Ward Churchill, con artist
Ward Churchill started out merely as an offensive windbag. Then, revelation by revelation, it became clear that he was a liar; and then a habitual liar. He appears to have lied about nearly everything: his ancestry, his job offers, his artwork, and now his writing, plagarizing the work of a Professor Cohen at Dalhousie.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s official; he’s a con artist (definition: a person who deceives other people by making them believe something false or making them give money away). Not to mention a bully, threatening the professor whose work he had appropriated.
Is there anything about Mr. Churchill that’s true? Until his whole house of cards came tumbling down, he must have been pretty convincing, like most con artists. Now his con could pay off even more handsomely, because there’s a chance he might end up not only getting his payoff and his golden parachute, but becoming even richer as a hero on the campus lecture circuit. Unless Professor Cohen decides to sue the pants off him for plagarism. Or unless the University of Colorado decides to stop feeding this particular alligator.
Question for soxblog and other Red Sox fans: Does the tale of Churchill’s hiring–that he was given the position without the proper vetting because he had received a competing offer from another college, and Colorado was loathe to lose him–remind you of the story the Sox told when they hired Butch Hobson as manager in 1992? I distinctly remember they said they were hiring the relatively young, unknown, and untested Hobson (he was pretty cute, though) because he was such a hot commodity that other teams were about to steal him away. Wonder if that tale was any truer than Ward Churchill’s?
UPDATE: Looks like Ward may be having a bit of trouble opening that golden parachute. See here. The article contains allegations (unproven as yet) that Churchill may also have a longstanding habit of threatening those he feels are about to blow the whistle on his con. Curiouser and curiouser.
Churchill seems to me to be a classic sociopath. For all its brains, the university is more easily scammed by such than any street cop or drywall crew.
With regard to affirmative action, under the guidance of EEOC, the University of Colorado feels that ‘after self-reflection’ you may define your own racial and gender identity for purposes of hiring. Nothing so disturbing as proof is required; it would be declasse even to offer to provide it.
You couldn’t set up a system more likely to be scammed (Dorothy Sayers) “if you thought about it with both feet.”
Any time – it’s not frequent – that I doubt the wisdom of the founding fathers, and think the checks and balances are so much condensed common sense, set up merely because anyone with the least experience of the world would set up such a system, I look at the University of Colorado and the United Nations.
I think it’s interesting no one has mentioned the words affirmative action.