A jury ruled on Thursday that the University of Colorado had illegally fired Ward Churchill in response to statements protected by the First Amendment. But it awarded the controversial ethnic-studies scholar only a token $1 in damages, leaving experts on academic freedom confused as to exactly what message other colleges should draw from the verdict.
Judge Larry J. Naves, who presided over the four-week trial in a state court in Denver, gave both sides 30 days to file motions related to the next phase of the proceedings, a hearing in which the judge will determine Mr. Churchill’s status at the university. Judge Naves could demand that Mr. Churchill be reinstated at the University of Colorado at Boulder, or he could order the university to pay Mr. Churchill a lump sum for money he could have earned if he had kept his university job, which paid $94,000 a year.
Mr. Churchill’s lawyers said they hoped to have him back teaching in university classrooms by the fall. That outcome, however, is likely to be strongly resisted by the university, which continues to stand by its conclusions that Mr. Churchill committed academic misconduct that merited his dismissal in 2007.
In awarding Mr. Churchill only $1 in damages, the jury rejected a call by his chief lawyer, David A. Lane, to award an amount that would send a message “in a big way” to faculty members and students at colleges around the nation.
After the verdict was read, however, Mr. Churchill jokingly held up a $1 bill and waved it. Speaking to reporters in a courthouse hallway, he said, “What was asked for and what was delivered was justice.” He added that his lawsuit had exposed “the fraud of the university’s campaign and collaboration with private right-wing interests.”
Mr. Lane called the jury’s decision “a great victory for the First Amendment and academic freedom,” and said he expects to recoup hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees from the university.
The University of Colorado system’s president, Bruce D. Benson, issued a written statement that said, “While we respect the jury’s decision, we strongly disagree.” The verdict, he said, “doesn’t change the fact that 21 of Ward Churchill’s faculty peers on three separate panels unanimously found he engaged in deliberate and repeated plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication that fell below the minimum standards of professional conduct.”
Mr. Bensen called the jury’s $1 award for punitive damages “an indication of what they thought of the value of Ward Churchill’s claim.” He said the university was weighing what to do next.
‘Speech Was the Flashpoint’
The trial in Mr. Churchill’s lawsuit lasted nearly four weeks, during which 45 witnesses took the stand. Among those who testified were Colorado’s former governor, Bill Owens; a long list of administrators and faculty members involved in the university’s investigation of charges that Mr. Churchill had committed academic misconduct; and several scholars in Mr. Churchill’s field of expertise, American Indian studies.
The university’s lawyers focused on trying to show that the university had treated Mr. Churchill fairly and had given him due process in the proceedings that led to his firing for scholarly misconduct. Mr. Churchill’s lawyers sought to convince the jury that his dismissal was in response to the uproar over an essay in which he compared many of the office workers killed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center to a Nazi bureaucrat, and said they were not truly innocent victims.
The six-member jury—consisting of four women and two men, all of whom appeared to be in their 20s or early 30s—deliberated for 10 hours before reaching its verdict late Thursday afternoon. Earlier in the day, it had tipped its hand by returning to the courtroom to ask Judge Naves if it needed to be unanimous in its decision on how much to award Mr. Churchill, and whether it had the option of awarding him no money at all. Judge Naves said yes, its decision had to be unanimous, and that $1 was the least it could award Mr. Churchill if it decided in his favor.
Mr. Churchill’s legal team appeared to suffer a major setback on Tuesday, when Judge Naves dismissed one of the professor’s two claims against the university—that its investigation of Mr. Churchill was, in itself, an act of retaliation. But the jurors’ responses to the various questions Judge Naves had posed to them to shape their deliberations showed that its members had clearly agreed with the lawsuit’s other key claim, that Mr. Churchill’s termination was a retaliatory act.
The jury concluded that the controversy over Mr. Churchill’s essay, which was protected under the First Amendment, was “a substantial or motivating factor” in the college’s decision to discharge him. It also said that the university had failed to show that he would have been fired even if he had never made his controversial remarks.
Ken McConnellogue, a university spokesman, said he disagreed with the verdict but could see how the jury came to its decision. “The speech was the flashpoint that got all of this going,” he said. “But we maintain we ruled early and said often it wasn’t about the speech, it was about his academic misconduct. Those two things were in such close proximity that you can see where the jury would make that connection.”
Cause for Caution
Robert M. O’Neil, a prominent First Amendment scholar who heads the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, in Charlottesville, Va., said the jury’s verdict was so “superficially inconsistent” that he found it hard to guess what implications it might have for colleges elsewhere.
“It just seems to be there is a curious paradox,” he said, between the jury’s finding that university officials violated Mr. Churchill’s rights and its decision to give him a nominal damage award suggesting he had not been harmed in any way. “I find it very hard to reconcile those conclusions.”
Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, expressed concern before the verdict that a jury of people without extensive backgrounds in academe would fail to grasp the nuances of controversy among scholars. He said a decision in the university’s favor would have had “a chilling effect” on academic freedom, sending “a message that, justly or unjustly, your recourse to the courts is limited if you feel that you have been basically sacrificed for political reasons.”
Stephen H. Balch, chairman of the National Association of Scholars, issued a written statement calling the jury’s verdict a “sorry result” that “will only further attenuate an already fraying relationship between the protections of academic freedom and their corollary obligations,” such as commitment to honesty.
“The outcome of the Churchill trial is unfortunate, but it was a trial that in a better academic world would never have occurred,” Mr. Balch said. “The best point at which to protect professionalism is not career exit, but career entrance and stage-by-stage thereafter.”
Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, said, “I think colleges recognized, from the fact that this went as far as it went, that they have to be very careful about respecting faculty members’ First Amendment rights.” Colleges should also carefully follow their procedures in disciplining faculty members, she said.
David Montero reported from Denver.
