So why is the latest recommendation such a depressing development? Because it undermines the united front that CU - that any university - should present to a member of its community who indulges in academic misconduct that includes plagiarism and the falsification of the historical record. Secondly, because the recommendation is yet another piece of evidence that a significant portion of the CU faculty rejects all meaningful accountability.
After all, the committee freely acknowledges the gravity of Churchill's transgressions. It concludes that he "committed multiple acts of plagiarism, fabrication and falsification." It says his behavior falls "below minimum standards of professional integrity" - the minimum, mind you - and therefore "requires severe sanctions."
And yet for three of the five committee members, a one-year suspension qualifies as "severe."
Why such leniency? Because while the Churchill case "shows misbehavior," the committee concluded, it is "not the worst possible misbehavior."
We wonder what the committee has in mind. Does a professor have to shoot someone? Commit a rape at high noon on the middle of campus? We are at a loss to determine what academic crimes have to be committed to get fired. Churchill’s major crime was not that he called the people who died on 9/11 “little Eichmanns.” That’s par for the course in academia.
He lied about his heritage – the Indian tribe he claims to be part of denies it – in order to become a department head. He has copied art from other artists and passed it off as his own. He falsified information about historical events when he wrote his “scholarly” papers. In other words he is an academic fraud. Yet the committee proposes that CU should continue to have on its faculty a person who is a proven and unrepentant liar. Is it possible that the professors at CU are challenging Duke’s faculty for the most witless moral cretins in the academic universe?
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