University of Colorado Regent Michael Carrigan denied that he and other regents signed off on an investigation into former professor Ward Churchill’s scholarship based on his controversial essay on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Carrigan testified today during the civil trial underway in Denver District Court. His testimony was interrupted Thursday due to the metro snowstorm.
Churchill, 61, a former ethnic-studies professor at CU-Boulder, sued the university for his 2007 termination, claiming he was retaliated against for the contents of the controversial essay in which he compared some of the victims in the World Trade Center attacks to Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who engineered the destruction of Jews in World War II.
CU says Churchill was fired for academic fraud after an extensive examination into his scholarly writings.
Carrigan tried to clarify comments he made in an earlier deposition, in which he said CU regents authorized the chancellor to look into Churchill’s “scholarship” while they were trying to determine whether his 9/11 essay was constitutionally protected.
Carrigan said by scholarship, he meant an inquiry into whether Churchill had engaged in any hate speech or political activity while using the prestige of CU to back him up.
Churchill’s lawyer, David Lane, argued with Carrigan about what “scholarship” meant, and Lane tried to show that Carrigan had signed off on a McCarthy-era, Un-American Activities type of investigation into Churchill’s books and essays in order to get rid of him for writing the politically unpopular essay.
“Mixing apples and oranges, that is what your case is about,” Carrigan shot back.
“But you do agree that if, in fact, my take on all this — (an investigation of) every word spoken — if that was happening, you would believe that is inappropriate?” Lane asked.
“If you mean looking at the footnotes and all that, I would agree it would be inappropriate,” Carrigan said.
But Carrigan said it was only after the university was made aware that Churchill had fabricated and plagiarized his research that CU began to investigate Churchill’s books and essays.
A juror submitted a question through the judge to Carrigan and asked whether newspaper reporters who wrote stories accusing Churchill of academic misconduct had done so in order to inspire CU to launch an investigation into his scholarship.
“Newspapers have nothing to do with the university,” Carrigan answered. “We can’t control newspapers.”
But in a followup question, Lane implied that former Rocky Mountain News columnist Paul Campos, also a professor at CU’s law school, may have leaked a complaint received by the university about Churchill’s scholarship to the newspaper.
John LaVelle, an Indian-law professor at the University of New Mexico, had complained to Dan Getches, CU’s law school dean, about Churchill’s scholarship before and after his 9/11 essay became national news.
“That is laughable,” Carrigan said. “I don’t know how the newspaper got the LaVelle complaint.”
