Nearly six years after Ward Churchill compared some American victims of terrorism to Nazi bureaucrats, the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado has voted to fire him. But the controversial ethnic-studies professor says he is “ready to roll” in the next arena of his struggle with the university: a court of law.
According to university administrators, it was findings that Mr. Churchill had committed research misconduct — and not the notoriety of his opinions — that fueled the decision last week.
In a news release that appeared on the university’s Web site just moments after the regents’ 8-to-1 vote, the officials said that Mr. Churchill’s record “shows a pattern of serious, repeated, and deliberate research misconduct that fell below the minimum stand [sic] of professional integrity, involving fabrication, falsification, improper citation, and plagiarism.”
“The university’s review of Professor Churchill focused on his professional activities, not his statements about victims of September 11, 2001,” the statement said.
“This was someone who created fraudulent research and was caught,” said Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado system, in an interview. “The university’s efforts were focused solely around that.”
However, some of Mr. Churchill’s supporters — which include the American Civil Liberties Union and the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors — say the “poisoned atmosphere” surrounding
the professor in Colorado made it impossible for him to receive a fair hearing. Other supporters, along with Churchill himself, say that the university’s findings of academic misconduct were just a pretext for retaliating against him for his views.
“Once you take away this carefully manufactured illusion of due process,” said Mr. Churchill in an interview last week, “there’s nothing left but the political speech.”
Mr. Churchill and his lawyer, David Lane, filed a lawsuit against the university the day after the decision, asking for damages and reinstatement.
From Comment to Conduct
For the Board of Regents, the vote to dismiss the hugely controversial professor was the culmination of a day of deliberations. Their closed discussion went on an hour and a half longer than expected, adding a last flutter of suspense before yielding an outcome that many saw as inevitable.
For the university, the vote represented the end of a two-and-a-half-year series of investigations into Mr. Churchill’s speech, scholarship, and conduct.
Those investigations started because of a public-relations crisis. Mr. Churchill was propelled into the national spotlight in early 2005, when the campus newspaper at Hamilton College, in New York State, where he was scheduled to give a speech, reported that he had once referred to the office workers killed in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, as “little Eichmanns.”
That incendiary remark, which instantly became Mr. Churchill’s calling card in the press, traveled like wildfire through the conservative blogosphere and traditional news media. Before long, Mr. Churchill had become nightly fodder for Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News talk show.
After threats of violence began pouring in to Hamilton College, Mr. Churchill’s speech there was canceled. And when politicians in Mr. Churchill’s home state of Colorado began calling for his ouster, the interim chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Mr. Churchill was on the faculty, announced that there would be an investigation into the professor’s work to see whether he “may have overstepped his bounds.”
That first investigation — carried out by the interim chancellor and two deans — found that Mr. Churchill’s speech was protected by the First Amendment. However, it also turned up pre-existing allegations of research misconduct, which set in motion another, more substantial review of the professor’s work.
In May 2006 a special investigative committee composed of three professors from Boulder and two outside professors released a 124-page report that found instances of fabricated evidence, improper citation, and plagiarism in Mr. Churchill’s scholarship. That report, which was followed by several other steps (see timeline), paved the way for Mr. Brown to recommend to the Board of Regents in July that Mr. Churchill be fired.
In its May 2006 report, the committee said that it was uneasy about the timing of the special attention given to Mr. Churchill’s scholarship, which had been prompted by his sudden public infamy. But the committee reasoned through its uneasiness with a law-enforcement metaphor.
“To use an analogy,” the committee wrote, “a motorist who is stopped and ticketed for speeding because the police officer was offended by the contents of her bumper sticker, and who otherwise would have been sent away with a warning, is still guilty of speeding, even if the officer’s motive for punishing the speeder was the offense taken to the speeder’s exercise of her right to free speech.
“No court would consider the improper motive of the police officer to constitute a defense to speeding, however protected by legal free-speech guarantees the contents of the bumper sticker might be.”
Grading the Investigators
In the weeks and months leading up to the Board of Regents’ vote, several supporters of Mr. Churchill turned their own scrutiny on the investigative committee’s report.
Eric Cheyfitz, a professor of American studies at Cornell University, was among a handful of professors supporting Mr. Churchill who drafted a response to the report, accusing the committee itself of research misconduct. The group criticized the committee for not including experts in Mr. Churchill’s field.
Mr. Cheyfitz said that the committee relied too much, in its assessments of Mr. Churchill’s research, on the work of scholars who have had longstanding feuds with Mr. Churchill.
The report focuses on Mr. Churchill’s accounts of several events in the history of U.S. relations with Native Americans. According to Mr. Cheyfitz, who testified before one of the university committees investigating Mr. Churchill, those events are clouded in controversy within the discipline of Native American studies.
“What they’ve done,” Mr. Cheyfitz said of the committee, “is turn an academic debate into an indictment of one side of that debate.”
Mr. Cheyfitz also said that the investigation “quibbled” over historical details, proferred “frivolous” charges of plagiarism, and focused on just a few pages in Mr. Churchill’s large body of work.
Mr. Brown, the university president, called those arguments “laughable.” He said that, of the more than 20 professors who were involved in the various committees investigating Mr. Churchill’s work, none of them disagreed that he had engaged in scholarly misconduct.
