March 31, 2005
Ward Churchill and The 9/11 Essay
The University of Colorado has released a preliminary review of its internal Ward Churchill Investigation While it argues Churchhill's essay is protected by "academic freedom," the report suggests further investigation into questions of plagarism continue.
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February 15, 2005
Historians Under Attack
It is now a given that academic research has been corrupted by corporate influence. Lawrence Soley’s Leasing the Ivory Tower, demonstrated how right-wing organizations have created a network of campus-based think tanks dedicated to spreading conservative philosophy. Geoffrey White’s Campus, Inc. portrayed how government legislation, such as the Bayh-Dole Act, allowed corporations to use the university as an incubator for scientific research – research that is seen as the private property of the corporation and therefore not made public for the common good. As reported by Jon Weiner, author of Historians in Trouble, corporations have now expanded their reach beyond simply injecting the profit motive into academic research. Corporations are now infringing on the very concept of free speech by harassing scholars and issuing subpoenas to university professors who document corporate abuses and potential illegal activities.
As Jon Weiner writer in The Nation:
Twenty of the biggest chemical companies in the United States have launched a campaign to discredit two historians who have studied the industry’s efforts to conceal links between their products and cancer. In an unprecedented move, attorneys for Dow, Monsanto, Goodrich, Goodyear, Union Carbide and others have subpoenaed and deposed five academics who recommended that the University of California Press Published a book Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. The companies have also recruited their own historian to argue that Markowitz and Rosner have engaged in unethical conduct. Markowitz is a professor of history at the CUNY Grad Center; Rosner is a professor of history and public health at Columbia University and director of the Center for History and Ethics of Public Health at Columiba’s School of Public Health.
According to Weiner, Rosner and Markowitz first initiated a study of vinyl chloride and its cancer causing possibilities when they were given access to company documents first made public in response to a civil lawsuit. Apparently, the strategy of the corporate lawyers was to “bury� the lawyer with paper. This strategy backfired when Rosner and Markowitz used the materials to demonstrate companies were aware as early as 1973 of the cancer causing properties of vinyl chloride.
Weiner believes the companies response to the research is not hard to grasp. The corporations “face potentially massive liability claims on the order of the tobacco litigation if cancer is linked to vinyl chloride-based consumer products such as hairspray. The stakes are high also for them, because when authors are charged with ethical violations and manuscript readers are subpoenaed, that has a chilling effect. The stakes are highest for the public, because this dispute centers on access to information about cancer causing chemicals in consumer products.�
The effect of these subpoenas and ethical charges of ethical is to create an atmosphere hostile to free speech and anti-corporate research. Weiner quotes the words of subpoenaed Blanche Wiesen Cook, Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City Univeristy of New York, former vice president for research of the AHA, award winning biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt. Cook calls such“harassment [an attempt] to silence independent research� and an effort to create a “chilling effect on folks who tell the truth.�
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December 5, 2004
An NCTE resolution about DP Benefits
A colleague at another institution (actually Morris Young) sent me this proposed NCTE resolution about not hosting the NCTE conference in states that have anti-gay marriage laws, specifically "constitutional amendments that ban domestic partner benefits." Should CCCC consider somethign comprable? This would mean that CCCC would not come to my current home state, Ohio, but I could live with that. Thoughts?
***Because NCTE has a history of and commitment to social justice and to speaking out against discrimination in many forms, and because NCTE supports teachers and students of diverse backgrounds, I propose the following Sense of the House Resolution.
I move that NCTE not hold its Annual Convention in states that have passed constitutional amendments that ban domestic partner benefits and infringe upon the rights of committed gay/lesbian couples and diverse families.***
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