Thursday, July 21, 2005
That's "...named after Ward not Winston, for dubious academic achievement." Two nominees in particular have appeared in multiple posts here -- Columbia's Rashid Khalidi (numerous posts -- just use the search box) and Northeastern's M. Shahid Alam (see: Northeastern Professor compares 9/11 Hijackers to Founding Fathers, The Professor Strikes Back and National Lawyers Guild to Present Free Speech Award to M. Shahid Alam.).
...AIA acknowledges the many competitors in higher education to Ward Churchill's still-evolving legacy of sensitivity, originality and, above all, accuracy.
- The Little Churchill award for sensitivity. Like the award which we will bestow for original scholarship that rivals Ward Churchill's own trend-setting accomplishments, the contenders for this prize come from a crowded field. Thus, we have a two-way tie for what might be termed the Little Churchill Little Eichmann. The distinguished joint winners of this prize are Hatem Bazian—the University of California at Berkeley professor who called for an Intifada in the United States and… Northeastern University (Illinois) professor Shahid Alam who compared the 9-11 terrorists to America's founding fathers.
- The Little Churchill award for original scholarship came down to another two-way tie between Columbia University Middle East Studies professor Rashid Khalidi and recently-retired Central Connecticut State University president Richard L. Judd. Khalidi, who thinks America's media make too big a deal about suicide bombers, posted an article under his own name on the web that matched up section by section with the work of another author, who was conveniently deceased. Judd offered an opinion column to the Hartford Courant that looked remarkably like an editorial by another writer that had appeared in The New York Times.
- The Little Churchill prize for accuracy. This award also functions as a lifetime achievement award for historian Howard Zinn. If he had written nothing else, and many of us wish that were the case, the grand master of historical fantasy would win the award for his demonstrably unfounded assertion that unemployment grew during the Reagan Years.
