Posted: Fri 25 Feb 2005 00:02 Post subject: White Guilt Runs Amok - the Ward Churchill Case
Quote:
Ward Churchill: "White is a state of mind. It's not a gene code, by the way. You've got to choose to act white in order to be white."
Ok. How does one "act white"? If Churchill is trying to imply that being "white" is the equivalent of being an "oppressor" of someone not "white," then no leftist should call him or herself "white."
One MAJOR problem on the Left is the tendency to reduce moral arguments to a matter of "more white" versus "less white," with the latter assumed to be right and the former assumed to be wrong - evidence be damned.
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Code:
Ward Churchill Gets a Warm Welcome in Speech at U. of Hawaii
By SCOTT SMALLWOOD
Chronicle of Higher Education
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Honolulu
Standing in front of a crowded auditorium here on Tuesday night, Ward Churchill didn't look like a professor who had received 100 death threats just a few weeks ago. That's what happened the last time he was scheduled to speak on a college campus. But this time, the four leis draped around his neck made him look more like a visiting dignitary than a treasonous professor, as he has been labeled.
Who says people hate this man? Maybe back on the mainland they do. There, his calling victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center \"little Eichmanns\" led to a rough reception.
It was just four weeks ago that the three-year-old essay in which he made that remark sparked a national controversy, and prompted Hamilton College, in upstate New York, to cancel his planned speech. It led to thousands of negative e-mail messages, hundreds of newspaper articles, hours of talk-show ranting, and calls for his firing. More recently, Denver reporters have been investigating his Indian heritage, his scholarship, and how the professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder received tenure.
But for his first campus visit since all that happened, he traveled to the University of Hawaii-Manoa -- about as far as you can get from Hamilton College and Bill O'Reilly and still be in the United States. And out here, the people loved him.
They loved when he called the American populace \"a willfully ignorant, self-deceiving public that celebrates the obliteration and carnage of others because they devalue them to the point of being not human.\"
They loved when he said, \"White is a state of mind. It's not a gene code, by the way. You've got to choose to act white in order to be white.\"
And they really loved it when he said that the United States \"has never had 15 minutes of its history when it was not butchering some people for its perceived interests somewhere. ... This most peace-loving country has never experienced peace.\"
Quaint Protests
There were, of course, some protesters. Remember, this man's words angered so many people so much that Hamilton officials feared his scheduled speech on their campus would lead to violence. Given that, the protesters here in Hawaii seemed almost quaint. They didn't chant or wave their signs. Instead they taped them to a nearby wall. One read: \"Churchill Does Not Speak for Hawaii.\" Another said: \"The 9/11 Victims Were Heroes. You're a Disgrace.\"
Kimberly Craven, a senior at the university and leader of the Hawaii College Republicans, helped organize the protest. She said she was opposed to bringing the professor to the campus because she believes he sympathizes with the enemy. \"It seems very similar,\" she said, \"to bringing the Japanese emperor to campus during World War II.\"
Among the hundreds of the supportive and the curious trying to cram into the auditorium an hour before the speech were a few who believed Mr. Churchill was, in the words of one woman, \"a creep.\" Patty Hustace, who graduated from Hawaii, heard about the event on the radio and had to come down to voice her complaint. \"He thinks the terrorists are heroes,\" she said.
Yet the largest problem was not those who thought he shouldn't be there; it was the hundreds of people who wanted to get in but couldn't. A young boy sat on a man's shoulders to get a better view. One man waved a sign picturing the now iconic image of a hooded Iraqi prisoner at the Abu Ghraib prison. Stuck outside the doors of the auditorium, they began chanting \"move it to the steps.\" Inside, Ruth Hsu, an associate professor of English who helped organize the visit, kept explaining that plans for an overflow room to broadcast a video feed of the speech had fallen through.
After a Hawaiian chant opened the event, a small woman hobbled to the podium, using a walker with tennis balls on the two rear feet. Yuri Kochiyama, the 83-year-old civil-rights activist who was by Malcolm X's side when he was killed, introduced Mr. Churchill, comparing him to Malcolm X and Che Guevara and calling him a \"warrior\" who \"speaks the truth.\"
Then, after a standing ovation, Mr. Churchill began his first speech on a college campus since becoming -- depending on one's point of view -- the nation's current cause célèbre of academic freedom or its foremost example of a leftist professoriate run amok.
