Literary theorist and legal scholar, Stanley Fish, weighs in on the report of the “committee of faculty peers” that found Ward Churchill guilty of academic misconduct.
“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.”
In the New York Times column, Fish concludes his Churchill-exonerating analysis by claiming that he doesn’t question the integrity of the committee leading the witch hunt, excusing their dishonesty with “they just got caught up in a circus that should have never come to town.”
Apparently Stanley Fish didn’t see any of the lying douchenozzles on the stand, or read their vomit-inducing 125-page report trashing Ward Churchill’s 30-year stint as polemicist laureate. Still, I appreciate Mr. Fish setting the record straight: Ward Churchill is not guilty of academic misconduct. I hope David Lane, Ward’s wildly fabulous attorney, is gearing up to sue the stuffing out of the next bastard who publicly claims he is.
Yeah, but what if they stack the jury with folks like our one-person fan club in New York?
Larry DeWitt, a real doctoral candidate, unlike Ward Churchill makes far more sense than Fish…
http://hnn.us/articles/73908.html
I disagree with Fish—Churchill’s practice of using of articles that he himself wrote under others’ names as references to support his arguments is not merely shoddy work, it is deceptive. Very few professors have committed anything like this. This is serious fraud that is not commonplace in academia.
Fish did his undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his Ph.D. from Yale University. He taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University before becoming Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke University for more than a decade. From 1999 to 2004 he was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a Professor of Law at Florida International University, in Miami, and the author of 10 books.
And your “expert” is a “real doctoral candidate”? Wow. He’s about as impressive as you are.
Dan, you are not invited to slime my posts with your uninspired blather. You add nothing interesting or informative to the discussion and, while others may tolerate you for reasons known only to them, I won’t.
right on Marie!!!!!
Dan Chinitz writes ON ANOTHER THREAD:
Dude,
to participate at NMT we like to see some intelligence or at least intellectual honesty. We’re making a big exception for you, although we’re not all agreed as to why. For my part I enjoy how you discredit yourself with every utterance.
Your comments do not offer a difference of opinion. You do not illuminate, you simply rehash unadulterated pro-awfulness –by coincidence the same talking points that demonstrably uneducated, antisocial, morally-bankrupt xenophobes are using to justify neoliberalism.
Note: try looking up a word you don’t understand, sooner than firing off a confused comment to change the subject.
My recommendation, leave posts alone if you’re drawing a blank. Contradiction is not argument. Avoid, certainly, recommending hobbyist-clerks like DeWitt over roundly educated voices. Go stalk a culinary blog and see how long they tolerate you assailing every post with “Why do you hate cheeseburgers?”
But of course your directive would be: “Cheeseburger shit doesn’t stink.” That non sequitur has got to be getting old, even for you.