If you’ve lost track of time, it’s been more than two years since a University of Colorado committee started investigating Ward Churchill. He is the ethnic studies professor who came under fire in early 2005 for inflammatory comments about Sept. 11 victims but then came under investigation for alleged plagiarism.
A year and a half later, on June 26, 2006, Phil DiStefano, then chancellor of the Boulder campus, recommended that Churchill be fired.
Since then, following existing tenure rules, Churchill’s case has worked its way through administrators and other CU committees, with no end in sight.
In future cases, part of the process mercifully will be speedier.
The CU Board of Regents last Thursday approved rules that set tight deadlines for the steps that must be taken after dismissal of a faculty member has been recommended. Earlier, the CU faculty senate endorsed the change by a two-thirds majority.
In theory, the new process could take as little as 100 days, although CU officials expect it will take no more than six months to resolve a case. The rules allow some extensions, but such exceptions are very tight.
The university’s current system doesn’t bear full blame for dragging out the Churchill saga. The extensive pre-investigation took time, the process stalled when two members of one committee quit, and Churchill himself stalled things by going to court. (If he’d been covered by the new deadlines, the clock wouldn’t have started running until the June 2006 firing.)
In addition, headline-starved politicians were calling for Churchill’s head, creating a distraction that practically begged for a cooling-off period.
The new deadlines are welcome for reasons that don’t have anything to do with the Churchill case. It’s best for the faculty members who are fighting for their jobs, as well as administrators, faculty committee members and the whole university community, to have such cases resolved fairly and quickly so that people can move on or return to their real work – teaching and research.
Other, less inflammatory CU firings in the past decade have taken up to two years to resolve.
The new rules will make CU’s process one of the speediest among American universities. That’s good, but the university should take care, when the next firing happens, to ensure that due process is honored and make adjustments if it’s not.