“In this process,” said Mr. Brown, “Churchill’s had a large number of opportunities to submit information, submit facts, call witnesses, and testify. None of that was convincing to any of the faculty members or any of the administrators. All of this has been heard and listened to and reviewed.”
Unlikely Symbol
A large (6'5"), brash, and iconoclastic figure, Mr. Churchill is not a natural poster child. Yet he has come to symbolize a bizarre array of modern causes, vices, and perils. He has been called a poster boy for “lefty nihilism,” for “extremists in academe,” for “academic malfeasance,” and for academic freedom, to name just a few.
For many conservatives, Mr. Churchill has become a symbol of the political biases they think are rife in higher education. His views, however unpalatable to the mainstream, have been described as dangerously typical of the professoriate. “How Many Ward Churchills?,” a study published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, purported to show that “Ward Churchill is everywhere” in academe.
Meanwhile, Mr. Churchill’s supporters see him as representative of a different phenomenon. Margaret LeCompte, president of Mr. Churchill’s local chapter of the American Association of University Professors, has called the scrutiny of Mr. Churchill “a test case by the U.S. right wing to emasculate faculty rights in U.S. universities,” an effort, she said, that has been spearheaded by ACTA.
Anne D. Neal, president of ACTA and author of the “How Many Ward Churchills?” study, said that free speech and even political bias were irrelevant to the board’s decision. “It’s not about politics,” she said. “It’s not about First Amendment rights. This is about scholarly standards and the need for the public trust to be maintained.”
The decision, she said, “sends a very positive message that higher education is cleaning up its own.”
Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said that Mr. Churchill’s legal case against the university may hold water, if only because of timing.
“Given that this investigation was initially launched because of his public opinions, he’s going to have an argument that this was all pretextual,” said Mr. Lukianoff.
Mr. Lukianoff added that the university had placed itself in an awkward position “by launching the investigation initially because people were angry about what he had said, not because of these pre-existing claims of academic misconduct.”
Mr. Churchill and his lawyer, Mr. Lane, said they were not surprised by the regents’ vote. They said they had already written out their lawsuit against the university by the night before the vote, in preparation for it to be filed afterward.
Ward Churchill by the Numbers 71 The number of months since Ward Churchill posted his essay “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” in which he called victims of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns.” 30 The number of months since Mr. Churchill and his essay first came to the attention of Bill O’Reilly. 79 The number of subsequent episodes of The O’Reilly Factor in which Mr. Churchill’s name has been mentioned at least four times. 7.5 million The number of American citizens that would need to be killed to “attain an actual proportional parity of damage” to exact revenge for Iraqis killed in the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent U.S. sanctions, according to Mr. Churchill’s essay. Thousands The number of “Ward Churchills” on university campuses across the country, according to David Horowitz. At least 125,000 The number of American Indians killed by a smallpox epidemic that originated in 1837 at Fort Clark, in what is now North Dakota, after the U.S. Army intentionally distributed infected blankets, according to Mr. Churchill, who cites Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. At most 30,000 The number of American Indians actually killed by that smallpox outbreak, according to Mr. Thornton, who says the epidemic originated on a riverboat and was transmitted “perhaps by deckhands who unloaded merchandise, perhaps by chiefs who went aboard a few days later, or perhaps by women and children who went aboard at the same time.” 2,320 The approximate number of Google hits generated by the sentence, “Ward Churchill is right.” 24,200 The approximate number of hits generated by the sentence, “Fire Ward Churchill.” |
A Ward Churchill Timeline September 2001 Ward Churchill writes an essay titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” in which he calls those who died in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns,” comparing those workers in corporate America to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of sending millions of Jews to concentration camps. December 2004 The Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y., includes a talk by Mr. Churchill in its list of spring events. A political-science professor reads Mr. Churchill’s work and tells Hamilton officials the event should be canceled. January 2005 Hamilton’s campus paper publishes an article that mentions Mr. Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” remark. The story is picked up by numerous conservative blogs and publications and by Bill O’Reilly, who calls Mr. Churchill “insane” during a segment on his Fox News show. Mr. Churchill resigns as chairman of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s ethnic-studies department. February 2005 Hamilton cancels the scheduled speech, citing threats of violence. The Colorado Board of Regents holds a meeting to discuss Mr. Churchill, and the interim chancellor, Philip P. DiStefano, announces that he and two deans will review the professor’s work. March 2005 Administrators at Boulder find that the First Amendment protects the statements Mr. Churchill made, but also uncover allegations of research misconduct that they say should be investigated by a faculty committee. May 2006 A faculty panel, led by Mimi Wesson, finds that Mr. Churchill plagiarized, falsified, and fabricated material in his own research. Meanwhile, the university reviews its tenure process after documents revealed that Mr. Churchill did not receive tenure in the traditional way. June 2006 After reviewing the panel’s findings, the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at Boulder issues a full report that agrees with the panel. Members cannot, however, agree on an appropriate punishment. Later in the month, Mr. DiStefano announces that he has given Mr. Churchill notice of intent to dismiss him. Mr. Churchill says he will appeal the decision. May 2007 Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado system, recommends that the Board of Regents fire Mr. Churchill. July 2007 The Board of Regents votes to fire Mr. Churchill, who vows to challenge his dismissal in court. |
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 53, Issue 48, Page A1