Monday, March 23, 2009

Radelet: No telling how much Churchill has cheated

CU sociology prof and Churchill investigative committee member Michael Radelet on direct examination:

Radelet dismissed the notion that just because a handful of examples of research misconduct was found by the investigative committee that it was much ado about nothing. He testified that the committee didn't come close to looking at all of Churchill's scholarship and that there was no guarantee there weren't more problems in those pages.

"It just sullies everything he's done," he said.

Churchill's attorney David Lane, of course, has repeatedly claimed CU looked at every word Churchill ever wrote.

Update: Oh, Snaps! The Post:
Radelet did not back down on the question of whether Churchill could claim that his assertions about smallpox were merely opinion, arguing that claims that are footnoted should stand for something in the academic world. Lane also attempted to show that Churchill's statements about Smith and smallpox constituted only a few lines in a much larger 40-page essay, but Radelet disagreed with the assertion that it wasn't that big a deal.

"It is a big deal when a centerpiece of the theme of the essay is built on a false assertion," Radelet said.

That theme, he pointed out, was the systematic genocide perpetuated by Europeans and white Americans against American Indians. And he argued that Churchill's claims about Smith and smallpox were "girders" in his argument, and therefore important.

Radelet said by Churchill's way of thinking, he could be a suspect in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey because he was in Boulder in 1996 and he hated the Miss America Pageant.

"It's the same amount of evidence, the same amount of circumstantial evidence that the Boulder police have on me for killing JonBenet Ramsey," Radelet said.

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