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That's not an argument, just another cop out on your part.
No. It's more of a "Oh God, do I have to explain myself yet again to the person who seems intent on misrepresenting the argument".
I know you don't think you are doing that, but you are. This is what happens when you don't really understand the issue, Boris.
In addition, we have to suffer your smarmy sarcasm, but hey - you are a pretty poor player at that game too.
So let me explain this to you very slowly....
Churchill is not in trouble for being a plagiarist, he's in trouble for saying politically unpopular things. That should be obvious to anyone with even the most basic knowledge of the case. The problem is that the university, instead of protecting his right to say unpopular things (that old thing called Academic Freedom) has caved to the pressure and has been looking to get rid of him one way or another since this whole thing blew up.
That is despicable and frightening – and a total dereliction of duty on the part of university officials. It should concern every professor in the United States that academic freedom could be so easily undermined by a political campaign. It also shows up your comment that my fears are "Orwellian". That is of course an exaggeration on your part, but the example of Churchill (who was in deep trouble before the plagiarism thing even arose) shows that a campaign to oust someone because of their political views can come very close to working. Far too close for comfort.
If it does work, we can be sure it will be tried again, since the chief agitators for Churchill's removal have the stated goal of wanting to remove all those with similar views as "not being fit to teach our children". What makes this even more galling is that what Churchill actually said was basically true, even if expressed in undiplomatic fashion.
This is the context - the university wants to get rid of him to cover its own ass, despite this being against everything that universities are supposed to stand for.
So why shouldn't he be fired for plagiarism, even if he is guilty? Because he won't be being fired for plagiarism - he'll be being fired solely for his political stance. That is the reality, which should be obvious to anyone who has looked at the situation. Only a ****** would think that Churchill is being fired for anything other than his political stance.
You seem to think that it would be somehow righteous to let the university get away with censorship under the guise of enforcing some other rule. Perhaps if, as you say, Churchill was found to be guilty of some heretofore undetected and heinous crime like rape, then the case would stop being about censoring his views and be about this worse crime.
But it's not. They don't want to fire him for plagiarism, they want to censor him to remove political pressure from themselves. In the grand scheme of things rape is a far worse crime than academic censorship, but as it happens plagiarism is a far lesser crime than a university censoring its own professors.
Generally, it is immoral to allow one group of people to commit a worse act by appealing to the fact that someone else committed a lesser act. It's also immoral for employers to go on fishing expeditions to justify firing people when they, the employers, are at greater fault.
Consider the following example. I write for a Toronto newspaper and I publish a scathing expose of the dealings of the local council and assorted local dignitaries. My expose is accurate and true, if impolitely expressed. It creates a stir and there is intense pressure from powerful political lobby groups to have me fired for writing it.
The editors of the paper decide that they can't handle the pressure and so they cave. But they can't fire me for writing the article, because that's my job. After all, what's the point of having a newspaper if reporters can be fired for writing stories that are unpopular with the powers that be? So they start looking around for any reason they can find to fire me.
So they find some female employee who accuses me of groping her. This can be a sackable offence, but it depends on a lot of factors as to whether anyone would actually get sacked for it. But that doesn't matter: they now have their "reason" and I get sacked. But we all know that this wasn't the reason - the message gets out across town - expose the local powers that be and you will be out of a job.
Which is worse: someone gets away with groping someone else, or a newspaper gets away with censoring a reporter to appease local bigwigs, thus depriving the public of honest and accurate reporting? You can't have it both ways.
This is exactly equivalent to the Churchill case. Your position is to allow the university to get away with an egregious crime because you don't want Ward Churchill to get away with a lesser one - out of pure spite towards the man rather than any commitment to scholarship or any other value.
That makes you a despicable person.
Now on to the actual "plagiarism". It isn't clear that Churchill actually did anything wrong. He did not represent the work as his own research (which would have been plagiarism), but he used another's work without permission - even though he indicated in the notes whose work it was. If he indeed printed the thing verbatim or almost verbatim then he should be punished (although again, this is not plagiarism) - although this is still a lesser crime than what the university is doing.
On the other hand, if he rewrote the article without claiming authorship and acknowledged the original author in the sources it isn't clear that this is wrong. Academics generally speaking do not have the power to prevent others from using their work as long as they are credited with it. If they were, the consequences would be absurd - I could prevent my rivals from attacking my work by not giving them permission to quote it.
I'm guessing that what happened here is that Churchill really needed to have something representing this work in his book (that's actually a credit to the importance of the author's research) and deadlines were approaching. But the author held out for more money or was being difficult or was trying to gain leverage (this happens all the time with such books) so Churchill gave up and prepared an alternate text as a summary of her view, making sure that she was accurately referenced as the source wherever her work was used. In order to maintain a sense of propriety Churchill refused to present the work as his original research and put himself down as "preparing" the text (which was true).
It's a slick trick and a bit fast, but it is not necessarily an academic offence. Certainly it is hard to see how the integrity of this woman was impugned by Churchill referencing her work and deeming it important enough to be in his book.
I don't think you are facing the issues.
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