Former Gov. Bill Owens testified Wednesday that he did not conspire with or pressure University of Colorado officials to get Boulder professor Ward Churchill fired from the faculty.
Churchill, 61, was terminated in 2007 for academic misconduct. He taught in the department of ethnic studies.
His lawsuit against CU says he was fired in retaliation for a controversial essay he wrote about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and not for academic misconduct, as CU contends. The civil trial continues today in Denver District Court.
Churchill attorney David Lane said there was political pressure about the essay, including outrage from Owens, who Lane claimed told CU officials to get rid of Churchill or risk jeopardizing the university’s funding.
In March 2005, Owens appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor,” a Fox News Channel show hosted by conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly, and Owens seemed to assure the host that he had a strategy for getting rid of Churchill.
“I really did not have a strategy,” Owens testified Wednesday. “What I meant was there is a process that is underway. It was a legal process that was going to go a long time, which I felt, based on the information I had seen in terms of plagiarism and what I had seen, I thought the process would lead to him being terminated.”
Lane showed a videotaped deposition with former CU president Betsy Hoffman, who testified that Owens made “a short and threatening phone call” telling her to “fire Churchill tomorrow.”
Hoffman told the governor that she could not just fire him.
To that, Hoffman said, Owens told her he would “unleash his plan.”
“She said you said this in an angry, threatening tone,” Lane said. “Do you deny that?”
“It doesn’t really sound like me; that is not the way I deal with people,” Owens said. “I don’t deal with people in an angry, threatening way.”
Churchill’s essay was deemed controversial because it called some of the victims in the World Trade Center attack “little Eichmanns,” referring to Adolf Eichmann, who engineered the Nazi extermination of Jews in World War II.
Churchill says the reference has been taken out of context by his critics, and Lane said Churchill was referring to the workers in the financial sector, who were “greasing the wheels of American oppression.”
CU counsel Patrick O’Rourke told jurors that while the essay put Churchill in the spotlight and put the school under political pressure, Churchill was fired for falsifying facts and plagiarism in his scholarly writings.
Owens said that he was concerned about the allegations against Churchill but that there was nothing he could do because he did not have any say over CU’s regents, who ultimately fired Churchill.
Lane asked the former governor whether he had threatened CU with budget cuts if the university did not find a way to get rid of Churchill.
“I never vetoed the University of Colorado’s budget, and the appropriation increased each year I was governor, including the years in question here,” Owens said.
Felisa Cardona: 303-954-1219 or fcardona@denverpost.com
