Jurors who will decide the future of former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill heard very different versions of the standards for scholarship Wednesday as his fight to win back his job continued in a Denver courtroom.
On one hand, Michael Yellow Bird, a professor at the University of Kansas, testified that numerous sources exist to support one of Churchill’s most controversial assertions — that the U.S. Army deliberately infected American Indians with smallpox in an effort to wipe them out. And he went on to suggest that scholars can draw conclusions to fill in blanks in history, to “invent the possibility that these things happened.”
Yellow Bird, a member of the Sahnish and Hidatsa tribes, also stood by an earlier statement he had made, that “a fabricated, made-up account promoted truth.”
On the other hand, Jose Limon, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that ethnic studies should be held to the same academic standards as every other discipline. And he rejected the idea that a scholar could fabricate a story in a search for the truth.
Churchill burst into the public consciousness in early 2005 just as he was to deliver a speech at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. The student newspaper, in an article about his talk, wrote about an obscure essay of his in which he referred to some victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as “little Eichmanns” — a reference to an infamous Nazi.
The university ultimately fired Churchill in 2007 after a committee found that he had “committed serious, repeated and deliberate research misconduct.”
The Daily Camera of Boulder contributed to this report.
