A juror’s question, posed Tuesday after former professor Ward Churchill had been on the witness stand for more than seven hours, gave him the opening to argue — succinctly — that he was the victim of his controversial views, not his scholarship.
The question, read by Denver District Judge Larry J. Naves, went to the heart of Churchill’s lawsuit — his assertion that he was stripped of his job not for academic fraud but because he called some victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks “Little Eichmanns,” a reference to a Nazi war criminal.
“Would any of these allegations have surfaced if it was not for the 9/11 essay?” the unidentified juror asked.
“I think the easy answer on that question,” Churchill said, “is, no, they would not.”
The exchange came near the end of a long day in the courtroom, one that saw Churchill face cross-examination by a University of Colorado lawyer for the first time.
But the hours of questioning were more fizzle than fireworks. Much of the talk involved a tedious examination of smallpox, sources, Indian deaths, ghostwriting and academic standards.
Still, there was some drama.
Churchill acknowledged for the first time that a Canadian college professor’s essay was plagiarized, although he denied that he was the one who lifted the piece by Fay Cohen, arguing that he merely edited it for inclusion in a 1992 book assembled by his then-wife, M. Annette Jaimes.
Both Churchill and CU attorneys made points.
The CU Board of Regents fired Churchill in 2007 after an investigation concluded he had committed numerous acts of academic misconduct. He filed suit, alleging that his scholarly work was examined because of his controversial Sept. 11 essay.
“I want my job back,” Churchill testified. “I want restitution and . . . acknowledgment the entire process under which I was terminated from the university was fraudulent.”
Churchill conceded that sections of an essay by Cohen, a Canadian professor, were lifted and published in a book he helped to edit.
“Plagiarism occurred,” Church ill said — but denied that he had had anything to do with it. He said that he had merely copy edited the essay for inclusion in a book.
Patrick O’Rourke, a CU attorney, saw his questioning backfire at one point when he asked Churchill if he was really arguing that he didn’t recognize the Cohen essay when he had edited it once before, for another book, just months earlier.
O’Rourke had the title pages of both versions of the essay put up on a big screen in an attempt to show that they had the same title. But they did not.
At another point, however, O’Rourke challenged a different essay that Churchill claimed to have written, even though it was published under another name.
“Why not put your name on all of them as co-author?” O’Rourke asked.
“And why would I?” Churchill responded.
“Because you wrote it,” O’Rourke said.
“I have an option not to,” Churchill said.
Much of the day was devoted to long, drawn-out discussions of the various instances of academic misconduct the university’s investigative panel concluded that Churchill perpetuated.
There were discussions of source materials, of various population estimates, of Indian oral tradition.
At one point, Naves suddenly called a recess after he saw that one of the jurors was having trouble staying awake.
Kevin Vaughan: 303-954-5019 or kvaughan@denverpost.com
