Give me the Churchill treatment

By David Yeagley
Front Page Magazine

The University of Colorado has announced its decision to fire Ward Churchill, the man who has faked being Indian, produced erroneous scholarship, and even been accused of plagiarizing art. If CU-Boulder is willing to fess up to the fact that they paid a fraud $100,000 a year to hate America in the name of American Indians, why don’t they try hiring a real Indian who loves America? I have academic credentials and more years experience teaching at the college level than Churchill did before he was hired. 

Of course, I would have to make a few demands: CU would have to offer me the same privileges it gave to Ward Churchill. Here are my propositions, based on what CU’s own committee found. To get the full Churchill treatment, I would demand: 

• $200,000 a year starting salary. (Hey, at least I’m a real Indian.)
• immediate tenure upon signing the contract. After all, I do have a doctorate. Churchill does not, yet was given immediate tenure.
• the right to teach courses wholly unrelated to my degrees. Churchill taught “ethnic studies,” yet his master’s degree (from the early 70’s) was in communication. Therefore, I would expect the privilege of teaching Vietnamese floristry, Incan herbalist lore, or fashion photography criticism – beginning, say, with the work of Firooz Zahedi.
• the right to plagiarize in all my scholarly works, las the group found Churchill had plagiarized Canadian professor Fay G. Cohen, (Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia), then apparently threatened her, as he apparently threatens anyone who opposes him; it also states he plagiarized Canadian environmental group Dam the Dams Campaign and that he plagiarized Indian author Rebecca L. Robins the year after her essay was published. 
• the right to plagiarize artwork. The study reported Churchill mirrored the artwork of Thomas E. Mails, and before that had copied a historical photograph of Charles M. Bell, and then pawned this work off as Churchill originals.  In 1990 Churchill was blocked from selling his “work” as Indian art. 
• the right to have my third wife hired with me, in the department in which I teach.  Natsu Saito (Japanese), Churchill’s latest wife, was hired to teach in the Department of Ethnic Studies along with him.
• the right to be continuously investigated for 15 months, and then only after my viciously anti-American remarks (like blaming the victims of 9/11 for the attack) have received international coverage and disgraced the university.
• I demand all the details of my plagiarism and false scholarship be published in the national press for those 15 months, without repercussions. I also reserve the right to make “inflammatory and irrelevant” remarks to all who oppose me, and to freely threaten female opponents, and yet to be respectfully treated by committee chairs like Marianne Wesson, chair of the committee who examined Churchill.
• the right to create false information, and false research, the way Churchill fantasized about non-existent “blood quantum” statements in the 1887 Allotment Act, and in the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act, and the way he completely fabricated “historical” information about “small pox infested blankets,” saying Capt. John Smith committed genocide against the Wampanoag in 1614 and that the U.S. Army did the same against the Mandan in 1837. 
• the right to be recognized as the true champion of free speech and academic freedom. When students at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, along with Rep. Steve Nass, protested the speech of Churchill in March 2005, Chancellor Jack Miller declared that the “academy is at its best when it functions as a forum for the free exchange of ideas...The university must follow its conscience.” And Churchill was apparently that conscience.
• the right to enjoy this infamy with a stream of steady speaking engagements at $50,000 a pop.

All this is only right, fair, and just. I’ve already demonstrated “grace under fire” when I was dismissed from Oklahoma State University-OKC for promoting patriotism. I didn’t file suit, even though I had Governor Keating’s support. I wasn’t investigated. I was simply ousted without fanfare. It would be much safer to hire me.

So, now I demand full acknowledgement, full recognition, and full compensation. Academically qualified patriots have a right to honor and a life of fame and fortune, too. And real American Indians have the same right to professorships at American universities that phony ones do.

If jobs were based on merit, I’d be a shoo-in. And if academia were as beneficent to conservatives as it is to hate-America leftists, I’d know what treatment to expect after I was hired.