The Massachusetts Senate race took an interesting twist recently when supporters of incumbent Republican Scott Brown accused Democrat candidate Elizabeth Warren of falsely claiming to have Indian blood in order to get a job as a professor at Harvard. Despite Warren’s early denials, it has now been proven that for several years she identified herself as a minority member to an academic association. Now it turns out that she is only 1/32 Indian, and that no tribe is willing to claim her as a member.
She certainly wasn’t the only college prof who ever falsely claimed minority blood in order to take advantage of Affirmative Action programs in hiring. The University of Colorado gave tenure to a half-baked scholar named Ward Churchill when he didn’t even have a doctorate, largely because he claimed to be an American Indian and made Indian grievances the center of his academic work. It turned out that Churchill lied about having Indian blood. He doesn’t even have as much Indian blood as Warren; extensive research shows not one drop of Indian blood in him.
And bloodlines are not the only biographical details college profs lie about to enhance their careers. History professor Joseph Ellis regaled students for years with accounts of his heroism in combat during the Vietnam War, and his subsequent heroism at home as GI-turned-anti-war-protester. He even taught classes on the war. It turns out that Joseph Ellis’ war record is a fraud, as are his claims of Vietnam era anti-war activism.
I, personally, had already read Ellis’ biography of Thomas Jefferson before learning of his casual relationship with truth. Now I wonder how much of the Jefferson biography was altered to suit Ellis’ left wing political agenda. Just recently I heard someone on a conservative talk radio station claiming that Ellis misrepresented Jefferson’s abridged version of the Bible in order to falsely portray Jefferson as a Deist, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that turned out to be true.
Oh well, at least the Jefferson biography can’t be as bogus as Professor Michael Bellesiles’ book on the history of gun ownership in the US. Every word in Bellesiles’ book was a lie, including “the” and “and.” He even went to the trouble of inventing reams of primary source materials from thin air in order to support his pro-gun-control political agenda.
As for Elizabeth Warren, let’s hope Massachusetts voters don’t trust her. She can always go back to academia.
I would be interested in hearing more about Jefferson and his abridged Bible. I have read articles/books in mainstream evangelical circles that describe the Jefferson Bible as Jefferson’s “getting rid of” allusions to the miraculous, including the virgin birth, miracles performed by Jesus, the resurrection, etc, effectively reducing the image of Christ to that of a good moral teacher.