The New Criterion

That’s Ward Churchill, not his illustrious namesake, Winston. The former “ethnic studies” professor at the University of Colorado is rapidly disappearing down the memory hole, but his odious comparison of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to Nazi bureaucrats will forever have a place in the library of morally obnoxious, pseudo-academic Newspeak. Churchill’s boutique radicalism rendered him a darling of the left-wing professoriate. There is nothing special about “ethnic studies” on college campuses. It is just one more outpost of rebarbative politicized sloganeering masquerading as scholarship. The late Kingsley Amis once observed that the word “workshop” summed up a lot that was wrong in the world of culture. The mantle for that distinction has been passed on to the word “studies.” Women’s studies, ethnic studies, black studies, LGBTQ studies: intellectually it’s 0 + 0+ 0 = ...

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