Jurors deciding whether Ward Churchill should get his job back continued to ask questions Wednesday about how much the fired University of Colorado professor’s controversial essay on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had to do with his termination.
“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?” Denver District Judge Larry J. Naves asked, reading a question submitted by a juror.
The question was directed to Todd Gleeson, dean of the Arts and Sciences College, who testified about the CU regents’ decision to fire the ethnic-studies professor in 2007 after he was found to have engaged in academic misconduct.
Gleeson said then-chancellor Phil DiStefano was very deliberate about protecting the professor’s free- speech rights while the school tried to determine whether he had overstepped his academic bounds.
Jurors also wondered whether friction among alumni, parents and former Gov. Bill Owens has eased now that Churchill is no longer working at CU.
“It is behind for a lot of people but certainly not for a lot of people,” Gleeson said.
The jurors asked whether Churchill would have been fired had there not been “threats to the university regarding funding.”
Gleeson said he is certain that allegations that Churchill had plagiarized, falsified and fabricated some of his scholarly writings “would have been forwarded to the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct, and I believe they would have reached the same conclusion.”
The juror questions came a day after a juror asked Churchill whether he believed he was fired solely for his Sept. 11 essay, in which he called some victims of the terrorist attacks “little Eichmanns.”
CU’s defense continues today.
The Daily Camera contributed to this report.
