Ward Churchill - Professor Pinocchio

The President of the University of Colorado has recommended that tenured professor Ward Churchill be fired.

This seems like a good time to go over what I see as the reasons why and why not.
Let's start with three issues that should have nothing to do with his firing:

1. His views about 9/11, ranging from crackpot conspiracy theories to repulsive metaphoric links of victims to Nazis, should not be grounds for his firing. A professor should never be fired for his or her political views, however outrageous they may be. Of all places in our society, the university must be open to the greatest diversity of ideas.

2. The First Amendment to our Constitution does not protect him. The First Amendment prohibits the government from interfering with speech and press. Although the FCC, with Congressional support and urging, violates this Amendment almost every day, neither one of them is going after Churchill. Universities should indeed encourage and enforce a maximum openness to speech and ideas - see #1 above - but this flows from university tradition and culture, not the First Amendment.

3. Tenure does not protect him. Tenure is often wrongly portrayed in our popular culture as giving its recipients immunity from being fired for any reason whatsoever. Not true. If a professor has tenure in a department which loses all of its students, and the professor has competence to teach in no other area, that tenured professor can be fired. Also, if a tenured professor commits a crime, or more to the point here is guility of fraudulent scholarly conduct, he or she can be fired.

Let's look at that last point, which in the university's view - based on its reports and the President's statement this morning - warrants Churchill's firing. Assuming the claims about Churchill's conduct are accurate, I agree.

Churchill is accused, among other things, of plagiarism (passing someone else's research and work off as his own) and its reverse, sock puppetry (passing your own voice off as someone else's). Either charge, if justified, would be ample grounds for Churchill's dismissal. Most people understand why plagiarism is wrong. What's up with sock puppetry?

I first became aware of the term almost a year ago on Wikipedia - where articles are edited, and can be removed, by group consensus. In this environment, an editor A logging on to Wikipedia under a false identity B, and arguing that A's point is brilliant, is clearly destructive to the system. Digg is beset by sock puppetry, too, but since Diggs and Buries are more the result of raw votes than protracted discussion, it takes a big number of sock puppets to do any real damage. (Meat puppets are real people who create accounts on an online system solely to support another person. Although they can distort online consensus-building too, the ethical violations of meat puppetry are far less clear than those of sock puppetry, since you can't know for sure what the meat puppet really believes.)

Back in the analog world, a scholar employing a sock puppet identity to support his or her work is the most damaging of all. At least on Wikipedia, a wrong decision made under the baneful influence of sock puppets can be easily reversed. A scholarly reputation in the real world and all that comes with it - including tenure at a university - can take much longer to undo, if necessary, because sock puppetry was part of its basis.

I am not directly privy to the facts in the Churchill case. But if it is indeed true that he even once wrote under a false identity to support his scholarly work, the University of Colorado should cut its ties to him and throw him out the door faster than a broken Pinocchio.