CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Ward Churchill in 2006, before he was fired from the University of Colorado. Thomas Boyd/Zuma

Ward Churchill died last week at the age of 79. The following is an interview I conducted with Ward in 2014, nine years after he was the talk of Fox News and the target of a concerted campaign to remove him from his teaching post at the University of Colorado. He was no longer living in Colorado in 2014, but he was still defending himself and his scholarship. I caught up with Churchill to see why we hadn’t heard much from him and whether the right-wing (and liberal) assault on his character had finally forced him into retreat. RIP. – JF

Joshua Frank: Ward, your name hasn’t appeared on The O’Reilly Factor in a while. What’s been keeping you busy these days?

Ward Churchill: It’s been eight years since I was the principle focus of O’Reilly’s anally-compulsive attentions, Joshua, so your question covers a lot of ground. The university “investigation” of my work took up an ungodly amount of time during the first couple of years, of course, and after that there was the trial, the various appeals, and so on. The process of “exhausting my domestic remedies” wasn’t really wrapped up until early February 2013, when the U.S. supreme court finally denied cert on the preeminent legal question raised by my case: Whether a nonjudicial governmental body like a university board of trustees can be “quasi-judicially” immunized against the consequences of a unanimous jury verdict holding that the entity involved knowingly and deliberately violated the constitutional rights of a citizen for purely political reasons.

Add in the fact that I moved to Atlanta about a year ago, and that getting resituated down here after more than forty years in the Colorado/northern plains region turned out to be a lot more demanding than I’d anticipated, and the result is that, although I’ve invested a huge amount of time and energy doing research and writing since 2005, relatively little of it’s been for publication. Or at least not yet. The upshot is that I’ve got a half-dozen books in varying states of completion and, now that the smoke’s beginning to clear a bit on the legal front, I figure to finish them pretty much one after another, at a fairly regular rate, over the next couple of years or so. It’ll probably be more like three years before they’re all in print.

None of this, by the way, should be taken to mean that the so-called firestorm of controversy in which I was enveloped during the spring of 2005, or any of the ensuing academic/legal bullshit ever caused me to stop publishing altogether. A relatively low rate of publication for me is still a fair amount, which is to say that I’ve produced several major articles for journals and law reviews, a half-dozen book chapters, an essay-length entry for The Encyclopedia of the American Indian, a batch of intros, prefaces, and forewords to books like Stephan Sheehi’s Islamophobia and Daniel Burton-Rose’s Creating a Movement with Teeth, and a few other odds and ends since then. I guess you could even say I managed to come out with a book, if you want to count the double-header I did with Antonia Darder, organized and edited by Pierre Orelus under the title A Decolonizing Encounter in 2012.

Right now, I’m finishing up a chapter for an upcoming book coedited by Akinyele Umoja and Charles Jones on the late Kwame Ture. I suppose it bears mentioning that Kwame was far better known in the U.S. as Stokely Carmichael, the guy who popularized the term “Black Power” back in 1967. My piece concerns his relationship with and influence upon the American Indian liberation struggle, particularly during the 1970s and ’80s. I also just finished a shorter piece on the Lynne Stewart case and the broader issue of compassionate release for terminally ill political prisoners that was to run in 4Struggle Magazine, to which I’ve lately agreed to be a regular contributor. Lynne was just released, though, so I expect that one is destined for the circular file. Maybe I’ll end up reworking it at some point, because the broader issue hasn’t exactly gone away.

JF: I notice you made no mention of public speaking. You used to do quite a lot of it, as I recall. Do you still?

WC: Nowhere near as much as I was doing prior to 2005. That, in part, is because I’ve been administratively blacklisted on campuses nationwide. There’ve been a fair number of instances in which I’ve been lined up by faculty and/or students to deliver a lecture and college or university presidents have directly intervened to prevent the event from happening. In a few cases, the organizers took such abridgments of their own intellectual rights seriously enough to force the issue and staged the events anyway, but usually not. The meekness with which tenured faculty members have typically submitted to administrative dictates in situations like this has been quite enlightening, and speaks volumes to the state of “academic freedom” in the contemporary U.S.

