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July 15, 2006
MIM investigated plagiarism charges against professor Ward Churchill and found them lacking and rather pointing to an ongoing criminal conspiracy against his civil rights. We will start with the narrow conflict with the University of Colorado and then proceed to a larger, more intelligent discussion.
On June 13th, University of Colorado's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct released a report. It is useful to start there to see what is not contested either by MIM or the University of Colorado.
First of all is timing. The report admits that no plagiarism complaint came to the University of Colorado until 2005, well after Ward Churchill's comments on 9/11 catapulted him to even greater levels of fame. For MIM, this is prima facie evidence that what we have here is not a case of plagiarism. Indeed, University of Colorado admits that one of the two plagiarism complainers never came forward but in fact filed that Ward Churchill is an ethnic fraud, the type of complaint the right-wing talk show hosts and other political enemies are making.
This leaves MIM with the University of Colorado's interpretation of the "Damn the Dams Campaign" controversy. We reviewed the University of Colorado report showing the similarities in writing in Ward Churchill's articles concerning the dam situation in a region of Kanada.
Here our first concern is why the University of Colorado chose history as its professional guideline for plagiarism. Did "Damn the Dams" or "Dam the Dams" think it was writing history when it gave Ward Churchill its leaflet: we believe that the University of Colorado knew very well that the activist group did not think of itself that way, and regarding Dam the Dams in that light is evidence of malice by the University of Colorado.
University of Colorado's complaint boils down to saying that Ward Churchill's footnotes referring to an article with Dam the Dams as a co-author of an earlier article were not enough. This is a subtle point. University of Colorado is not denying that Ward Churchill was an author of the original article published on the topic. We also have not seen University of Colorado deny Ward Churchill ownership. It is merely saying the original article had the "Dam the Dams Campaign" as a co-author that does not always appear in subsequent versions of the article.(1)
MIM's examination of Ward Churchill's footnotes shows that the first few were actually comments on the content of Churchill's own document. The first in the 2002 Struggle for the Land says,
This is not to say that everything is "okay" in the United States. For a succinct treatment of the relevant issues in the "Lower Forty-Eight," see Daniel McCool's Command of the Waters: Iron Triangles, Federal Water Development, and Indian Water.
These sort of footnotes are not really sources but recommendations for further reading. A later footnote again refers to Dam the Dams, but apparently University of Colorado says the footnote should have had greater prominence or listed Dam the Dams as a co-author.
Activists and intellectual property: University of Colorado's credibility
MIM knew right away that the "Dam the Dams" controversy was likely part of a criminal conspiracy, because MIM comrades come from backgrounds in single- issue movements. We know first-hand what it is like trying to get media attention for a good cause. People who have never done it probably haven't thought about the motivations for approaching someone like Churchill. We found it highly improbable that anyone in an environmentalist movement objected to Ward Churchill's publication of leaflet material--except maybe after 9/11 comments by Ward Churchill. In fact, we find it likely that organization activists tried to co-opt Ward Churchill or include him as a member. Even now that MIM has the most-read communist website exceeding traffic for Cuba's web page lately, we still find some reason that we ourselves would give Churchill documents to try to publish.
Thanks to Churchill the whole dams issue for Kanada is on bookshelves all around the world. Here we must digress again to what we know from experience. We have some criticism of anarchists here, because it is their lack of organizational accountability that makes these charges against Churchill possible. If MIM were to try to track down a stable organizational form for the dam-related environmentalist movement we would have trouble as a Google search would quickly reveal. The Ward Churchill case on the surface looks like another backstabbing by the environmentalist movement against the indigenist movement--or at least that's what the University of Colorado tries to create the impression of. It's an important political point, because it is evident that Ward Churchill took a risk out of a sense of duty to the movement. He took a risk that association with an amorphous movement would later be used against him--probably in part because Churchill has even more sympathy for anarchism and similar organizational ideas than MIM does. Rather than be attacked for that, he should receive a medal for going out on a limb for an important cause. What the University of Colorado is doing is nothing but a straight-up attack on the connection of scholars to movements that may not choose to organize themselves in manners suitable to university administrators. Hard as it may seem to faculty members, many activists write with the hope of hooking a greater audience by any means--and not to attain intellectual property. In addition, courts have already decided that organizations need not be transparent to government institutions such as the University of Colorado: the First Amendment guarantees people the right to organize themselves as they see fit-- including how they relate to Ward Churchill.
That is a problem in our proletarian movement globally, but it is really a digression from the University of Colorado's blameworthiness in the situation. While a whole cabal of armchair scholars might not appreciate the motivations of an environmentalist activist in enlisting Churchill's aid and doing so without a movement structure (yes, annoying and we don't agree with it, but it does happen often, a fact of life), we do know that the University of Colorado did not apply standards to itself that it applied to Ward Churchill.
The original 124 page report against Churchill said:
He maintains that the editor took Dam the Dams’ name off the essay without his consent. This claim, like many of Professor Churchill’s claims, is difficult to disprove.Yet when we go to find who in "Dam the Dams Campaign" said Churchill was plagiarizing them, we did not see the University report make a reference. (See page 83.) It appears that University of Colorado intends to promote anonymous charges without giving Ward Churchill the chance to contest the nature of the anonymous condemnation or its maker. In contrast, Churchill's response to the matter was much more straight-forward. Talk about "difficult to disprove": it's hard to disprove a phantom.