Deadly Bureaucrats
The professor is a tall man, with an immediate presence. Wearing a navy-blue T-shirt, jeans, and a black sport coat, he spoke rapidly and passionately. His is the confident voice of someone who gives dozens of speeches every year.
He explained the origins of his essay. It was written at the suggestion of the publisher of an online journal in the 12 hours immediately after the September 11 attacks. He explained how he saw the attacks in the context of a history of U.S. aggression -- from Vietnam to the Philippines, from Wounded Knee all the way back to Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam.
And he elaborated on his reference to Adolf Eichmann, who orchestrated the transport of Jews to concentration camps under Hitler. \"Eichmann,\" Mr. Churchill said, \"symbolized the people that worked under him in his little bureau, that performed the technical functions with great proficiency of arranging the train schedules, the shipment of gas, the transshipment of gold from teeth, never stepping close enough to smell the stench of rotten death, never ever killing anyone, being perfect little bureaucrats.\"
And he explained again that he did not mean that everyone -- the passers-by, the children, or the janitors -- fell into that category. \"Obviously, that's not who was at issue,\" he said. \"The Eichmanns were the investment bankers, the Eichmanns were the traders, the Eichmanns were those who didn't even necessarily agree with U.S. policy in the Middle East or Southeast Asia, but embraced the system and made it function so the results would accrue.\"
The crowd loved it when Mr. Churchill railed against \"the urinal sort of journalism.\" They loved when he joked about Bill O'Reilly or Paula Zahn. They laughed when he mocked Thomas Brown, a Lamar University professor who has charged that Mr. Churchill's research is fraudulent. (Mr. Churchill dismissed the claim with one sentence: \"He found a footnote he disagrees with.\")
When the audience got a chance to ask questions, no one talked about the controversial essay. No one questioned the \"little Eichmanns\" reference. One person asked him to clarify his position on the use of violence. (He said that defensive violence could be justified.) More common, though, were the questions that began with favorable comparisons between Mr. Churchill and Crazy Horse.
'I'm Going to Butcher Them in Court'
Before the final standing ovation, he argued that attempts to silence or fire him were the beginning of a widespread \"purge\" of the academy.
\"No less than Newt Gingrich said, 'We're going to nail this guy and send the dominoes tumbling,'\" Mr. Churchill said. \"'And everybody who has an opinion out there and entire disciplines like ethnic studies and women's studies and cultural studies and queer studies that we don't like won't be there anymore.'\"
Mr. Churchill defiantly said he would fight for his job: \"If they try to deep-six my ass, I'm going to butcher them in court.\"
He then concluded the speech with a rousing endorsement of academic freedom. That's what the coalition of departments and professors at Manoa said they were defending when they scrambled to raise the several thousand dollars it cost to bring Mr. Churchill to Hawaii. (He was not paid an honorarium.)
\"I never set out to be a poster boy of academic freedom,\" he said. \"They selected me. And I'm going to stand on the principle. I'm going to stand on the issue because to give an inch is to give away something that we cannot afford to lose, and when I say 'we,' I mean all of us in the academy. Whatever your interest is in the academy, if you let this one go down you've lost it all.\"
Immediately after the speech, Mr. Churchill and his wife, Natsu Saito, left to catch an overnight flight back to Colorado. By the time the crowd cleared out of the auditorium, the protesters were long gone. One group of men outside debated theories that the World Trade Center attacks must have involved bombs, not just planes, because fuel fires alone could not have melted the steel frame of the buildings. A few students nearby agreed that Mr. Churchill had \"kicked ass.\"
Just one sign remained. Instead of those deploring the terrible, enemy-loving professor there stood a single poster: \"Collateral Damage Every Day in Iraq.\" Down in the right-hand corner was a color photograph of an Iraqi man cradling a dying boy.
Rocky Mountain News
Paul Campos: Truth tricky for Churchill
February 8, 2005
The deeper one digs into the Ward Churchill scandal, the more amazing the story becomes.
Academic freedom must be protected, which is why I'm continuing to write about this matter. A version of academic freedom that protects Churchill from appropriate sanctions isn't sustainable either as a political or an ethical matter.
Consider: Churchill has constructed his entire academic career around the claim that he is a Native American, yet it turns out there is no evidence, other than his own statements, that this is the case.
Churchill has said at various times that he is either one-sixteenth or three-sixteenths Cherokee, yet genealogical reporting by the Rocky Mountain News and others has failed to turn up any Cherokee ancestors - or any other Native Americans - in Churchill's family tree.
