[Ppnews] Jury Gets Case of Ward Churchill

Thu Apr 2 11:46:17 EDT 2009

Jury Gets Case of Fired Professor

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/us/02churchill.html?em

By 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/katharine_q_seelye/index.html?inline=nyt-per>KATHARINE 
Q. SEELYE
Published: April 1, 2009

After a four-week trial, a jury in Denver is 
deliberating the case of Ward L. Churchill, a 
former 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_colorado/index.html?inline=nyt-org>University 
of Colorado professor who says he was fired 
because of an 
<http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html>essay 
he wrote in which he called victims of the Sept. 
11, 2001, terrorist attacks “little Eichmanns.”

Ward Churchill, left, and his attorney David Lane 
after closing arguments in Churchill’s civil suit 
against the University of Colorado in Denver on Wednesday.

The university says Mr. Churchill plagiarized and 
falsified parts of his academic research, 
particularly on American Indians, and cited this 
as grounds for his dismissal in July 2007. Mr. 
Churchill brought a wrongful termination suit 
against the university, seeking monetary damages 
for lost wages and harm to his reputation. He 
also wants to be reinstated to his job teaching ethnic studies.

The case is seen as a struggle between freedom of 
speech and academic integrity, and it has revived 
the longstanding debate about whether hate speech 
deserves protection by the First Amendment.

“If we win,” said David Lane, Mr. Churchill’s 
lawyer, “the symbolic First Amendment moment of 
Ward Churchill’s walking back into a classroom 
will be overwhelmingly positive.”

Ken McConnellogue, a spokesman for the 
university, said the university’s case was 
“nuanced” and “perhaps doesn’t translate as well 
as a sound-bite case.” Still, he said, “We 
believe we’ve put on a compelling case” that 
officials fired Mr. Churchill for inferior scholarship, not his 9/11 essay.

Mr. Churchill, 61, had been a tenured faculty 
member at the university’s campus in Boulder 
since 1991, and chairman of the ethnic studies department.

On Sept. 12, 2001, he wrote an essay in which he 
argued that many of those working in the World 
Trade Center on Sept. 11 were not innocent 
bystanders but a “technocratic corps” of “little 
Eichmanns,” a reference to 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/adolf_eichmann/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Adolf 
Eichmann, the Nazi who has been called the architect of the Holocaust.

His suggestion was that their participation in 
the global financial system made them complicit 
in the terrorist attacks, just as Eichmann, who 
had said he was only following orders, was 
responsible for the extermination of the Jews.

The essay garnered little notice at the time but 
gradually seeped through the Internet, coming to 
light in 2005, and then creating an uproar.

At the time, the university defended his essay as 
free speech. But accusations began to emerge that 
in some of his other academic writings, 
especially about the persecution of American 
Indians, he had plagiarized other scholars and set forth false information.

The university said this scholarship  not the 
9/11 essay  prompted a faculty investigation. 
And in May 2006, a faculty committee found that 
his work  including his theory that Capt. John 
Smith intentionally introduced smallpox among the 
Wampanoag Indians in the 17th century  was 
seriously flawed and had no basis in fact. In 
July of that year, the university’s Board of Regents voted 8 to 1 to fire him.

His lawyer, Mr. Lane, accused the university of 
conducting a McCarthy-era style “witch hunt” 
against Mr. Churchill, saying officials trumped 
up the charges of academic fraud as a pretext for 
getting rid of him. On the witness stand last 
week, Mr. Churchill, a somewhat flamboyant figure 
wearing his long hair in a ponytail, said he 
understood that his essay had been hurtful to the 
families of those who were killed on 9/11. But he 
also said he wanted the United States to take 
more responsibility for how it treated others around the world.

“If you make a practice of killing other people’s 
babies for personal gain, they will eventually 
give you a taste of the same thing,” he said.

Throughout the trial, the university maintained 
that it fired Mr. Churchill solely “for his 
research misconduct, for taking other people’s 
work and making it his own, for fabricating 
research, for falsifying research,” as Steven K. 
Bosley, a university regent, told the court.

“It was not one time, not even one time on 
purpose,” Mr. Bosley added. “It was a pattern of misconduct.”

The jury got the case Wednesday afternoon, after 
hearing closing arguments. If the jury sides with 
Mr. Churchill, it will set the damages, although 
the judge, Larry J. Naves, can modify the amount. 
Judge Naves will decide whether Mr. Churchill should be reinstated.

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415 863-9977

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