Then there is the matter of what the University of Colorado should know about the nature of journalism including libel, something that University of Colorado has done to Ward Churchill:
"Ideas and facts are never protected by a copyright. Rather, the copyright pertains only to the literary, musical, graphic or artistic form in which an author expresses intellectual concepts." (The Associated Press: Stylebook and Libel Manual Sixth Trade Edition, Norm Goldstein, Editor (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1996), p. 301.)
The 2002 edition of the same book says the same including:
The types of creative expression eligible for copyright protection include literary, graphic, photographic, audio-visual, and musical works.
Die-hard journalists who actually read competing news sources know that in the heyday of Reuters's competition with Associated Press, their articles were often almost verbatim copies of each other. The law protects "scoops," but not something like the Dam the Dams article, which has no claim to being art work or a first-time scoop anymore.
There is a good reason for the law on copyright and journalism. It would become difficult for various newspapers to comment on or report the same news stories if they ended up using similar words, because inevitably one paper would publish "first" on observable facts of say the bombing of Iraq. Making all subsequent writers "plagiarists" was not a good idea. In the case of history, it's often a case of writing an extended "scoop" using sources no one has bothered with perhaps for hundreds of years. So writing history is not really analogous to what Churchill did for the environmentalist movement.
MIM is not going to deny that someone like Charles Brennan(1) may not be informed about the law regarding intellectual property in journalism. Then again, many of the writers talking about Ward Churchill since 9/11 lack basic commonsense, not just a knowledge of the law.
Criminal conspiracy against civil rights
MIM is additionally suspicious of the "Dam the Dams" plagiarism controversy, because MIM has in recent months had two federal agents approach it and attempt to threaten it into compliant political behavior with references to potential plagiarism campaigns against MIM. We suggest to people attacking MIM that they better cease their criminal conspiracies. MIM knows what it is doing and does have the upper-hand at this time. We also anticipate quite a fireworks show if Churchill ends up in court.
A further point we will make is about University of Colorado's complaint that Churchill has not responded to some criticisms outside the university. When someone stands for as many clear-cut principles as Ward Churchill does, he attracts many enemies. By allowing people to go back and backstab Churchill over things they did not complain about at the time they were published, the University of Colorado encourages research misconduct and a popularity contest instead of the skilled tactics needed to reveal the truth at the right moment. Aside from the fact that time responding to some critics may not be well-spent when publication duty calls, no one knows better than Ward Churchill himself the nature of his opponents and their particular motivations. University of Colorado's approach would kill off pretty much any serious investigative journalism. We see how long it took for Watergate's "Deep Throat" to come forward and respond to public discussion of him. There is a correct timing for such questions and Ward Churchill is no doubt deep into an investigational process. Even some of his political critics allude to this when they refer to him as an ongoing military agent. Churchill should also think the same of his critics. Like it or not, there is the question of defending truth production in a politically charged atmosphere-- instead of denying that truth does emerge from such atmospheres.
The troglodytes pursuing Ward Churchill realized they could not win an upfront battle over politics or the First Amendment, so they turned to the tried-and-true white network to produce a different result.
What we see now is typical in the daily low-life of white collar politics. People who had worked with Ward Churchill in the past are being called on to withdraw permission to use their materials in an act whites usually call "Indian-giving." By this means of white collar politics, anyone's work can be destroyed. By simply going back to people interviewed or worked with, and persuading them that "Ward Churchill is a bad guy," it becomes possible to start the process of unraveling any social research. The real hotheads are asking for and abetting what may become perjury if it ends up in court.
What should be happening is a public denunciation of the conspiracy to deprive Ward Churchill of his civil rights. No encouragement should go to people who come forward with their little white collar backstabbing. Instead, the media and university are giving credence to the idea that Ward Churchill plagiarized himself--and crucially in a non-academic article in the case of "Z Magazine." Maybe next the University of Colorado will evaluate professors' comments to their spouses at dinner, and check the footnotes.
We at MIM are quite sure that academic authorities like Phil DiStefano realize that "Z Magazine" is not a source of tenure or career advancement. We're also quite sure that these same authorities realize that journalism is not subject to the same plagiarism rules as academic history. Because the authorities involved know very well that "Z Magazine" is extra-curricular, MIM sees further evidence of a conscious criminal conspiracy against Ward Churchill's civil rights. We are still demanding prosecutor action against DiStefano and others involved. The evidence continues to pile up without action.
We find it disingenuous in the university's report that just because such an article appears on a resume prepared by a university secretary, that suddenly we are to believe that academic authorities do not know which articles count for career advancement and which do not. They know very well, but they raise this issue in order to slander his professional reputation and discriminate against him in a way that has not happened to other scholars in the process of extra reviews started by his 9/11 comments. Professors earn their lifelong contracts through work leading to tenure. University of Colorado now tries to pretend it does not know that in order to assuage politicians in charge of their grants.
Notes:
1. For an anonymous discussion --apparently by surgeons--on the topic of
"self-plagiarism" including how common it is, see,
http://www.wame.org/selfplag.htm
2. MIM found one blogger using the same tactics as Charlie Brennan against
him. http://tryworks.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_tryworks_archive.html