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The Strange Career of Ethnic Studies and Its Influences on the Teaching of Race and Ethnicity

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Abstract

The 2005–2007 scandal and subsequent investigation surrounding the work of Ward Churchill has cast Ethnic Studies, both as an academic department and an intellectual practice that is cross-referenced and influences the broader teaching of race and ethnicity in the university, in an uncomfortable limelight. Churchill, a widely known writer and polemicist of American Indian Studies, was the chair of the Ethnic Studies department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, one of the most prestigious public Research One universities in the country. The controversy caused by his remarks regarding the events of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing successful conservative-inspired campaign to have him removed from his position and his tenure rescinded, revealed a number of different things about the practice of Ethnic Studies and its role in the contemporary American university.

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Lisa Guerrero

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© 2008 Lisa Guerrero

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DeSoto, A.M. (2008). The Strange Career of Ethnic Studies and Its Influences on the Teaching of Race and Ethnicity. In: Guerrero, L. (eds) Teaching Race in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616950_2

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