Why should we care one way or another? We should care because Churchill has used his supposed Indian heritage to bully his way into academia. Indeed Churchill lacks what are normally considered the minimum requirements for a tenure-track job at a research university: he never earned a doctorate, and his only degrees are a bachelor's and a master's from a then-obscure Illinois college.
Churchill's lack of conventional academic credentials was apparently compensated for, at least in part in the eyes of those who hired him at the University of Colorado, by the "fact" that he contributed to the ethnic diversity of the school's tenure-track faculty.
To the extent that Churchill was hired because he claimed to be a Native American, he would seem to be guilty of academic fraud. But the situation is worse than this.
Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar University, has written a paper that outlines what looks like a more conventional form of academic fraud on Churchill's part. According to Brown, Churchill fabricated a story about the U.S. Army intentionally creating a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan tribe in 1837, by simply inventing almost all of the story's most crucial facts, and then attributing these "facts" to sources that say nothing of the kind.
"One has only to read the sources that Churchill cites to realize the magnitude of his fraudulent claims for them," Brown writes. "We are not dealing with a few minor errors here. We are dealing with a story that Churchill has fabricated almost entirely from scratch. The lack of rationality on Churchill's part is mind-boggling." (Brown's essay can be read here: http://hal.lamar.edu/~browntf/Churchill1.htm.)
Similar charges have been leveled against Churchill by University of New Mexico law professor John Lavelle, a Native American scholar who has documented what appear to be equally fraudulent claims on Churchill's part regarding the General Allotment Act, one of the most important federal laws dealing with Indian lands. (Lavelle also accuses Churchill of plagiarism).
The saddest aspect of Churchill's case is that, in regard to his identity, he might not be guilty of fraud in the narrowest legal sense. According to the News, Churchill has been claiming to be a Native American since his high school days in Illinois. It may well be that by this point he has genuinely convinced himself that he actually is an Indian.
Of course some people believe they're Napoleon. But that's not a good reason for giving them professorships in French history.
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.
Campos: Real question is, how did prof get on CU's faculty in first place?
By Paul Campos
February 5, 2005
Should a serious research university consider hiring a fascist? This question doesn't have an easy answer.
After all, prior to World War II Europe produced several brilliant political theorists and philosophers who could be characterized as fascists, or proto-fascists, including Joseph de Maistre, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger.
Whether, post- Auschwitz, it's possible even in theory to advocate similar views in intellectually plausible ways is an interesting question.
It is not, however, a question that has any relevance to the case of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, despite the obvious fascistic streak in Churchill's writings and public performances.
As a political inclination and an aesthetic style, fascism is marked by, among other things, the following characteristics:
The worship of violence as a purifying social force. This often manifests itself as an aggressive and romanticized militarism, that produces a kind of cult of the warrior, and that advocates violent action as a mechanism for social change, and an appropriate way of crushing dissent.
A hyper-nationalistic ideology, that casts history into a drama featuring an inevitably violent struggle between Good and Evil, and that obsesses on questions of racial and ethnic identity.
The dehumanization and scapegoating of opponents, who are characterized by turns as demonically clever conspirators plotting to undermine the possibility of a virtuous society, and soulless automatons mindlessly carrying out the orders of a vast and evil bureaucracy. This dehumanization often leads to demands that the evil in our midst be eradicated "by any means necessary," up to and including the mass extermination of entire nations and peoples.
The treatment of moral responsibility as a fundamentally collective matter. The supposed virtues and sins of a nation or people are ascribed to all of its individual members, so that, for example, one speaks of "the Jew" (meaning all Jews collectively and each Jewish person individually) being responsible for the decadence of modern culture.
Anyone who reads widely in the collected works of professor Churchill, and especially anyone who listens to his speeches, will, if they are not blinded by certain ideological commitments, recognize the essentially fascist tendency of his work. If a white American were to speak of any foreign people or nation in anything like the way Churchill discusses America and Americans, the fascist character of his work would be obvious to everyone.
This point is only underlined by the behavior of Churchill's supporters, who, while not actually wearing brown shirts, did a quite convincing impersonation of fascist thugs at Thursday's meeting of the University of Colorado Regents.
All this was merely par for the course for Churchill, who believes that a Columbus Day parade is an incitement to genocide, and therefore something that he and his followers have a legal right to disrupt.
