Ward Churchill Fired

July 25, 2007

More than two and a half years after Ward Churchill’s writings on 9/11 set off a furor, and more than a year after a faculty panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder found him guilty of repeated, intentional academic misconduct, the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted 8-1 Tuesday evening to fire him.

The vote followed a special, all-day meeting of the board, in which it heard in private from Churchill, a faculty panel and from Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado System, who in May recommended dismissing Churchill from his tenured post. The regents emerged from their private deliberations at around 5:30 p.m. Colorado time and voted to fire Churchill, but they did not discuss their views and they quickly adjourned. A small group of Churchill supporters in the audience shouted “bullshit” as the board vote was announced.

While the firing is effective immediately, Churchill is entitled under Colorado regulations to receive one year’s salary, which for him is just under $100,000.

Churchill predicted prior to the meeting that he would be fired and vowed to file a suit against the university, as early as today. In a press conference after the vote, Churchill repeated his argument that the board fired him primarily because of his political views, which he said are “inconvenient and uncomfortable” to the powerful. He vowed to keep “fighting the fight” and said that the impact of the case goes “way beyond Ward Churchill” and will hinder freedom of expression generally. Churchill was upbeat during the news conference, which also featured Native American drumming and chanting by supporters.

In an interview Tuesday night after the vote, Brown, the system president, said that the evidence against Churchill for scholarly misconduct was overwhelming. “I think it was the depth of the falsification that ultimately led to the outcome,” Brown said. “It wasn’t just one or two or three or four, but numerous incidents of intentional falsification,” such that Brown believed that in the end board members “felt like they didn’t have a choice.”

Brown, who was present for the board’s discussions with Churchill and the faculty panel that reviewed the case, but not for the deliberations, said that board members seemed focused not on the question of Churchill’s guilt, but of the punishment. Brown said that the lone regent who voted against firing did so based only on the issue of firing him, not out of any disagreement with the finding that he had committed misconduct.

The meaning of the Churchill case has been heatedly debated over the past two-plus years. To Churchill and his defenders, he is a victim of politics and of a right wing attack on freedom of thought. To Brown and others at the university, Churchill’s case is not about politics at all about enforcing academic integrity and punishing those who don’t live up to basic rules of research honesty. To many others in academe, the Churchill case has been less clearcut. Many academics have said that they are troubled by both the findings of research misconduct against Churchill and by the reality that his work received intense scrutiny only after his political views drew attention to him.

Churchill has been working at Boulder since 1978 and has been a tenured professor of ethnic studies since 1991. In the years before 2005, he gained a reputation at Colorado and on the college lecture circuit nationally as an impassioned speaker and writer on behalf of Native Americans. Most of his speeches were attended by supporters of his views, so he did not attract widespread criticism.

All of that changed early in 2005, however, when Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College. Some professors there, who did not feel Churchill was an ideal speaker, circulated some of his writings, including an essay with the the now notorious remark comparing World Trade Center victims on 9/11 to “little Eichmanns.”

Within days, the controversy spread — with Hamilton under pressure to uninvite Churchill and Colorado under pressure to fire him. Hamilton stood by its invitation, on academic freedom grounds, but in the end called off the appearance, based on threats of violence.

As the University of Colorado considered what to do, a series of accusations against Churchill started to come in that involved his scholarly practices. While Churchill repeatedly has portrayed his critics as conservatives, a number of those who brought complaints against him share his fury at the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans. The complaints included charges of plagiarism, of false descriptions of other scholars’ work or historical evidence, and of fabrications. The university first determined that it could not fire Churchill based on his statements about 9/11, but that it could investigate the other allegations of misconduct, which it then proceeded to do. Three separate faculty panels then found Churchill guilty of multiple instances of research misconduct. The various panels had splits on whether Churchill deserved to be fired and those splits were complicated.

For example, the Boulder faculty panel that first found Churchill guilty of misconduct had five members. One member suggested that Churchill be fired. Two recommended that he be suspended for five years without pay. And two recommended that he be suspended for two years without pay. But the two panel members who preferred a five-year suspension said that they — like the panel member who favored dismissal — would find revocation of tenure and firing to be “not an improper sanction” for Churchill, given the seriousness of the findings. Thus Churchill’s defenders were able to say that the panel didn’t want him fired and his critics were able to say that the panel’s majority saw firing as appropriate.

