Colo. Regents Vote to Fire Ward Churchill

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.

http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 53, Issue 48, Page A1