CU reviewing new charges leveled against Churchill

Sara Burnett, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 11, 2006 at midnight

Text size

More Education

Just as one investigation of CU professor Ward Churchill is ending, another is getting under way.

The University of Colorado confirmed Wednesday that it is reviewing new allegations of research misconduct against Churchill, setting off a process that could take several more months to resolve.

In a letter to CU, Churchill and his attorney called the decision "nothing short of harassment," and said that if administrators don't drop the new probe, they'll meet in federal court.

"We are not going to tolerate the endless investigation of Ward Churchill," attorney David Lane said Wednesday.

Round two comes just as CU is wrapping up a separate 15-month investigation of the ethnic studies professor, who is accused of plagiarizing, fabricating material and misusing others' work.

Those findings are expected to be released Tuesday.

CU spokesman Barrie Hartman said the latest complaint is in the "inquiry" stage and that it's possible CU's standing committee on research misconduct will decide that the allegations don't merit full investigation. If so, they would be dropped.

But if the standing committee - which has 60 days to review the charges - decides the complaints should be looked into further, a new five-member investigative panel would be named.

Just like the panel that completed the first investigation of Churchill on Tuesday, the new group would be given up to 120 days - plus necessary extensions - to decide whether research misconduct occurred.

Hartman said Wednesday he hadn't seen Lane's letter, but that the university wants to follow official policy.

"We'd like to have the process play out," he said. "Let the process decide what happens."

Churchill came under intense scrutiny beginning in January 2005, when an essay he wrote the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was widely publicized.

In it, he compared some victims in the World Trade Center to Nazi Adolf Eichmann, and said the towers were legitimate military targets because some of the people who worked there contributed to U.S. oppression overseas, just as Eichmann contributed to the Holocaust.

CU launched its investigation weeks later.

In the letter sent to CU on Tuesday, Lane described "an unbroken chain of retaliatory actions" against Churchill. Among them:

• Boulder Chancellor Phil DiStefano and other CU officials publicly denounced and apologized for Churchill's views.

• The university didn't inform Churchill of its initial investigation. Instead, he learned of it through the media.

• The standing committee on research misconduct "failed to consider the malicious nature of the allegations or the political motivations of those bringing them."

• The university wrongly added allegations raised in a Rocky Mountain News series to the charges against Churchill, and gave him just 14 days to respond to 59 pages of material.

• Despite receiving the latest complaint in May 2005, CU waited until last month to launch a new inquiry, subjecting Churchill to "a potentially endless process of inquiry and investigation."

"No faculty member at the University of Colorado has been subjected to a comparable investigation of his or her scholarship or to comparable public attack," Lane wrote.

Lane also said the most recent charges were filed by someone who is "widely recognized as having personal and political motivations."

Ernesto Vigil, an author and former member of the activist group Citizens for Justice, accused Churchill of fabricating material in a book, including that the organization harbored a fugitive in the mid-1970s.

He also took issue with Churchill's description in another book. Churchill, he said, called some victims of a massacre in El Salvador "Indians," when source materials referred to them as "Salvadoran peasants, villagers and civilians."

Vigil could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

burnetts@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5343

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News