Shamed pseudoscholar Ward Churchill - that charming mix of self-proclaimed Native American, left-wing militant, radical feminist, 9/11 Truther, and every other oppressed subgroup fashionable in identity politics - has finally been terminated.

Remember - though his politics are distasteful to most, the impetus for his discipline came from scholarly plagiarism and fabrication. I don’t care how inflammatory or mundane your politics are, there’s no place in scholarship for cheating.

There’s no need for me to parse Churchill’s circumstances [I highlighted Anne D. Neal’s take on it a few weeks ago]. That one’s been around the Victrola more than a few times. There is, however, an excellent - and, at times, troubling - discussion in the comments of InsideHigherEd.com’s coverage of the firing. One need not be a particularly interested party to find value in the exchange.

Robert at Casting Out Nines threw his hat into that comment ring and gives his opinion, as well as some reasoning for his comment on IHE, on his own site.

UPDATE at 7.26.07, 4.18pm: Want to know why UC President Hank Brown terminated Churchill? Read his explanation called “Why I Fired Professor Ward Churchill” on the Wall Street Journal Online, no subscription required.

And, since I’m feeling slightly pedomorphic and snarky this afternoon, I can’t help but post the following video - it’s not unlike Ward Churchill’s wake-up call when the ruling came down from the Board of Regents. [If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, just give a click here]

Anne D. Neal has written an excellent piece on Ward Churchill, discredited professor of God-knows-what at the University of Colorado. I was disappointed when Churchill gained public attention because of his politics; while troubling and unsound, his political views aren’t the real problem with his place in academia.

Ward has been proven to be a meritless scholar with no business teaching others. He lied, plagiarized, fabricated research, and cheated a University and its students out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in resources and wasted time. To put it more succinctly, he defrauded their entire system and then pleaded for leniency based on academic freedom.

Neal sees through it all:

When the Boulder campus’s Standing Committee on Research Misconduct issued its report on Churchill last summer, it unanimously found Churchill guilty of severe, sustained, and deliberate breaches of professional integrity. It further noted that the evaluative system that nurtured and rewarded Churchill needed an overhaul…

… Of course, Churchill and his defenders claim that Colorado’s two-year investigation was an assault on academic freedom because it arose from a public scandal about Churchill’s speech. Churchill’s lawyer even suggested to The Rocky Mountain News that “[a]ny discipline is wrong” in this case. But to suggest that notoriety somehow exempts Churchill from scrutiny is risible. Scrutiny should be applied to scholarly work – as a matter of practice …

… As the decision-making process winds down in Colorado, Churchill’s career hangs in the balance. But so does the integrity of academia.

I don’t think that Neal overstates the importance of this case. The rabid comments at the end of the piece suggest that we’re in the minority, though.

Also, take a look at The New Criterion’s quick take on the reasoning that underlies Churchill’s punishment-to-be. Maybe there isn’t as much hope as I thought.