Both politically and psychologically, it’s of course been necessary that the folks I’ve just described, especially those claiming a liberal pedigree, advance some other, more palatable explanation of their behavior and its implications. Most often, this has taken the form of their citing some supposed defect in my scholarship and/or my “abrasive style,” either or both of which were ostensibly pointed out to them after their invitation was extended, causing them to rethink the propriety of offering me a forum in a campus setting imbued with such lofty standards of scholarship and collegiality as their own. In the name of something like “quality control,” then, preserving the “academic integrity” of their institutions leaves them no alternative but to concur—always with the utmost reluctance, of course—and only in this particular instance, mind you—with the administration’s preemption of students’ right to hear and assess whatever I might have to say and customary faculty prerogatives in the bargain.

The upshot is that not only has a decided majority of the liberal professoriate exposed itself as being guilty of the most craven sort of capitulation vis-à-vis the principles they espouse and are purportedly prepared to defend, but the manner in which they’ve sought to rationalize the capitulation has served to lend a completely unwarranted appearance of “left wing” validation to the welter of falsehoods promoted on the right for purposes of discrediting both me, personally, and, more importantly, the kind of work I’ve been doing over the past several decades. All of that nonsense about my having perpetrated “scholarly fraud” and the like has been long since and repeatedly disproven, both in court and elsewhere—that’s a matter of record, easily accessible to anyone who cares to look—but they simply ignore such facts in favor of the convenience embodied in regurgitating the same old lies as a pretext.

None of this is breaking news, of course, or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s how blacklisting has always worked. Which means, among other things, that being blacklisted is in no sense an experience unique to me, either currently or historically. A lot of people have been blacklisted for one reason or another and to a greater or lesser extent over the years, and, as is readily evidenced by the examples of Norman Finkelstein and a number of others, that’s still true. It just happens that among the recent cases, mine has been especially high-profile, and is thus rather useful for illustrative purposes. So I’ve run down this aspect of it mainly to demonstrate to anyone entertaining doubts on the matter that not much has really changed in these respects since, say, 1955.

All that said, however, being blacklisted by the country’s self-styled guarantors of academic freedom accounts for only part of the drop-off in the number of public lectures I’ve delivered over the past few years. For one thing, I was already growing increasing weary of the lecture circuit before the Great Controversy commenced in 2005. I mean, I’d been speaking twice a week on average for nearly 20 years at that point, and was frankly sick of airports, motel rooms, and lecture halls. Literally so. Correspondingly, there’s a sense in which I’ve actually welcomed the drop-off. I’d undoubtedly have started cutting back on the number of speaking gigs I accepted, even without the Controversy and resulting blacklist.

I’m getting’ on in years, and the sentiment has grown steadily more pronounced. At this point, I absolutely will not set foot on an airplane in anything other than extraordinary circumstances—getting to Pine Ridge from Atlanta last October when I received word that Russ Means probably had no more than a day or two to live, for example. This is not because I’ve lately developed a fear of flying, but because I refuse to accept the dehumanizing treatment accorded passengers these days by the airlines. If I can’t drive my old pickup to wherever I’m going, well, chances are good that I just won’t go. True, The Authorities are doing their level best to make driving a miserable experience as well—them, and the oil companies and chain restaurants—but it’s still vastly preferable to flying. Or even entering an airport. Hard to do a lot of events on the West Coast under those circumstances when you live in Georgia, soooo…

The truth is that I’m basically doing as many speaking gigs as I want these days, and that allows me to be rather selective about which invitations I accept. I participated in a symposium honoring Russ at the University of Colorado/Denver in October, then drove on out to LA to deliver a lecture at Scripps College a week later. I’ll be delivering the annual Walter Rodney lecture at Atlanta University in February, and presenting at a conference at Oxford via Skype a few days after that. Last spring, I drove all the way up to Buffalo to give a talk at Burning Books a little infoshop, simply because I like what the people running it are into and wanted to support their effort. In November, I gave a talk at the anarchist book fair in LA. I might be inclined to do more speaking at political events, but I’ve been targeted for a bit of bad-jacketing on that front over the past couple of years. I can go into some of that a bit later, if you’d like.

