So you thought the Ward Churchill case had been resolved? What are you, an optimist?
No, the wheels of American justice grind s-l-o-w-l-y, and now yet another court — the Colorado Supreme Court, in fact — is poised to take up the matter of whether the former University of Colorado professor was properly fired in 2007 for gross academic fraud.
We’ve long since stopped trying to predict the twists and turns of the Churchill affair, which exploded into the national consciousness in 2005 when his essay blaming the 9/11 victims for the terror attacks came to light. Whether the state’s high court will sustain two lower courts and agree that CU had a right to fire him is anyone’s guess.
But make no mistake: Whatever the final decision, Churchill deserved to be fired. Moreover, he was not fired because of his vile 9/11 essay and his equally vile views on a number of other historical topics. He was fired because in the wake of his sudden notoriety, other scholars as well as news organizations began to point out that he was a serial plagiarist and academic fraud. He was a propagandist who inhabited a world in which “quotation marks are meaningless” and where there “are no standards and no accountability,” to quote CU’s attorney at an earlier court hearing.
A faculty committee that investigated Churchill’s work was even more devastatingly blunt regarding his practice of citing his own ghostwritten works as research sources: “To put it most simply,” the committee said, “it was part of a pattern and consistent research stratagem to cloak extreme, unsupportable, propaganda-like claims of fact that support Professor Churchill’s legal and political claims with the aura of authentic scholarly research . . . .”
It would be a serious blow to CU — and indeed to every college in this state — if it had to reinstate him. Administrators would be on notice that faculty who engage in even the most shocking forms of academic misconduct are immune from accountability.
Nevertheless, a jury originally concluded that Churchill was fired partly in retaliation for his controversial essay. We’re not sure what the high court will make of that remarkable verdict — but we hope not much.
