Ward Churchill, the professor who once likened victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks to “little Eichmanns,” plagiarized, falsified, and fabricated material in his own research, an investigative panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder has found. The finding moves the university one step closer to firing the controversial professor.
A five-member committee, which released its 125-page report last week, found that Mr. Churchill had engaged in a pattern of misconduct, shown a “recurrent refusal to take responsibility for errors,” and repeatedly demonstrated a “willingness to blame others for his troubles.” The committee was made up of three professors from Boulder, one from Arizona State University, and one from the University of Texas at Austin.
Committee members agreed unanimously that the misconduct was serious, but they could not agree on the appropriate punishment. Two members of the committee said they thought that the misconduct was not serious enough to warrant his firing and that dismissing him would adversely affect the freedom of other scholars. Those two committee members recommended that Mr. Churchill be suspended without pay for two years.
The other three committee members said they thought the misconduct was serious enough to warrant dismissing the professor. One recommended that he be fired. The other two, while believing that dismissal was a reasonable punishment, recommended that he be suspended for five years without pay.
But the committee members will not decide how to punish Mr. Churchill. The panel’s report has been given to the Boulder campus’s Standing Committee on Research Misconduct, which will now make recommendations to the provost and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The ultimate decision on whether to fire Mr. Churchill will be made by the Colorado Board of Regents.
Mr. Churchill called the report “a travesty.” In a written statement, he complained that the committee was dominated by Colorado insiders who did not understand his field, American Indian studies. He also argued that the report misrepresented some of the evidence and was, in some places, “patently false.”
“The entire procedure appears to be little more than a carefully orchestrated effort to cast an aura of legitimacy over an entirely illegitimate set of predetermined outcomes,” he said.
The investigation into Mr. Church- ill’s work began in early February 2005, when the interim chancellor at Boulder, Philip P. DiStefano, announced that he would determine whether the professor had “overstepped his bounds.”
The review at first focused on Mr. Churchill’s controversial statements about the September 11 attacks — he compared some of those working in the World Trade Center to Nazi bureaucrats — but as attention focused on the professor, several allegations of misconduct arose.
Some Colorado politicians have called for the university to fire Mr. Churchill. Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, said that the investigation had confirmed that Mr. Churchill “has tarnished the title of professor,” and that he should resign.
The charges against Mr. Churchill include misrepresenting federal laws regarding American Indians, fabricating material regarding a smallpox epidemic in 1837, and several instances of plagiarism.
The investigative committee emphasized that it was uncomfortable with the timing and the motives of the accusations against Mr. Churchill, noting that several of them had been well known by scholars years before but had not been brought up formally until after the professor became publicly reviled.
Nevertheless, the committee wrote that its analysis had not been colored by how the charges came about, and that Mr. Churchill’s free-speech rights could not be used as a defense for research misconduct.
“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.”
The investigative committee also chastised the university administration, suggesting that in 1991 it “got more than it bargained for” when it hired Mr. Churchill, a charismatic polemicist, as a tenured associate professor even though he lacked both a doctorate and experience as a regular faculty member elsewhere.
“For us,” the committee wrote, “the indignation now exhibited by some university actors about Professor Churchill’s work appears disingenuous, as they and their predecessors are the ones who decided to hire him.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 52, Issue 38, Page A1
