMRoper]

Marc, great posting. Your comment "I find his essay on the matter no less than brilliant and it should be must-reading for all fellow lefties." should equally apply to all my fellow righties.

Burke reminds me of another fellow, Cooper I believe he is called.

[abdul abulbul amir]

Wow. The hairbrush stings. The question left to answer is how the fellow Burke more or less characterizes as having a big red bulbous nose, floppy shoes, and flaming orange hair came to be a tenured department chairman with that appearance.

[Marc Cooper]

Well.. Abdul.. you might mean it sarcastically (duh) but it turns out to be an excellent question after all.

[Cridland]

Has Burke considered Reynold's scholarly writing with this comparison, or only the blogging? I'm sincerely asking, because it's not apparent from the passage. But I'm grateful for a broader appraisal of Churchill's career.

Any claim to legitimacy that Churchill might have scored with the 9/11 essay was lost with his use of the word "technocrat." It has powerful and specific meanings when used by people like Virginia Postrel. But when used by the tenured to describe a less-admirable sort of desk jockey, the boundless, personal condecension in his heart becomes readily apparent. Answer quick: Were the lives of the technocrats in the WTC & Pentagon less or more of a loss than the girl with the juice cart?

Or does Churchill need to think it over again?

PS - Mr. Cooper, does the three-post limit apply across two-part postings?

[Green Dem]

I don't know. This whole thing struck me as ridiculous 48 hours ago, and 24 hours ago, and still today.

Why?

Leftism has not genuinely posed a threat to the survival of bourgeois capitalist democracy in the west since the 1930s. Indeed, now it poses a threat to the survival of bourgeois capitalist democracy exactly nowhere.

If Churchill was a radical Islamist, he would be a genuine subversive in early 21st century America (in addition to being a bigger douchebag than he already is), because the threat of the radical Islamist ideology coming to power in a significant swath of the Muslim world is probably quite real, and clearly they have little use for us.

Until the left can offer not only a compelling, holistic narrative different from the bourgeois capitalist democractic one, and a compelling, seductive program that people actually *care* about, not only moonbats like this guy, but leftism generally won't matter.

[Green Dem]

PS This is not to say that I wouldn't love for the left to be vital, which is to say *dangerous* again, and for the powers that be to quake in their boots when we ride into town, but come on everyone that just ain't the case. The closest thing the left has to dangerous anymore is those people who go and live in trees that are slated to be cut down, or their douchey cousins who burn down Hummer dealerships.

No, really...

This guy is a gnat.

[Chris]

I listened to recorded speech, yesterday, that Churchill made in 1996. It's still available online here in MP3 format:

http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=10461

He's a good speaker, and lays out a good case on why the conquest of the native americans should be called genocide. I have not read any other of his writings, but after listening to that speech, i think he deserves to be heard, despite what Mr. Burke says.

[Wagner James Au]

> why the conquest of the native americans should
> be called genocide

You're not reading Mr. Burke carefully enough:

"What are the sources, in a purely historicist account of ethics, of a belief in the sanctity of human cultures, or a belief that it is wrong to colonize or practice what Churchill would call genocide? Churchill, like others who write within his intellectual tradition, has no way to explain the genesis of his own political and ethical position."

This more or less boils down to, "How can Churchill say he's a victim of Western genocide, when he's here in the West condemning the West with Western ideas?" (Well, turns out Churchill isn't actually an American Indian, but you get the idea.) The argument is self-refuting.

[chris]

By that argument, you could say that the holocaust was not genocide, because it did not kill all the jews in Europe.

Just because all the native americans are not dead, does not mean genocide was not committed.

[Jim Rockford]

Excellent post, I'd like to add a few things:

1. The lack of a civilized debate across the ideological spectrum WITHIN Universities makes granting both tenure and Chairmanship to a fraud like Churchill inevitable. Michael Belisles, Churchill, and at least one other person made up whole frauds of either their research (Belisles on his gun book, he cited documents that did not exist and could not produce research notes or raw data with lame excuses; Churchill and one other in self-aggrandizing biographies). This also has the effect of making intellectual theories on the Left more fragile and incoherent, since they lack the rigor of civilized but partisan criticism shaping them into more robust theories.

2. Universities and Colleges lack widespread public support, in part because they ARE openly hostile to the interests and basic assumptions of most Americans. Green Dem's wish for a holistic alternative to bourgeois capitalism CAN be found in the Academy, with one anti-American/capitalist screed after another. After a while, folks wonder why their taxes go to people who hate them and everything they stand for. And thus vote against bond measures or taxes for higher education.

