h/t to reader Hank (no relation) Riehl, who found my blog a while back via Instapundit, todays Rocky Mountain News details the latest scandal surrounding Ward Churchill. Apparently he claimed ownership at different times and with different versions of a circa 1970's environmentalist tract which claimed there was a secret plot to damn Canadian rivers and re-direct them to the US and Mexico. The "plot" was so wild, even the original conspiracy theorists later disowned it, but that didn't stop Churchill from perpetuating the myth right up until 2002 under his own name and or a related organization.
... those reading Churchill's articles as late as 2002 could have been led to believe that a monstrous disaster was on the verge of happening.
So, what was the nature of this round of freedom of expression?
He's a bit embarrassed about it now, but 33 years ago, Ulrich Wendt was convinced that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers intended to flood much of northern Canada ...
But Dam the Dams (Wendt's organization) disbanded a few years later, Wendt and other former members said, no longer fearing what it once thought was an evil, imminent plot.
"If you've read our pamphlet, you know our paranoia at the time," said Wendt, who lived near Thunder Bay, Ontario, when the group was based there. "But our organization died a natural death a long time ago because it turned out there was nothing to it."
Enter Ward Churchill two decades later ...
Nearly two decades after Dam the Dams released its pamphlet outlining the ill-fated plan, he (Churchill) republished virtually the same work, eventually claiming it as his own...
In 1989, Churchill published a version of The Water Plot with the same structure, language and information found in the original. He credited that piece to Dam the Dams and his own research organization, Institute for Natural Progress.
In 1991, Churchill took sole credit for another version of The Water Plot that was largely identical to the 1989 version. In 2002, he published a third version of the essay under his own name...
The discovery of the striking similarity between Churchill's essays and the Dam the Dams pamphlet comes as the University of Colorado's standing committee on research misconduct investigates a plagiarism charge against the tenured ethnic studies professor, as well as other allegations of research misconduct.
In the case before the committee, officials at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, contend that an essay on Indian fishing rights - which also was published under the name of Churchill's institute - plagiarizes an essay from a professor there. Churchill has said he never claimed to have written the fishing rights essay, but merely "prepared" it.
It's unfair to paint all scholarship by liberals with too broad a brush, but there's little doubt that Churchill's brand of scholarship shouldn't have a home in any legitimate academy. Evidently the tenure jury is still out.
Hmmm, you think if all this finally comes to roost that he'll have to end up writing speeches for Joe Biden?
Posted by: David | Saturday, June 04, 2005 at 01:51 PM