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The Ward Churchill saga shows no sign of ending. In case you've been enjoying life under a rock in recent years, Churchill taught ethnic studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
he wrote an essay called Chickens Coming Home to
Roost.
In it, he referred to some of the World Trade
Center fatalities as Little Eichmanns,
comparing
American corporate functionaries to the cogs of the Nazi
extermination-camp machinery.
The piece attracted little if any notice at the time, but in January, 2005, Churchill was invited to speak at Hamilton College in New York. A student who had lost relatives on Sept. 11 was offended by the essay and protested the invitation.
Soon Churchill was denounced by every right-thinking opportunist in American public life. That outrage was rather selective, though. In essence, Churchill argued that the United States had allowed certain evils, and had thus got what was coming to it. That is also what the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson claimed at the same time -- America tolerated evil and justly suffered retribution.
But Falwell remained president of Liberty University and Robertson continued as chancellor of Regent University.
Churchill, however, was not a founder of the University of Colorado. The school could not exactly fire a professor for writing an essay. But it could investigate Churchill's scholarship.
What the investigators found was appalling -- falsehoods, plagiarism, fabrications, etc. None of it looked like big-league stuff, but citing an article he ghost-wrote as an independent source of information is certainly not the stuff of honest research.
To put this another way, if I were still a managing editor, and I had a reporter who tried to pull stunts like this, the reporter would have been pointed to the door.
On account of shoddy scholarship, at least officially, CU has fired Churchill. He plans to appeal to the Board of Regents, and if the regents uphold the dismissal as expected, then the next step will be litigation on the grounds that the university infringed on Churchill's First Amendment right to free speech.
The thesis is that Churchill is really being fired for
the unpopular opinions in his Chickens Coming Home to
Roost
essay. Unable to fire him for that, the
university went over his published work with a fine-toothed
comb and came up with reasons to punish him -- a sort of
selective enforcement
of the rules of
scholarship.
That may well be true, but it doesn't change the fact of fraudulent scholarship, which to me at least, appears beyond doubt. With that information in hand, what is an institution of higher learning supposed to do? Perhaps pay more attention to faculty scholarship before there's a scandal, but that's another column.
It would be easier to support Churchill's claim that his First Amendment rights are being circuitously violated if there were any evidence that Churchill actually believed in the First Amendment.
Most of us, after all, figure the First Amendment applies to everybody, even people we disagree with. But Churchill has been arrested on several occasions for attempting to violate other people's rights to free expression -- specifically, the marchers in Denver's annual Columbus Day parade.
In Ward's world, the parade is hate speech
and
not entitled to First Amendment protection. Now others have
made decisions that likely stemmed from his expressions,
which some found rather hateful. Perhaps some chickens have
come home to roost.
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