Former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, a controversial symbol of academic freedom and free speech who was fired after comparing 9/11 victims to a notorious Nazi, has died. He was 78.
Churchill died Tuesday in Atlanta of complications from a stroke, his longtime friend and former attorney David Lane said Wednesday.
Churchill had been a tenured professor at CU’s Boulder campus for more than 15 years and had served as chairman of its ethnic studies department when he was fired in 2007 following a national uproar over an essay he wrote on Sept. 12, 2001, in which he argued the U.S. had provoked the terrorist attacks.
While the Board of Regents said it fired Churchill for academic misconduct, alleging plagiarism and fabrication in his research on Native Americans, Churchill sued the university for wrongful termination, claiming the real cause was to penalize him for the essay.
The piece, titled “Some People Push Back,” referred to some victims in the World Trade Center attacks as “little Eichmanns” who were complicit in the evil of “America’s global financial empire.” The statement references , a Nazi leader who helped orchestrate the Holocaust.
It went largely unnoticed until February 2005, when faculty at Hamilton College in New York came across the writing when Churchill was invited to speak at the campus. His remarks sparked national backlash, debates over free speech protections, calls for his dismissal from then-Gov. Bill Owens and Colorado’s congressional delegation and a that went all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court.
In 2009, a Denver jury found that CU unlawfully terminated Churchill for exercising his right to free speech and awarded him symbolic $1 in damages, but the judge did not order CU to reinstate him as a professor.
The state Court of Appeals and state Supreme Court heard Churchill’s appeals, but both upheld the lower courtap decision that the man was not entitled to reinstatement or back pay. Churchill then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to take the case.
At the time, Lane, who represented Churchill in the civil trial, said the court’s ruling set a dangerous precedent that the regents are above the law.
“The right wing and the regents tried their best to smear him in the media, but a jury of his peers in Denver District Court saw through it all and found he was fired not because he was a shoddy scholar… But for making controversial remarks about how 9/11 was a rational military response by an oppressed people to American foreign policy,” Lane said Wednesday.
Churchill’s legacy at CU Boulder remains complicated, faculty members said Wednesday.
, a history professor at CU Boulder and proponent of academic freedom, said Churchill had a right to make those “reprehensible” statements in his 2001 essay, but they did spark the investigation into his academic conduct. One could also just as easily ask why an inquiry hadn’t happened earlier, she said.
“I think there was an enormous amount of confusion and strong feeling brought out by having it cast as an issue of academic freedom, but I don’t think it was that,” Limerick said. “I would push to say this was never about academic freedom.”
Academic freedom is important, she said, but it doesn’t protect against plagiarism. Many public officials also moved too quickly in calling for his termination, she said.
“(There’s a lesson) to be careful what you move too quickly to support, and be ready to take in more information and think maybe there’s something here we weren’t paying attention to,” Limerick said.
Christopher Braider was part of a faculty group who protested the university’s actions against Churchill. He objected to the university’s investigation, which he believes was the administration caving to public and political pressure from Colorado and the nation.
There’s no doubt that Churchill did cheat, plagiarize and violate scholarly ethics, Braider said. But the investigation only happened because of Churchill’s protected speech, which Braider believes was wrong.
“The university wanted to fire him, and they found a pretext through this investigation of his scholarly work,” Braider said. “They wouldn’t have investigated his scholarly work without the public outcry, and thatap what the jury found.”
“The guy may (have been) a stinker, but the university behaved very badly,” Braider continued.
Condemnation of Churchill’s scholarship was not universal — in 2012, the Colorado delegation of the published an extensive report that characterized the allegations against him as “almost entirely false or misleading; the slivers that remain standing are trivial in the extreme, given the volume of Churchill’s work and the high regard in which it is held by other experts in the field.”
Lane described Churchill as a passionate fighter for human rights, especially those of Native Americans and Indigenous people everywhere.
“He was absolutely fearless when it came to standing up for what he believed was right,” Lane said. “He didn’t care who criticized him; he was willing to go to jail for his beliefs. I think he was a very inspirational figure.”
A 2005 investigative report by the Rocky Mountain News also criticized Churchill’s claims that he was Native American. In 2017, he told a he “never claimed (he) was (expletive) Sitting Bull.”
Churchill was born on Oct. 2, 1947, in Urbana, Illinois, to Jack LeRoy Churchill and Maralyn Lucretia Allen.
He was drafted into the U.S. Army at 19 years old and served a 10-month tour in South Vietnam, according to the AAUP. It was an experience Lane said helped shape his political views and advocacy for Indigenous people.
Churchill soon became involved in political activism back home, and went on to earn a master’s degree in cross-cultural communication from the University of Illinois-Springfield.
He briefly taught studio art and art history at Black Hills State College in South Dakota before moving to Colorado, where he started working for CU Boulder in 1978.
He rose through the campus ranks over the next decade, serving as director of the American Indian Educational Opportunity Program and University Learning Center and helping found the center that was a precursor to the university’s Ethnic Studies department, according to the AAUP.
Churchill was hired as an associate professor in 1988 and won multiple campus awards for his political and intellectual work. He accepted a tenured faculty position in 1991, was promoted to full professor in 1997 and became chair of the Ethnic Studies Department in 2002.
Information about his survivors and memorial services was not available Wednesday.