The University of Colorado is going to hurt for a generation after this debacle, believe you me. EVERY politician with an ounce of savvy will run against the spectre of Ward Churchill, and the pseudo-Marxist stuff peddled therein. To the extent that Dems can pinned to Ward Churchill, it hurts them as well. A pity since Salazar showed that Western conservatism at it's best (emphasis on freedom, responsbility, caring, the environment) is fertile ground for Democrats.

I'll say I part massive space with Green Democrat philosophically. I do NOT want an alternative to bourgeois capitalism. That's already been tried and found wanting in freedom, justice, and humanity. What I want is the current system made better. I suppose there is a huge disconnect between the Academy, which largely finds the current system flawed, and wants it replaced with some sort of Puritan-Secular Utopia (Winthrop's City on the Hill); and the townies who also see a flawed system, but want to improve not throw out the current arrangement.

Enough evidence suggests that Rev Dr. King's approach (fix don't throw out) gives better results than Pol Pot's or Mao's have ever done. Sadly most of the Academy has not realized the true "revolutionary" of the Twentieth Century was not Mao, Lenin, or Stalin, but a humble and brilliant preacher from Atlanta who by embracing the best of America and the old time religion changed the world.

Sad isn't it ... how much he's forgotten, in the rush to embrace every crackpot theory that feeds the need for opposing the system instead of making it better? It's not surprising though. Rev Dr. King's views would not sit well with much of anyone, even (or particularly) within the Academy.

[anothersteve]

Just a couple of comments on Burke. One, for all his posturing about the need for scholarly standards, he is not a very clear writer. For example, he uses the word "unthoughtfully" when "thoughtlessly" is much more appropriate. The other thing is that he really never demonstrates why Ward Churchill's writings are so bad. That would require a concrete analysis of "Little Matter of Genocide" or "The Cointelpro Papers," which would be too onerous a task for our Swarthmore professor. He prefers to adopt the stance of the elephants who sniffed at Dumbo, "He's not good enough to be part of our crowd."

[Oscar]

Having looked at Glenn Reynold's academic papers, I feel that the snarky comments about him being a hack like Churchill are unfounded, but what do you expect from a thoughtful leftist?

Seriously, Burke's general point is well taken: Churchill's position may well be a danger to the system which allows hims to flourish, particularly in state schools.

[docob]

Reynolds is definitely not a hack, and doesn't deserve to be grouped with Limbaugh and O'Reilly.

[too many steves]

I think Burke is on to something when he exposes the lack of rigorousness (god I hope that's real word) exemplified by the Churchill matter.

He seems to argue that this is systemic. I'm not sure I agree with that, while accepting the evidence provided that most (all) of Churchill's writings are a minor reformulation of a single elemental idea, and the retreat of Academia to a position behind the wall of the First Amendment; as illustrated by his defenders.

Burke (and Cooper) makes a very strong case that a system that allows a lier like Churchill, who is also a pretty pathetic example of rigorous scholarship, to ascend to a tenured position and chair of a department, and to be invited to fairly prestigious institutions like Hamilton College, is, at best, sloppy.

[Gan Nima]

Max Sawicky made Glenn Reynolds look foolish about a week and a half ago.

[richard lo cicero]

i'll be glad to jump on the group dump on churchill just as soon as Jerry fallwell has to step down from all posts and is banned from the media for suggesting that 9-11 was god's wrath for abortion and homosexuality.

[Gan nima]

THen who would Larry King have to interview?
How many dead GIs in Iraq today by the way?

[reg]

"just as soon as Jerry fallwell has to step down from all posts and is banned from the media for suggesting that 9-11 was god's wrath for abortion and homosexuality."

More recently the popular, pro-Bush talk-radio figure, Michael Savage, has celebrated the tsunami as God's wrath on Muslim fanatics and countries engaged in juvenile sex-trade. He's not tenured, so a public move to dump him from any and all venues other than his own web-page and other self-publishing shouldn't be controversial (there may be similiar contract issues - I obviously am not privy to all details).

