BOULDER, Colo.—After 2 1/2 years of academic investigations and a rancorous national debate, the professor who once likened some Sept. 11 victims to Nazi Adolf Eichmann waited Tuesday to learn whether he would be fired for alleged research misconduct.
The University of Colorado’s governing Board of Regents deliberated behind closed doors whether to dismiss Ward Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies accused of plagiarism, falsification and other infractions.
Churchill denies the allegations and promised to sue if the regents take any action against him. He said Tuesday he expected the university to oust him.
“What else can they do?” he said.
At least a half-dozen campus police officers stood inside the room where regents met. Pink notices taped to each door warned against disruptions, and everyone entering had to pass through a metal detector.
University spokesman Ken McConnellogue said additional security measures were taken, partly in light of the shootings at Virginia Tech and partly because the university had received a credible death threat against the regents within the past month, specific to the Churchill case.
“I don’t think this rose to the highest level of worry,” McConnellogue said. He said Churchill supporters also have caused disruptions at previous meetings.
University President Hank Brown recommended in May that the regents fire Churchill after faculty committees accused Churchill of misconduct in some of his academic writing.
The allegations included misrepresenting the effects of federal laws on American Indians, fabricating evidence that the Army deliberately spread smallpox to Mandan Indians in 1837, and claiming the work of a Canadian environmental group as his own.
But the essay that thrust Churchill into the national spotlight, titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” was not part of the investigation.
That essay and a follow-up book argued that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were a response to a long history of U.S. abuses. Churchill said those killed in the World Trade Center collapse were “a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire” and called them “little Eichmanns.”
Churchill has said Eichmann was a bureaucrat who carried out policies like the Holocaust that were planned by others but was still responsible for his actions.
Churchill wrote the piece shortly after the attacks, but it drew little notice until 2005, when a professor at Hamilton College in upstate New York called attention to it when Churchill was invited to speak there.
In the uproar that followed, the Regents apologized to “all Americans” for the essay and the Colorado Legislature labeled Churchill’s remarks “evil and inflammatory.”
Bill Owens, then governor of Colorado, said Churchill should be fired, and George Pataki, then governor of New York, called Churchill a “bigoted terrorist supporter.”
School officials concluded Churchill couldn’t be dismissed because he was exercising his First Amendment rights. But they launched the investigation into his research in other work.
A faculty committee and an interim chancellor recommended Churchill be fired. When a second committee reviewed the case, three of its five members recommended a suspension. The other two said he should be fired.
Churchill remained on the university payroll but had been out of the classroom since the spring of 2006, first because he was on leave and later because the school relieved him of teaching duties after the interim chancellor recommended he be fired.
