The University of Colorado previously investigated whether professor Ward Churchill misrepresented his Indian heritage and found any such allegations were a result of infighting in the American Indian community, according to Churchill.
Churchill said that point is among many he makes in a 50-page document he submitted to members of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct, which is investigating that allegation and others. He met with the group Tuesday, accompanied by his attorney, David Lane, who said committee members asked the ethnic studies professor questions about his work but did not indicate whether the preliminary inquiry would go to a full-fledged investigation.
“These guys are trying hard to study this stuff,” Lane said after the meeting. “But it’s not their field.”
Churchill was asked whether his ethnicity was key to his scholarship, and he said it was not. “I stand on the quality of my work,” he said.
Churchill also conceded that he ghost-wrote five articles under other scholars’ names, but said he never stole the works of other writers.
“I think it’s a reasonably standard practice and if that’s an issue to be raised, it should be raised with the people whose names are on the paper,” he said.
Churchill said the 50-page response, plus dozens more pages of supporting materials, refutes point-by-point the allegations that he misrepresented historical fact and his Indian heritage to buttress his work and plagiarized others’ writings.
Pauline Hale, CU-Boulder spokeswoman, declined to speak to reporters about the case. She issued a statement saying that the process was confidential and declined to discuss details of the meeting.
Churchill said his response notes that then-chairwoman of the Department of Ethnic Studies, Evelyn Hu-DeHart investigated a similar complaint in 1994 and found it without merit.
“I do not believe that the university has any business, nor any need to become party to this internecine political war in the Indian world,” Hu-DeHart wrote in a 1994 memo.
Hu-DeHart was integrally involved in Churchill’s controversial hiring in 1991 with tenure. He didn’t have a Ph.D. and the customary seven-year tenure review did not apply.
Churchill has been under attack since his essay comparing 9/11 victims to a Nazi bureaucrat surfaced earlier this year. A panel of administrators reviewed his writings and found his comments were protected by the First Amendment. However, they also found that the allegations of plagiarism and academic fraud were credible enough to send his work to the Standing Committee.
In particular, some scholars have disputed Churchill’s claim that as many as 100,000 American Indians died after the U.S. Army purposely infected them with smallpox.
Churchill does concede that he made unintentional but minor mistakes in his work. For example, he said, he should have used the term War Department instead of Army.
Those mistakes are not to the level that would require discipline, he added.
“They better bring the entire faculty on charges if that’s the level of scrutiny we’re going to be under,” he said.
Staff writer Arthur Kane can be reached at 303-820-1626 or akane@denverpost.com.
