Wednesday, July 25, 2007

The Fall of an Intellectual Thug

The University of Colorado has fired Ward Churchill, plagiarist, pseudo-American Indian, and intellectual thug.

In case you have not guessed, I am happy about that.

If a student had committed as much plagiarism as Churchill did, he would flunk the course. (My course, at any rate.)

Some people will try to argue that Churchill was fired for political speech, but he was not. Yes, as some of Ann Althouse's commenters note, the political speech may have caused his other behavior to be investigated.

It is sort of like being stopped for speeding after you robbed a bank.

I learned about Churchill's methods when I was a graduate student at CU-Boulder in the 1980s. He led the lynch mob against a religious-studies professor whose work on Native American religion displeased him, and he played the race card every chance that he had. What an irony that he was faking it.

Churchill wanted to be the dictator who could declare whose scholarship was politically acceptable and whose was not. I suppose that is why Russell Means and some other Indian activists are supporting him--they would like to have that power too.

More recently, the American Indian Movement has given Means the shove. And they have an interesting Web page on Ward Churchill, too.

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