But while the question of whether a brilliant scholar with a fascist streak ought to be considered for a place on a university faculty retains at least some academic interest, it has nothing to do with Churchill, whose writings and speeches feature an incoherent farrago of boundless paranoia, wildly implausible theories, obscene celebrations of murder, and atrocious prose.
The question of whether a serious research university ought to hire someone like Churchill is laughable on its face. What's not so funny is the question of exactly how someone like him got hired in the first place, and then tenured and named the head of a department.
That, in the end, is a more important question than what will or ought to happen to Churchill now. Churchill is a pathetic buffoon, but the University of Colorado is far from alone in having allowed itself to toss intellectual integrity and human decency overboard in the pursuit of worthy goals.
Speaking truth to power, giving a voice to those who have been silenced, pursuing controversial and unpopular ideas in an intellectually rigorous way - these are all things that the university in general, and this university in particular, has done and continues to do.
That through whatever combination of negligence, cowardice and complicity we have allowed Ward Churchill to besmirch those ideals by invoking them in the defense of his contemptible rantings is now our burden and our shame.
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.
Posted: Fri 25 Feb 2005 00:40 Post subject: The Real Indians Reply to Churchill
Quote:
Churchill's identity revealed in wake of Nazi comment
Indian Country Today February 03, 2005.
Posted: February 03, 2005
by: Editors Report / Indian Country Today
A public speaking engagement at an Eastern college has turned hotly controversial for Ward Churchill, a professor and until last week the chairman of Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Churchill, a self-professed American Indian, is a prolific and highly polemical writer on Indian issues. Shortly after the murderous attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 in New York, Washington, D.C. and over Pennsylvania, Professor Churchill widely circulated an article in which he compared the victims of those attacks to Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann, and to all appearances called their horrific deaths a ''befitting ... penalty'' for the ''little Eichmanns' ... participation.''
This week the Boulder professor's public representation of the 9/11 victims became the focal point of a serious broadside. New York's Governor George Pataki chastised Hamilton College for inviting a ''bigoted terrorist supporter'' to ''a forum.'' Hundreds of 9/11 survivors have similarly protested to Hamilton College for hosting such a person, and the furor has already forced Churchill to give up his department chair, as he wrote to his superiors: ''The present political climate has rendered me a liability in terms of representing either my department, the college, or the university.'' The university will allow Churchill to keep his teaching position, which is tenured but not safe from a frontal campaign such as Churchill is likely to continue to face. The focus of calls now is for Churchill to resign or be fired from his tenured position.
The case of a professor or any other American exercising the right of free speech is always important to us. We support that fundamental right more than any other and believe that even the extreme views of others (which sometimes become mainstream) must be defended against any force that would silence our First Amendment rights as citizens and as free human beings.
The nature of Churchill's decidedly offensive remarks, however, forces us to critique in general the injurious approach to scholarship and basic human decency. We defend the right to broadcast and publish, but propose it is reprehensible to excoriate innocent human beings who have suffered great loss by rubbing salt in deep wounds simply to prove a political point and simply to strike (one more time) a political posture on behalf of the far left and under the guise of American Indian sentiment. Wrapped intimately with American Indian themes in his writings and lectures, and shielded apparently by his own American Indian Movement (AIM) security team, Churchill projects the image of the quintessential American Indian activist and/or warrior - angry, defiant, insulting, forceful and accusatory. Churchill sometimes captures the historical truth of a thing, but only to load it like deadly ammunition into his ideological machine gun.
In our own pages this week, Churchill asserts that his remarks have received ''widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage.'' No doubt, this is happening and a good range of commentators will have a heyday with Churchill's attitude on the issues of terrorism, and the causes and justifications he has professed for the attacks of 9/11. No doubt, he will be vilified for his anti-Americanism and his scholarship and there will be much misinformation about his positions. A careful reading of his article on the subject, however, gives a clear sense of the gist of Churchill's words; and we submit that any reasonable and decent human being would find them to be disgusting and cheap words, a callous insult to the dead and wounded in the horrific events of that fateful day.
Being in the crucible of hostility is not new to the chip-on-the-shoulder professor, who has become a celebrity for jumping into the polemic melee over issues big and small, internal and external to the Native world. Even in the question of personal identity, the professor's position is controversial. Churchill's Indian status is not verifiable in the usual ways of checking into tribal membership. We are expansive here from a national position on recognized and non-recognized tribes, southern nations and global indigenous people, but the question of relations and proper belonging in the tribal circles in the United States and Canada is generally verifiable for Indian observers and such appears to be completely lacking in Churchill's case. He has claimed membership in the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee, but reliable representatives from the tribe deny Churchill is or ever was, or has blood relatives on their rolls. He was granted an ''associate certificate'' by a former leader of the tribe (later impeached) for services supposedly rendered, not due to blood relations - but even the tribe declines to exactly identify what that means.