Certainly The National Review, Weekly Standard, etc. etc. should be calling for this guy to be boycotted from the airwaves for going far beyond the bounds of decency. I haven't read any comments by Jim Rockford (who celebrates indiscriminate bombing of civilians for purposes of "regime change", a' la Curtis Lemay) or John Moore (who celebrates "scientific" racism, a'la Murray/Jensen) dissociating themselves from Savage to date. Shouldn't they and other hysterical right-wing scolds cleanse their own house of a mass media figure heard daily by hundreds of thousands of their brethren in the conservative camp before they waste time weighing in on obscure crackpot-left professors who only a handful of folks had even heard of until he became a far-right cause celebre to leverage against liberal academics.

[jim hitchcock]

You're goading again, Reg.

But the obvious response to that would be that the message of wingnuts like Savage wasn't aimed at captive, `impressionable', developing young minds. Plus, the tenure argument.

Now, if somebody would only come with V-chip implants...

[Gan nima]

"I haven't read any comments by Jim Rockford (who celebrates indiscriminate bombing of civilians for purposes of "regime change", a' la Curtis Lemay) "

You seem to forget mr. reg that our lives are infitinitely worth more than their lives. isn't that obvious from watching the corporate news channels? And we at least apologize after we kill thousands of people in poor countries that are 100 times weaker than us good guys.

[Michael Hardesty]

Thanks, Marc, for your comments on Ward Churchill.
If anything you understate the case against him.
He is a white man who has been playing wannabe Indian for decades in an attempt to cash in on
what Norman Finkelstein has correctly labeled
the holocaust industry. Churchill has opposed
free speech rights for holocaust revisionists
and so I shed no tears for his. He's another
hypocritical Left Stalinist and his "scholarship"
is dismal, as I can attest from reading two of his
books plus his rantings at Z, where I also contributed to half a dozen times in the past.
I know the Chomsky-Cockburn clique will pump this
for all its worth but it has even less merit than
Mumia, where one could rationally argue for a
new trial. I used to entirely disagee with you
on Mumia until he pulled that stunt of getting
some phony to "confess" for him, too much even
for Leonard Weinglass, his attorney.
I do not want my tax dollars going to support
some object like Churchill.
Thanks again for being a sane voice on the Left.

[Mavis Beacon]

I had so much to yell while catching up on the last two posts and comments, but now that I’ve reached the end I find myself fairly calm and measured.

There are really an immense number of stereotypes about academia floating among these hollowed blog halls: John Moore is angry that academics make more than engineers; Jim Rockford suspects Rev. Martin Luther King’s views are repugnant to professors and worries colleges are unpopular-probably because of the “sick skein of Anti-Semitic, anti-American hatred” (despite that fact that, in 2000, 70% of high school seniors attended college undeterred by said hatred), and Marc derides, “There is something really, really repugnant about a professor who has to work maybe 9 hours a week for a lifetime of comfy tenure, sucking off the tit of a public university…”

This represents a really silly slew of accusations, unworthy of this space. Most of the points you all try to make can be argued for without this kind of drivel.

(John Moore: I don’t understand how you can promote the efficacy of the Bell Curve and descry the discrimination practiced by the academy in the same post.)

[Andrew]

I have to agree with Mavis' comments regarding the off-target comments regarding this immense thing we call "academia"--honestly, I don't know if we're experiencing the same world. In the academic world I inhabit, all my peers and faculty work from early A.M. to late P.M., all four seasons. My fellow graduate students and I compete for very few academic jobs (which is why we consider industry jobs, as well), but still love what we do in spite of the obstacles. The lazy tenured professor is an outmoded stereotype, certainly among the new Gen-Xers joining the ranks of assistant professors. And finally, on this public university campus, I have seen as many prominently posted ads for speakers such as Ann Coulter and David Horowitz as I have radical lefties. Oh, and that's not to mention the Jesus groups on campus. At least in this university I can find extremes on both sides of the spectrum, rather than just one.

The point? Let's rein in the over-generalizations.

[reg]

"...a really silly slew of accusations..."
"Let's rein in the over-generalizations."

Party poopers...you obviously fail to understand we're dealing with The Hydra-Headed Red Campus Menace of Academic Neo-Marxist Identity Politics, Post-Modern DeConstructionist Relativism and Anti-Western, Anti-Semitic Moral Equivalence here. It must be stopped by any means necessary from destroying the very foundations of our civilization.

[Markus rose]

Louis Proyect has written a long response to Burke's post on his web page. In it, he calls you a member of the limp left and says you're rapidly turning into the American version of Norm Geras.

Cockburn's also getting into the ring to defend Churchill over at Counterpunch.

I dig these guys - they should form a tag team called "stalinists with balls."