Jurors listening to the Ward Churchill trial in Denver District Court today continued to ask questions about how much the former professor’s controversial essay on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks had to do with his termination from the University of Colorado.
“When the public was making all these complaints about Mr. Churchill’s essay did CU make it publicly known or give public support that this essay was within his First Amendment rights?” Judge Larry J. Naves asked, reading from a juror’s submitted question.
The question was pointed at Todd Gleeson, dean of the arts and sciences college, who was testifying about CU’s decision to terminate Churchill. CU regents fired Churchill after university committees found he engaged in academic misconduct — specifically that he had plagiarized, falsified and fabricated some of his scholarly writings.
“When the chancellor met with regents to form committee, he raised the possibility that the controversy may not be in violation of any rule or policy — that it was a protected,” Gleeson told the jurors.
Jurors then wanted to know if CU’s friction among alumni, parents and the former governor had been settled now that Churchill is no longer working there.
“It is behind for a lot of people but certainly not for a lot of people,” Gleeson said. “When I or my colleagues travel to other universities, we still continue to be asked about this case and how it’s been resolved. Has the parental support returned? I would say that for the most part, the answer to that is yes. There are certainly some folks who will never forgive the university or never send their child there I suppose, but for the most part, those wounds are healed.”
Jurors asked Gleeson if he felt someone should apologize for something they don’t find they did wrong just to satisfy others.
“I would hope that if I or my colleagues committed egregious acts of research misconduct…but a body of my peers, a group of 20 or more faculty told me my behavior was out of line with expectation of my peers I would hope that I would be able to swallow my pride and apologize…,” Gleeson said.
“Do you feel that had threats not been made to the university regarding funding and CU was not under such scrutiny by the public and the media, that the firing of Churchill would have taken place?” the jurors wanted to know.
“I am 100 percent certain those allegations would have been forwarded to the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct and I believe they would have reached the same conclusion,” Gleeson said.
The juror questions came a day after a juror asked Churchill if he believed he was fired solely for his 9-11 essay.
Churchill answered that he believed that was the reason he was let go.
The former ethnic studies professor is suing to get his job back at CU and claims that he was retaliated against by CU for writing the controversial speech that compared some victims in the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, who engineered the destruction of Jews in World War II.
Churchill says the essay was taken out of context and more a statement on American economic aggression.
Lawyers for Churchill rested their case earlier today after Churchill’s wife testified that CU had attempted to discredit her husband’s entire body of work.
Natsu Taylor Saito, now a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, said Churchill’s entire academic career was spent “getting out this other side of history… those big lies that historically had been been excluded…that gave a sense of hope, of pride, to the young people.”
Saito, who was an associate professor in CU’s ethnic studies department until she resigned in May 2006, began crying on the witness stand as she recounted the stress she and other teachers felt during the investigation into Churchill’s work.
CU counsel Kari Hershey opened the university’s case with Gleeson testifying about the evolution of the inquiry into allegations against Churchill.
He said the debate started over the offensive 9-11 essay but that “the flavor changed” to whether other of Churchill’s writings were accurate and original. Within the first month of the investigation, other faculty members accused Churchill of research misconduct and that a “heavy volume of ‘passionate’ e-mails” coupled with newspaper articles expanded the scope of the investigation, he testified.
His committee recommended to Chancellor Phil DiStefano that allegations of plagiarism and research misconduct be turned over to a faculty review committee because it was not the job for deans and officers to analyze the integrity of Churchill’s writings.
