DENVER—A former University of Colorado professor who was fired on plagiarism allegations amid an uproar about his comments about Sept. 11 victims defended his scholarship in court Tuesday against a barrage of questions from a university lawyer.
Ward Churchill testified for a second day in his lawsuit seeking to get his job back. He denies research misconduct and says the university was looking for a reason to fire him over an essay he wrote comparing some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi.
The university maintains it was justified in firing him.
University attorney Patrick O’Rourke questioned Churchill about an essay that he submitted in one of his an annual reports to the university. The annual reports, used in performance evaluations, are supposed to contain only the professor’s own writings, but Churchill has acknowledged that he didn’t write the essay in question.
Churchill testified Tuesday that someone else compiled the report and that he signed off on it.
O’Rourke showed jurors an e-mail Churchill wrote to a faculty member explaining the error.
“Was this sloppy on my part? Yeah, probably,” read the e-mail by Churchill. “I’ve never been big on filling out forms.”
Churchill was also accused of plagiarizing that essay in a book he edited. The university says that in the book, the essay was wrongly attributed to the Institute for Natural Progress—a group it says Churchill founded—instead of to the author, Nova Scotia professor Fay Cohen.
Churchill testified he wasn’t responsible for the incorrect attribution because it was submitted to him that way.
O’Rourke also questioned Churchill about a published essay that O’Rourke said Churchill wrote but attributed to someone else. Churchill, who later cited that work in another piece he wrote, said ghostwriting is common in academia.
“I saw it as helping her articulate a position that she endorsed,” he said, adding that the professor read the article he wrote in her name and had the option of editing it.
Churchill was dismissed in July 2007 after the university concluded that he misrepresented or fabricated research on Native Americans and claimed the work of a Canadian environmental group as his own.
The investigation into his research began after Churchill came under intense criticism for the essay that likened victims in the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who organized the Holocaust.
The university concluded that Churchill’s free speech rights protected him from being fired for the Eichmann essay. It wasn’t included in the research misconduct investigation.
Churchill testified Monday that when he made the Eichmann comparison, he was arguing that “if you make it a practice of killing other people’s babies for personal gain … eventually they’re going to give you a taste of the same thing.”
During cross-examination Tuesday, O’Rourke asked Churchill whether he thought it was right to compare the World Trade Center victims to Eichmann. Churchill said some of the Sept. 11 victims had acquiesced to the practice of chaining 13-year-olds to their work stations in Indonesian sweatshops.
“That’s the point that I was trying to make, is that you need to look at what you’re doing in the world,” he said.
Churchill said Tuesday that widespread news coverage of the Eichmann comment helped put pressure on CU to fire him.
“From day one this was handled in the media,” Churchill said. He said the university posted one investigative report about him on its Web site before he could read it.