JF: I would. But first, just so we’re clear, you mentioned that charges that you’ve engaged in scholarly fraud, plagiarism, and the like have been disproven, both in court and elsewhere. Could you go into the details of that?

WC: Sure. As concerns the “in court” part, I sued the University of Colorado right after I was fired in July 2007 on grounds that it terminated me in retaliation for my expression of political views—a violation of my rights under the first amendment—rather than any supposed “research misconduct.” That resulted in a four-week jury trial in March 2009, during which the university made its best case, bringing in most of the faculty members who’d comprised the committees that investigated my scholarship to testify as to the “facts” of my misconduct. Both they and the university’s attorneys also argued, repeatedly, that if I was guilty of even one of multitude of scholarly offenses the committee members claimed I’d committed, that in itself would be legitimate cause for the regents to have fired me. In effect, they trotted out everything they had while simultaneously hedging their bets. Pretty sound strategy, that.

But, you have to bear in mind that this was the first time any of these folks were forced into an arena where the university was not in complete control of the procedures involved, were unable to change the rules as they went along, and so on. It was also the first time any of them were subject to genuine cross-examination and to say they ended up getting their butts kicked is an understatement. You never saw so many red faces or heard so much sputtering in your life. Meanwhile, my own experts—who, unlike the university’s faculty hacks, actually knew what they were talking about, and who had the additional advantage of not having to try and defend a series of expedient fabrications—were in precisely the opposite situation. It wasn’t much of a contest, really, but I have to admit that there was some serious payback involved from my point of view, and that I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

In any event, having heard both sides in depth, and having been exposed to several thousand pages of documentation, the jury unanimously concluded in its verdict that the university had shown no cause other than objections to my political views for firing me. In substance, none of the charges of scholarly fraud held up to scrutiny. On the contrary, in a post-trial meeting convened in the judge’s chambers between the jury and attorneys for both sides and the jurors, the latter explained that they’d found none of the university’s witnesses to be credible. Not one. In fact, they said they’d made themselves a chart during deliberations and went through it, witness by witness. What they found was that every single witness called by the university had been caught in at least one outright lie, and in several cases multiple lies. At several points, the university’s lead attorney was also caught flagrantly misrepresenting his supposed evidence.

A couple of the jurors subsequently said as much on one or another among Denver’s endless spew of rightwing talk radio programs, and one of them, a young woman named Bethany Newell, summarized some of it in an interview with Westword, the city’s alternative weekly. I think the interview, along with a more sharply-worded affidavit Newill later provided my attorneys, and key elements of the judicial proceedings, are all posted on wardchurchill.net. That’s what I meant about the information being readily-accessible to anyone who cares to look.

JF: Let me stop you for a moment at this point. It seems clear enough that the jury’s verdict would serve to exonerate you of the scholarly offenses alleged by the university. But, then, the judge vacated the verdict, didn’t he?

WC: Yes, he did. But it’s important to understand that he didn’t do so on the basis that the jury somehow erred in its understanding either of the law or of the facts involved. The verdict therefore remains unaltered: I didn’t do what the university claimed I did—that was simply an elaborate pretext—and it violated my constitutional rights by firing me for the actual reasons involved. What the judge ruled was that such things were utterly irrelevant. Why? Because, he said, the regents enjoy “quasi-judicial immunity” from the consequences of their actions, at least when it comes to personnel matters. So, even though they’d plainly violated my constitutional rights by firing me, and had systematically defamed me by conjuring up the pretext of my supposed scholarly fraud, I had no legal recourse. In effect, I’d never had standing to bring suit........

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