Stanley Fish Goes to Starbucks

In his piece in Slate yesterday, Ron Rosenbaum called attention to Stanley Fish's latest senile ramblings in the Times (here's the link, but you need to be a TimeSelect member). Rosenbaum does a pretty good job of eviscerating it, but I just felt the need to add a few thoughts of my own.

If this had simply been another case of an elderly, sheltered intellectual rambling, Grampa Simpson-style, about the confusions of the modern world, it would have made for good comedy. However, what takes it from comedy to ire-inducing insult are the last few paragraphs, in which Fish complains about having to pour his own cream and sugar: "And worst of all, what you're paying for is the privilege of doing the work that should be done by those who take your money."

This would be offensive enough if it were coming from any run-of-the-mill septuagenarian with a six-figure salary. But it has special resonance coming from Fish, who famously chaired the Duke English department during its heady rise to the forefront of Theory. Duke perfected gameplan of the Theory department: hiring highly-paid "star" professors, letting them do whatever the hell they want, and shifting the burden of dirty jobs like actually teaching to low-paid TAs. In other words, having the bourgeoisie espouse Marxism while exploiting the proletariat.

So, to summarize: Fish, public face for a group of academics who refuse to do the jobs they get paid to do, is complaining about Starbucks baristas making him stir his own sugar. Of course, if Fish ever bothered to teach an undergraduate class at whatever university is employing him this week, he would most likely recognize those baristas as his students, and realize that they are working at one of the most demanding service industry jobs available (you have to memorize a recipe book roughly the size of Paradise Lost-remember that book Stanley?-and be almost sickeningly chipper and energetic 8 hours a day) in order to keep from being buried in student loans for the rest of their adult lives. And where does that student loan money go? To Stanley Fish, who, instead of doing his job and teaching, is busy complaining about them in the pages of the New York Times.

I Come to Bury Ward Churchill . . .

The fraud that is Ward Churchill, university professor, is no more. For those of you late to the party, Churchill was a University of Colorado Ethnic Studies professor who turned into David Horowitz's wet dream after being invited to speak at Hamilton College two years ago. A Hamilton conservative group began circulating an essay Churchill wrote after 9/11, in which he famously called the 9/11 victims "little Eichmans". In the media shitstorm that followed, it was discovered that Churchill:

A) Had somehow become a tenured professor and chairman of the Ethnic Studies department with a six-figure salary despite only holding an M.A. in communications from from a hippie-dippy experimental college that did not assign grades.

B) Could not prove any of his claims to membership in three different Native American tribes. His claimed Indian heritage had been part of the reason he had got his job as a diversity hire, but the closest he came was an honorary membership from the Keetowah Band, which has since publicly disavowed him.

C) Had plagiarized his work and falsified and misrepresented his sources on multiple occasions.

It is this last point that finally got Churchill fired after two years of committee hearings and faculties reviews. But the first two points make it clear that he never should have had a job to begin with.

But that is neither here nor there. Because, as his well-intentioned but misguided supporters have frequently pointed out, this is "not about Ward Churchill". No, it is about the assault on academic freedom that it represents. According to his supporters, Churchill was not being fired because of his shoddy scholarship, but because of his political views. If he had not written his essay about 9/11, the investigation would have never began. If he is fired because of the investigation that his controversial statements started, it will discourage other professors from speaking truths that make people uncomfortable. . .

You know what, screw this. I was seriously trying to present the pro-Churchill camp's views in a serious manner before refuting them, but I can't do it. I really want to understand the pro-Churchill people, I really do. They include many people that I know personally and deeply respect, and I have spent the past two years trying to see what they see that I don't. But I simply can't do it. What is the lesson of Ward Churchill, what is his legacy in academia? Simply this: if you are lucky enough to hustle your way into a cushy, well-paying job you clearly are not qualified for and get by for fifteen years doing terrible work, keep your mouth shut. This is not about a scholar being punished for his controversial views. This is about a charlatan's idiotic statements finally drawing attention to his lack of credentials and bad scholarship and a University Board of Regents finally doing a job it should have done a long time ago.

Academics should be outraged about this story, but about its beginning, not its end. It should anger every honest, hardworking professor and graduate student that, in world where tenured jobs are increasingly hard to come by, this con man was able to steal a job from someone who was actually deserving of it. We should be on the case of the Colorado Board of Regents and the university administration, but instead of accusing them of being puppets for the vast right-wing conspiracy, we should be accusing them of incompetence in ever letting this idiot get by with his scam for so long.

And one final comment about that essay the essay that started all of this. All of the anti-Churchill people have frequently repeated that the firing was not about his political views, but about his shoddy and unethical work. However, it should be, at least in part, about that essay. Not about the position that it ostensibly represents: that U.S citizens should take a long hard look at the things our country has done to create the dangerous climate we live in today. That is an important and potentially unpopular position that should be explored. But it should be done by real scholars, and "Roosting Chickens" proves that Churchill is not a real scholar.

Anyone who has waded through the tortured prose of "Roosting Chickens" can see Churchill's lack of intellectual honesty. That essay proves that he is not about opening minds, but closing them inside of his ideologically-driven agenda. He is not a martyr to academic freedom, which is about protecting open and honest inquiry, but instead he is just the left-wing version of the anti-intellectual Bush administration neocons, who let no amount of reality interfere with their ideology.

Academia has too many problems facing it today for scholars to waste their time on idiots like Ward Churchill. He, as an American, of course has the right to say any idiotic thing he wants to, and his notoriety from this needlessly-prolonged nonsense guarantees that he will make a good living doing so, preaching to the far-left choir and being hailed as free-speech hero at Campus Green Party events and Rage Against the Machine concerts around the country. Good for him. But the rest of us, who aspire to be real scholars, need to work to protect our institution, from the likes of both David Horowitz and Ward Churchill.

Larry the Cable Guy Hates Our Troops

I am typically opposed to our government using torture, but everyone involved with this film needs a trip to Gitmo.

It's not enough that Dan Whitney has become a millionaire portraying a racist, homophobic white trash version of Stepin Fetchit, but now he has to insult our troops too, not to mention make a mockery of the disaster of historical proportions that our president has gotten us into? Whitney's target audience are the same people that elected Bush, now they're expected to laugh at the disaster they helped create? How come Whitney and the makers of this film get a free pass but John Kerry gets raked over the coals for one idiotic comment about the troops' intelligence? I am really just unable to process this.