Regents do their duty

Churchill firing only responsible course, given the evidence

Published July 25, 2007 at midnight

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To the very end, professor Ward Churchill's supporters continued to market the delusion that he was targeted by a jingoistic public intolerant of radical dissent.

Churchill the martyr for free speech. Churchill the victim of establishment repression. Churchill the last shining hope for academic freedom.

"Ward Churchill is a far more profound, original, knowledgeable, productive and important scholar than any of his critics," University of Colorado sociology professor Tom Mayer insisted as recently as last month.

Mayer is correct to this extent: Yes, Churchill was original and productive. He was original to the point of inventing his material and productive to the point of lifting the work of others. The voluminous evidence is all available, for anyone to see, in the 124 pages of the "Report of the Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct" that was issued in May 2006.

Once the evidence had been officially compiled (much of it had already appeared in this newspaper), Churchill's termination by the regents, which occurred Tuesday in an 8 to 1 vote, was all but a formality.

After all, the faculty's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct agreed by a two-thirds majority that he should be fired. The chancellor and university president had each in turn concurred. How could the regents balk, given that they possessed proof that one of their professors had engaged in outrageous academic fraud - not just once but on multiple occasions? And far from being remorseful, he was actually defiant - admitting to nothing and refusing to apologize.

If CU were to declare that his transgressions did not justify firing, what would it suggest about the standards the university upholds? What sort of cloud would it cast over the work of every true scholar associated with CU?

Ah, but his defenders say, even if the charges against Churchill's research are true, Churchill was investigated only because of a 9/11 essay in which he claimed the victims deserved what they got.

Well, sure - if they mean that once Churchill became the subject of national controversy, the university could no longer avert its gaze from allegations of fraud circulating around him. But what of it? If writing outrageous, offensive essays inoculates a professor from documentation of fraud, then every scoundrel in academia - and they are a small minority, let us be clear - would know exactly what to do to protect himself.

So what have we learned from the Churchill saga? That it is difficult, but not quite impossible, to fire a tenured professor. That the wheels of due process at a university are ridiculously slow, in this case taking 2 1/2 years. That public pressure on a university is not always a bad thing, since it can produce reform that otherwise would have been spurned. Does anyone suppose that CU would have bothered to revamp the process by which it grants tenure - which it did - without the spur of the Churchill fallout?

Under President Hank Brown's leadership, the university has put yet another awkward issue behind it. Even if a court reinstates Churchill someday on the improbable, spurious ground that his First Amendment rights were violated when he was fired, at least Coloradans will know that the faculty and leadership at their flagship university expelled his poisonous influence from their midst when they had the chance.

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