Ultimately, the university’s Board of Regents alone had the authority to fire. Board members have widely been expected to dismiss Churchill, but they have been circumspect about the case for months. With Churchill threatening to sue, regents were sensitive to any suggestion that they were doing anything except follow standard procedures for allegations of misconduct serious enough to merit firing a tenured professor.

Patricia Hayes, chair of the board, said in a post-vote press conference that “we were very careful not to discuss this among ourselves” and said that she did not know — coming into the meeting — how her colleagues would vote. She also said that board members had been “very diligent” about going through all the materials in the case, including statements directly from Churchill. Asked why the board took so long on Tuesday — regents didn’t appear until an hour and a half after they were expected — she said that “we wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing for the university.”

Brown, at the press conference, said Churchill had tried to “falsify history,” something Brown said conflicts with the university’s “fundamental role” in producing research. Several questions at the press conference concerned Churchill’s allegation that academic freedom was being hurt by the vote. Brown said that was not the case.

“The message this sends is that the university faces up to problems. It deals with them,” he said. As to Churchill’s charges that the review of allegations was rigged against him, Brown called it an “extraordinarily long process” with “countless hearings” and said that “there isn’t anybody who can look you in the eye ... and say that this case hasn’t had due process.”

Churchill and his lawyer have rejected some of the specific charges of misconduct against him, but they have stressed the view — backed by the American Civil Liberties Union — that Colorado politicians and the public were so outraged by Churchill’s 9/11 statements that there was no way his scholarship could be fairly evaluated.

David Lane, Churchill’s lawyer, told reporters that the hearings and Tuesday’s vote were all part of a “scripted performance” and that the expected 4 p.m. vote by the regents was just a part of that script. “The scripted performance calls for the body to be brought out at 4 o’clock, laid in front ... for media purposes,” he said. Advocates who have been watching the Churchill case from afar continued to differ on what it means. Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and a frequent critic of Churchill, praised the Colorado regents. “Academic freedom has to be based on integrity” and “that’s what this case was about,” she said.

Peter N. Kirstein, a professor of history at Saint Xavier University and a blogger who writes frequently about academic freedom, said he was dismayed by the vote, which he called “an egregious violation of academic freedom” that “may transform higher education into a stultifying pall of conformity.” Kirstein said that the bottom line is that Churchill’s “dismissal would not have happened had there not been negative reaction to his writings on the causes and meaning of the September 11 attacks. That point is irrefutable. This situation would never have occurred had he not defied conventional wisdom in his depiction of American casualties in a negative manner. That was his right and our duty to defend it.”

Writing on the Free Exchange on Campus blog before the vote to fire Churchill, Aaron Barlow wrote that it was time to look at the case beyond Churchill himself and raised possible criticisms both of Churchill’s adversaries and defenders. “If nothing else, the Churchill case points out the fact that we need to seriously consider the question of whether we academics are doing enough to police ourselves. The next time those attacking academia come up with a particular person to attack, will we be confident that our defense of that person will not open us up to further accusations of protecting the unqualified or dishonest?” asked Barlow, who teaches English at the New York City College of Technology.

“Should the fact of a witch-hunt be enough to bring academia to the defense of one of its own? The knee-jerk answer is ‘Yes.’ But what if it turns out that the person in question (the details of the Churchill case aside) really wasn’t qualified for the position, by background or by scholarship? What if it turns out that there certainly was dishonesty going on? Should the defense be continued?” Barlow wrote. “The results of the Churchill case will not answer these questions. But, as we move forward with or without Churchill in our midst, everyone concerned with academic freedom needs to consider how best to react next time. The argument, in other words, will not be over on Tuesday.”

— Scott Jaschik

The original story and user comments can be viewed online at Original Article July 2007

The Churchill Firing — I

By Hank Brown

The case of Professor Ward Churchill has received considerable national attention over its two-plus year run. With the next act to be played out in the courtroom, the talk shows will soon be on to other things.

But the ripple effects for higher education will be much longer lasting. The University of Colorado Board of Regents on Tuesday accepted my recommendation that Professor Churchill be dismissed from the faculty for engaging in serious, deliberate and repeated research misconduct. The reaction to the regents’ decision from the university’s constituents has been overwhelmingly positive. Yet in the higher education community across the country, things are a bit more unsettled.