Discerning indigenous identity is not an exact science, but it has its rules. It would not be a primary issue relative to research and writing of producers from any quarter, except Churchill represents himself as a major spokesman for Indian people through his participation in a branch of AIM and his claim to Cherokee origins. So far, nothing whatsoever has surfaced that gives evidence to Churchill's claims to having Cherokee Indian origins. Given the intense antagonism and attention focused on Churchill, his biography in this context is likely to be further scrutinized by the University of Colorado, the media, and others who were led to understand he was an American Indian professional at the time of his hiring.
In the Native Studies field, Churchill has been one of those scholar-spokesmen who lead with the idea that Indian peoples are best served by constantly pushing the button of contradiction and the memory of every ill that has ever been inflicted against the tribes. To endlessly cite the misdeeds of the American Empire - while layering the legend of Nazi Germany over it - has the constant method of the Churchill scholarship. Producing a stream of abundant texts all wrapped around his brand of anti-colonialist rhetoric, Churchill has been - by far - the loudest and most obvious remonstrator against the Euro-American Empire's historical (and contemporary) evils inflicted on Native peoples. One can argue Churchill has projected the image of an angry Indian who became notorious for being in the face of non-Indians as much as possible - even though the evidence builds that he is, himself, non-Indian.
Churchill has made a reputation and a career out of these themes and in some circles has come to represent the Indian view to various national and international publics. This is unfortunate for the vast majority of Native people who do not at all share in his opinions about the brutal murder of some 3,000 innocent people during the events of 9/11. Churchill has claimed the media is now misquoting him and he is even parsing ''technicians'' (his bad guys) from the ''janitors, service people, etc.'' (his good guys). It doesn't play any better that way.
Here is what we read in his original article, perhaps the more troubling for his own admission that it was written in a ''stream of consciousness'' expression. Churchill, about the victims of 9/11:
''True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the 'mighty engine of profit' to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to 'ignorance' - a derivative, after all, of the word 'ignore' - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see.''
The victims' crime, according to Churchill, was to be ignorant of the crimes of the American Empire. This ignorance of real international reality, he further recriminates, was ''likely ... because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants.'' For this, the logic apparently follows, they deserved to be murdered.
This is the clincher of Churchill's troublesome message, which has him now running up a tree from the barking dogs: ''If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.''
In our opinion, Churchill hurts himself with this kind of callous thinking. This is not the way to represent American Indian peoples. What Churchill and his thinking-cap buddies seem to miss is the necessary and much more compelling need of the families and communities of Indian people to find a way forward for the survival and prosperity of their future generations. Men and women leaders who understand the world and actually represent bodies of social and political life never take this type of insulting tack.
Churchill's remarks on the subject reflect easy ideological posturing in the face of horrible personal tragedies that befell so many families. His lost real point, that Americans need to pay more attention to the suffering they cause in the world at large, has been made by others in much more perceptive and eloquent ways, so that those who should hear it most will be able to receive it more readily. The Churchill approach -- to beat the audience over the head with his arguments, as if people had no right to make their way in the world as best they can, for their families and tribes -- has always been counterproductive. These days, it has him in serious hot water.
We will defend a good Indian argument in these pages any time. But, again, there is no evidence that Churchill is Indian. Further, Churchill's statements are obviously devoid of even the most basic humanity that American Indian peoples hold dear. In no way does his insult reflect the views of Indian country. To know the response of Indian country to the 9/11 tragedies is to reflect on the humanitarianism shown by Eastern Native communities: from the Mohawk to the Oneida, the Pequot, Mohegan and many others who immediately put their people - ironworkers, ferry-boat crews and medical personnel - into the rescue and recovery operations, to the California Indian nations that expressed their solidarity with America and donated generously to the rescue efforts, to the Lakota families who brought their Sacred Pipe to pray at the site, leaving their quiet offerings early one dawn. This is always the preferred way of human beings - to understand the kind of empathy required to belong to the human race is essential in all political and economic discourse. To call the people who were murdered on Sept. 11 ''little Eichmanns'' is a hideous expression that when combined to Churchill's mistaken Native identity can only poison the public discourse concerning American Indians.
