I don’t know much about Ward Churchill, and from the little I do know, I know I don’t want to know much more. Mr. Churchill’s ex-faculty colleagues at the University of Colorado supported his firing after they had reviewed his “research” regarding the theory that the United States Army had shipped smallpox infected blankets to American Indians at Fort Clark on the Upper Missouri. Churchill asserted, as cited in a New York Times article published March 24, 2009, that he didn’t need to provide references or research for his claims which verge on charging the Army with genocide. Churchill’s rationale for not needing written proof? He claims the history of the atrocity was “common knowledge.”

The faculty committee found that neither tradition nor scholarly texts could support Mr. Churchill’s claim. “Common knowledge” in this instance means no knowledge at all. But does common knowledge ever really mean anything?

What is common knowledge? Or more importantly, how do we know what we know?

Some years ago a concert pianist friend of mine was comparing all the different versions of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, the body of work that forms the absolute core of piano literature. Since Beethoven himself wrote those pages, and reviewed the engravings that his publisher created, you might rationally assume that all editions of the sonatas would be the same. You would be wrong. There are many editions of the Beethoven sonatas, since among other reasons, they are in the public domain, beyond the protections of copyright. If you, for instance, had your own thoughts about the Moonlight Sonata, you would be free to go ahead and mark up the music, provide your own tempos and expressions, fingering suggestions, tweak something up an octave or double the bass, and publish your version as “Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, edited by Yourself — Beethoven updated for the 21st Century.” Or you would be free to create a version with the hard parts simplified. Beethoven for Dummies.

But what if you want to know what Beethoven really had in mind? You would look for the “urtext” version. Ur is German for “original.” Urtext is the highest authority (notice the word author in authority) for something, the closest to the truth.

How do we know the truth? Both the New York Times, the Economist, and the Lehrer Evening News have in recent weeks said that President Obama promised to abolish earmarks in the budget during the campaign, and now he was betraying that promise. You might assume that if all of these authoritative sources say so, it must be true. But, alas, it’s not. We can always go to the urtext, the recordings and transcripts of what Obama actually said. Politifact.com searched for all of Obama’s remarks about earmarks, and all they could find was this: “The closest he came to saying he would eliminate earmarks, as far as we could find, was when he said, in the third presidential debate , “Earmarks account for 0.5 percent of the total federal budget. There’s no doubt that the system needs reform and there are a lot of screwy things that we end up spending money on, and they need to be eliminated. But it’s not going to solve the problem.” (Given his other campaign statements on earmarks, it’s clear he meant “screwy,” or wasteful, earmarks should be eliminated, not all earmarks.)”

Now that newspapers are becoming an endangered species, the number of people whose job title is fact-checker will surely diminish. Some of the great fact-checkers used to be found at The New Yorker, and I hope their professional standards persist. Writers used to complain bitterly about the line-by-line and, even more important, concept-by-concept grilling The New Yorker fact-checkers would visit upon even the most esteemed authors. The consequence, for the reader at least, was that if it was in print in The New Yorker it had an overwhelming likelihood of being actually true.

The Internet provides endless opportunities to delude us with a false sense that we have reach the “ur” level of something. When I was writing a section in my new book, The Genius Machine, (New World Library, May, 2009) I wanted to find a quote I recalled about the Wright brothers and how their meticulous notes had rapidly lead them to their wing designs, and within two or three years, made powered flight possible. I found a website sponsored by what appeared to be many authoritative sources, including a group at Cal Tech who were at work re-creating the first Wright brothers airplane. The website has a picture of the Wright brothers’ wind tunnel, and wonderful direct quotes from Wilbur about how the tunnel provided the data that helped them refine their wing.

My publisher asked me to find a higher source for the quotes I had gathered from the website. I wrote to the Library of Congress, and the Wright brothers expert there said he doubted the quotes were genuine. It turns out they were total fabrications. Not true. Never written by Wilbur.

They were, in short, complete bullpucky.

My kind librarian then provided me with tons of genuine Wright brothers’ correspondence, and I was able to pull together the truth about their work on the evolution of the wing, using their wind tunnel. Not only am I delighted that I got to the truth, I also have now had the experience of being in thrilling direct contact with the source materials, the urtext. I am now fairly well assured that I really know what I know about those incredible few years in the back of the bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. And what I know is completely different from hearing about something.

In most areas of knowledge or fact there is a person who created or discovered that knowledge. Usually they wrote down or lectured about their discoveries. We often have the choice to either accept what Newton said, or what Madison said, or what Einstein discovered, or to find out for ourselves what their precise words were. Have you ever been at an event that was subsequently reported on in the news, and had the feeling that your experience was fundamentally different from what was reported? Who would you believe? Those second-hand news and “expert” reports, or your own lyin’ eyes?

Seek the urtext. If you care about knowing something, if some knowledge is important to you, make the extra effort, go a step higher. You will frequently be delighted to discover that the author of the knowledge you want speaks to you more directly and thrillingly than the intermediary who doesn’t really fully understand the original. You can read about Abraham Lincoln in thousands of books and get a different picture of him in every one. You can also read the words of Lincoln directly and make your own judgments about him and his ideas. Sure it helps to have a context of history and culture, but the reality is that you don’t need help to enter into a dialogue with the greats. You can read Shakespeare in the original.

Not that I want to make anything easier for Ward Churchill, but there may be an urtext about a government trying to wipe out an Indian tribe by infecting them with smallpox. My brother-in-law Buster Simpson loaned me a book a few years ago that tells the story of how the French in Montreal supplied the U.S. Army with smallpox-infected materials to wipe out the Indians in central Michigan. I have the book somewhere, if only I could lay my hands on it…