In this excellent NRO article Victor Davis Hanson ponders the Ward Churchill case. Worth reading.

Back in the mid-90s, there was a famous hoax perpetrated on the lefty Duke University journal Social Text by a physicist named Alan Sokol, who sent in a completely absurd piece written in leftist jargon, in which he said that gravity was merely a social construct. It showed how easily leftist academics are hoodwinked. The same phenomenon is at work here. Whatever this Ward Churchill fellow may actually think, he realized that he had a good chance of landing a high-paying university spot just by saying all the right things for multiculturalist ears with enough brazenness, and donning the trappings of a member of an oppressed minority. I’m not suggesting that Churchill meant to pull a hoax on the University of Colorado (but wouldn’t it be a howler if that were the case!), but only that the same mindset that would accept and publish Sokol’s stupendous hoax will grant a tenured professorship to a charlatan who affects to be things he is not.