Churchill writes that his life has been threatened since the controversy began over his published characterizations of the 9/11 victims. Churchill deserves police protection. We applauded the initial steadfastness of Hamilton College in sponsoring the forum and initially sustaining a First Amendment position on the controversy, yet understand that security concerns did cause the cancellation of the event. Now Colorado Governor Bill Owens has requested Churchill's resignation from his teaching position. The hounding of the professor intensifies.
Ward Churchill would do himself some good to express a profound apology to people he has offended and misled. He should also come clean about his appropriated American Indian identity. This is not advice he will likely take. Churchill has jumped on the cougar of controversy ever since he came onto the Indian scene as Russell Means' main speechwriter in the early 1980s. Churchill thrives on riding that controversial cougar, but this time he poked it in the eye.
Posted: Mon 28 Feb 2005 19:54 Post subject: Another extreme case of \"white guilt\"
Tim Wise promotes the idea that blacks are helpless creatures who can't be held responsible for their actions while all "whites" are all-powerful. He usually tries to make his point by citing the privileges of millionaires and billionaires and presenting them as representative of "whites" in general.
Churchill assails call to defend heritage
CU administrators are urged to drop the investigation of the tenured professors academic work and ethnicity claims.
By Amy Herdy
Denver Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 05, 2005 -
An attorney for University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has accused the university of "the grossest violation of due process and fundamental fairness" in the handling of Churchill's case and asked that the complaint against him be dismissed.
In a letter sent to the university Monday, attorney David Lane also asked for clarification on how the university would like Churchill to prove that he is truly an Indian in order to defend himself. Part of the inquiry now underway by the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct is to determine whether Churchill used a false claim of Indian heritage to gain an audience for his books and papers.
Lane's letter devotes little space to responding to university complaints that Churchill had plagiarized other scholars or engaged in shoddy research, writing that "Professor Churchill can easily refute the substantive allegations of the report."
Instead, in a broadside that may indicate the aggressive posture Churchill will take in his defense, the letter devotes almost four of its five pages to an attack on the university's effort to investigate Churchill's ethnicity.
In a series of references to infamous historic efforts at defining race, Lane asks rhetorically how the school intends to prove whether Churchill is part Indian, as he has maintained in the face of questions about his background.
"Do you wish to employ the Nazi standard for racial purity? ... Do you wish to employ the standard adopted by the United States government for determining Japanese ancestry in order to qualify for internment? ... "
CU-Boulder interim chancellor Phil DiStefano, who was part of the three-person committee that referred complaints about Churchill to a standing committee on misconduct, declined through a spokeswoman to speak about the demands made in the letter.
Churchill's scholarship and ethnicity came under scrutiny after it was discovered in January that he had compared some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Since then, the university has determined that his opinions about the victims are protected by the First Amendment.
CHURCHILL CONTROVERSY
Essay & statements
Click here to read Ward Churchill's controversial 2001 essay, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" as posted on a third-party political website. (The Denver Post does not endorse the content of the website and offers the link solely as a service to readers.)
Click here to read Churchill's Feb. 1 statement on the controversy.
Click here to read the University of Colorado Board of Regents' Feb. 3 resolution on the controversy.
Click here to read the Colorado House of Representatives' Feb. 2 resolution condemning Churchill.
Click here to read Gov. Bill Owens' letter on Churchill.
Click here for an archive of 9News coverage of CU controversies.
But DiStefano and two other administrators recommended that his academic work and ethnicity claims be further investigated by the committee made up of faculty and staff to see whether they meet the standards for a tenured professor.
On Monday, Lane challenged anyone who would question Churchill's ethnicity.
"It's offensive he's being asked to show his pedigree," Lane said. "Is he really a registered dog with the American Kennel Club?"
Meanwhile, Churchill filed a motion Monday in federal court for Washington state seeking to protect his right to speak this morning at Eastern Washington University.
EWU officials had previously canceled Churchill's appearance, citing "security concerns," said attorney Scott Wheat, who filed the motion on behalf of Churchill and three others.
EWU officials said they were hoping to defend their decision in court as soon as possible, adding that they intended to allow Churchill to speak to a classroom full of students this morning but not to an auditorium full of people. The president of that university, Stephen Jordan, is a finalist for the position of Metro State College president in Denver.
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