I argue here that Colorado’s canning of the con-man is only the first step the university should take.
The focus ought to turn now to the “Ethnic Studies” department (and then all the rest of the various “Studies” departments) to chop out those parts that have nothing to do with knowledge, but are just opinion-mongering. In a paper the Pope Center published in 2005, Melana Zyla Vickers concluded that that was pretty much the case with regard to Women’s Studies programs in the UNC system.
When was the last time a tenured professor was fired for academic fraud? So far as I’m aware, it was Michael Bellesiles at Emory, whose book Arming America, immediately a hit with the anti-gun crowd, was found to be intellectually dishonest through and through. Melissa Seckora wrote about it for National Review here.
At Colorado, as university president Hank Brown wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The panels found that Mr. Churchill rewrote history to fit his own theories.” That’s exactly what Bellesiles did. Professors can hold whatever views they choose, but should stick to the facts when teaching classes and writing what purport to be scholarly works.
