commentary by Michael L. Bromley
copyright 2005

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... of Politics

Feb 8/05:  More on the University of Colorado and Hamilton College suicide pact...

In response to the so very appropriate outrage over the Wooden Indian, aka Bin Laden sympathizer Ward Churchill (see entry Feb 3), a real scholar, Thomas Brown of Lamar University, has made a preliminary release of his work,

The Genocide That Wasn’t: Ward Churchill’s Research Fraud
(with thanks for the headsup to poster "freespirited" at FreeRepublic.com here)

Brown introduces his stunning review of Churchill's long-running scam with,

This is a work in progress that I am making available due to the current interest in Ward Churchill’s writings. I show that Churchill has committed research fraud, and very possibly committed perjury as well. This article analyzes Churchill’s fabrication of a genocide. Churchill invented a story about the US Army deliberately creating a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan people in 1837 by distributing infected blankets. While there was a smallpox epidemic on the Plains in 1837, it was entirely accidental, the Army wasn’t involved, and nearly every element of Churchill’s story is a total invention. My goal here was to show how and why Churchill engaged in such blatant fraud, and why no one has challenged him on it until now.

Churchill, Brown concludes, operates by way of "oppositional identity" -- something you and I already know as teenage angst. Taking it well beyond adolescence, in Churchill it's a sickening manipulation of dissent for self-promotion:

One has only to read the sources that Churchill cites to realize the magnitude of his fraudulent claims for them. 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. Why would a tenured professor decide to make up data—perhaps the most scandalous possible abuse of the academy’s norms—especially when in the Amherst affair, Churchill had a verified example of precisely the type of incident he wanted to invoke for his polemic purposes? How did Churchill expect to get away with a fraud that is so easily detected simply by reading the sources he cites in his own footnotes?

The answer comes into focus when you consider that Churchill is not writing for a scholarly audience. He originally wrote this story to inflame the emotions of a jury. Churchill publishes the bulk of his essays in small left-wing presses or in obscure journals that lack a rigorous peer review. He is writing for a non-specialist audience that takes him at his word. Mainly, Churchill is writing for other Indian activists, and for the broader reading population of leftists.

Would that the other academic pretenders have that same decency Mr. Churchill has displayed not just to make fools of themselves but to prove it. Hamilton College's homegrown "oppositional identifiers" have washed their hands of him -- and, worse, have been allowed by the college to get away with it. The chief perp in all this  -- whom Churchill can thank for his current media roll, and his soon-to-be unemployment, has been let off all too easily: The New York Times paints her white with this story:

Unrest on Campus Over Speaker Who Sees U.S. Role in 9/11
For Nancy Rabinowitz, the Hamilton professor who invited Professor Churchill, the larger issue has become one of free speech. ...Rabinowitz said she found [Churchill's Sept. 11] remarks distasteful but decided not to cancel his visit. "It's part of a larger argument that what the U.S. has done around the world and at home makes for violence," she said, adding, "I'm not an advocate for violence."

Sure, Nancy, honey, you just let others do the violence and its advocacy for you.

Rabinowitz leads an inane crowd of hysterical feminists at Hamilton with whom I dealt as a student there in the early 1980s. I watched her and other "teachers" infect students, mostly girls, but not only girls, with a virus of self-loathing whose chief symptom was a feminist masquerade and a rejection of all things male. All things. They actually ran around campus blowing whistles at "known" womanizers. (That one was quite funny, actually! I'm afraid to say no one blew a whistle my way.) They actually protested the chapel and its steeple for being a phallic symbol. And, contrary to the statement by Hamilton's current president that,

Hamilton, like any institution committed to the free exchange of ideas, invites to its campus people of diverse opinions, often controversial.
(College Issues Statement Concerning Churchill Visit)

the Rabinowitz crowd damned well did shut down a campus visitor. I watched it happen. When the campus film society announced its intention to show a mildly pornographic animated film about the sex life, or, rather, its absence, of a rather pathetic member of the avian/aquatic species, the gender warriors took to outrage and shut it down. No diversity allowed when confronted by the "Dirty Duck."  Poor duck, all he wanted was to get laid... Of course the school employed the limp wrist and refused to back the film society, so I organized a showing of it "off campus" at my fraternity, and paid by non-campus funds. Fraternities, btw, were a few years ago kicked out, under the sickening theories of the uber-egalitarians and their forced parity, dead or alive, that the presence of fraternities was inherently unfair to women. So much for diversity, eh?

But there's good news in all this, especially in that Hamilton College has gotten precisely what it deserves: bad publicity. And, oh yes, we gave as good as we took back then. A giant snow penis we made for a freshman girl's birthday was untouchable as it was on private property. A professor, a classic, who lived down the road from our rented, private house, walked by as we were celebrating its magnificence (it made the college paper). He said nothing as he plodded along in his short, old-man's steps. We went silent. If he were offended, then we went too far. Head shaking back and forth, he got to the end of the property and turned to us, freezing us, beer or smoke in hand, like ice.

"Gentlemen," he said, shaking his head. "People around here haven't seen one of those in years."

Another day  I stood in his office looking out upon a circling protest of pickets and chants around the president's office. The old professor watched quietly, shaking his head. "What's the matter?" I asked, worried for what he was thinking. Eyeing one of teachers in the crowd, he said,

"That woman had her vagina filled with concrete when she was young. And we've all been paying for it ever since."

True story.

Thankfully, not all of Hamilton is so crazed as Rabinowitz & Co.  Here for an fine piece in The Washington Times by Hamilton professor of history, Bob Paquette

Of liberty and license

Professor Paquette -- whose class I never took because the Department chair (later the president of the College who shut down the fraternities) was my freshman class advisor and was such a prick I refused to take history at Hamilton* -- offers a perfectly marvelous synonym for practitioners of "oppositional identity":

infantile transgressives and unabashed cultural subversives.

Too good, Professor Paquette, too good! And thank you for standing up to the fools.

* The following year I got up the courage to try the History Dept., and signed up for a class on the French Revolution. It was taught through the eyes of a feminist-communist... Man, I fought for that C-minus.
 

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