Silence deafening on Churchill

I have reprinted Tom Mayer's defense of Churchill on three different forums and no one has said a word about it, for or against. Mayer can't get any mainstream media to print that defense, either.

Over at Swan's Commentary, Gilles d'Aymery feels the silence too:

As to Ward Churchill, the silence is deafening. The so-called Standing Committee on Research Misconduct of the University of Colorado at Boulder recently issued a politically motivated 124-page report accusing professor Churchill of "academic misconduct" and calling for sanctions, perhaps temporarily, or even excluding him from the university. Professor of sociology Tom Mayer deconstructed the report in a 1900-word article that he sent to local papers in Boulder to no avail. They all rejected the article because "it was too long." Nineteen hundred words to criticize a 124-page report are considered too long by the local guard dogs of the orthodoxy. The national press simply ignored the issue altogether -- or maybe they covered it in tiny snippets buried in the bowels of the papers. One can easily imagine a Van Gelder treatment of the news: "Controversial professor is charged with academic misconduct: Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the U. of Colorado who called the 9/11 victims at the World Trade Center 'technocrats' and 'little Eichmanns,' and blamed Americans for what he called the 'genocide' of the Indian nations, was accused of gross academic misconduct by the university Standing Committee on Research Misconduct. The committee recommends sanctions that may include his expulsion from the university."

What's troubling is that Mayer's response takes up a number of issues with the Standing Committee and the original report, on-point: The political motivation of the original investigation, the alleged improprieties and violations of protocol, the inconsistent punishment compared to other scholars guilty of the same things, the overstatement of "misconduct" when really, there's little more than allegations of factual innacuracies and lots of difference of opinion, and so on.

Yet nobody is saying anything--well, except the people who would have fired Churchill for his 9/11 statements without even pretending to look for other reasons.

Churchill's latest response can be found here.