DENVER—A jury began deliberating Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging the firing of a University of Colorado professor who wrote an essay likening some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi leader.
Ward Churchill contends he was fired in 2007 because of the uproar over the essay, not over allegations of plagiarism and research misconduct as the school claims.
Churchill’s attorney, David Lane, said during closing arguments that his client was fired for criticizing history’s “master narrative.”
“When you tell the truth about the master narrative, the master slaps you down for it,” Lane said. “Basically, white guys in suits write history,” he added later.
Jurors were sent home Wednesday night without reaching a verdict and will resume deliberations Thursday morning.
Churchill is asking for his job back and for unspecified damages. He was a tenured professor of ethnic studies.
CU fired Churchill after faculty panels said he plagiarized and misrepresented sources in his academic research. Churchill alleges the university was looking for an excuse to fire him and that his free speech rights were violated.
“For 30 years, he’s been telling the other side of the story,” Lane said.
University attorney Patrick O’Rourke said the probe into Churchill’s work was fair and his firing was justified. Churchill’s Sept. 11 essay was not included in the investigation against him.
“Professor Churchill is trying to use the First Amendment to excuse his own fraud,” O’Rourke said.
“What we’ve learned is that in Ward Churchill’s world, there are no standards and no accountability,” he said.
Churchill’s essay called the World Trade Center victims “little Eichmanns,” a reference to Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who organized the Holocaust. The essay was written in 2001 but attracted little attention until 2005, when critics publicized it after Churchill was invited to speak at a Hamilton College in upstate New York. That touched off a national firestorm.
Then-Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and other political leaders called for Churchill’s firing. University officials said Churchill’s remarks were protected by the First Amendment, but they launched an investigation into his scholarly writings.
University officials say the faculty committees found a pattern of research misconduct that included plagiarism, fabricated research on Native Americans and an article Churchill wrote under someone else’s name and then later cited it in support of his work.
Lane told jurors that Churchill did nothing wrong, but even if the research-misconduct allegations were true, the question they must answer is whether he was fired as retribution for the Sept. 11 essay.
Churchill testified last week that he didn’t mean his comments to be hurtful to Sept. 11 victims. He said 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.”
O’Rourke told the jurors the Eichmann essay wasn’t the reason for Churchill’s firing but was still hateful speech.
“What you’ve heard is an effort to sanitize hatred and mask it as intellectual inquiry,” he said.