There are those on one end of the spectrum who believe Churchill is free speech martyr who was persecuted because of statements that flew in the face of prevailing winds. On the other end of the spectrum are those who think he is a charlatan, selling snake oil while disguised as an academic. Perhaps the largest group is the one in the middle, which recognizes that his academic misconduct sins were egregious, but remain decidedly uncomfortable that those sins came to light after he engaged in controversial speech.

The case’s implications for academic freedom are also compelling. The term being employed, particularly by those who either support Churchill or are concerned for his free speech rights, is that the decision to fire Churchill may have a “chilling” effect on academic freedom. That’s understandable, but holding Ward Churchill up as the poster child for academic freedom runs counter to the facts.

His own writing shows us why. His essay, “About that Bering Strait Land Bridge ... Let’s Turn Those Footprints Around,” which takes archaeologists to task for holding to a migration theory, he writes, “Tailoring the facts to fit one’s theory constitutes neither good science nor good journalism. Rather, it is intellectually dishonest and, when published for consumption by a mass audience, adds up to propaganda.”

Three separate panels of more than 20 tenured faculty, from the University of Colorado and other universities, unanimously found that important pieces of Professor Churchill’s research and writing met his own criteria for intellectual dishonesty. The faculty members, to a person, agreed that he engaged in research misconduct and that it required serious sanction. The faculty found a pattern of serious, repeated and deliberate research misconduct that included fabrication, falsification, improper citation and plagiarism.

The tenured faculty who reached these conclusions, like all faculty, have a significant stake in academic freedom. The bedrock of any university, particularly public research universities, is academic freedom. The scholars and researchers who investigated Professor Churchill’s work understood this relation to the work they did. They have the same stake in this bedrock principle that all academicians have.

If there is any real chilling effect in this matter, it is the threat posed to academic freedom by the types of serious academic misconduct in which Churchill engaged. Academic freedom exists only because tenured faculty can be trusted to act responsibly. When Churchill breached the obligations of trust imposed upon him, responsible scholars had no choice but to act.

Still, there are those willing to give his shoddy work a free pass because his intellectual dishonesty came to light after complaints about his controversial speech. There is no doubt that Churchill drew attention to himself when writing and speaking about 9/11 victims. It is also clear that allegations of research misconduct, unrelated to his 9/11 comments, were brought to the attention of the university.

Indeed, Professor Churchill invited his readers to challenge his work. In the introduction of his 1997 collection of essays, A Little Matter of Genocide, he writes, “I do believe that when making many of the points I’ve sought to make, and with the bluntness which typically marks my work, one is well-advised to be thorough in revealing the basis on which they rest. I also believe it is a matter not just of courtesy, but of ethics, to make proper attribution to those upon whose ideas and research one relies. Most importantly, I want those who read this book to be able to interrogate what I’ve said, to challenge it and consequently to build on it.”

The ethics of proper attribution and the basis on which his work rests were what the University of Colorado investigated after learning of potential research misconduct. His courting of public controversy on one occasion does not immunize him from adhering to professional standards in all his professional work. The university had an obligation to investigate serious allegations of research misconduct. Our policy statement on research misconduct prohibits us from turning our back on such allegations. Hiding behind the First Amendment is a smokescreen aimed at distracting people from the real issue: academic integrity.

In the final analysis, the Board of Regents of the university had little choice but to dismiss him. His acts of academic fraud were numerous, serious and intentional. Professor Churchill refused to apologize or correct his errors. He did nothing to indicate he would refrain from fraudulent research in the future.

Fraudulent scholarship violates the public trust and damages the profession. Faculty integrity is the cornerstone of any great university. The quality of the faculty’s work is at the heart of everything we in higher education do. To excuse the kind of academic fraud Professor Churchill engaged in would do irreparable damage to all universities.

Hank Brown is president of the University of Colorado. The original story and user comments can be viewed online at Original Report

The Churchill Firing — II

By Gary Witherspoon
July 30

Many conservatives believe the firing of University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill will now reduce liberal politics in academia. Many liberals believe that his firing will uphold high standards of academic scholarship. Both are wrong — because the firing of Churchill reveals a very pernicious kind of exclusionary dogmatism in scholarly research and writing and media reporting. The firing of Professor Churchill for alleged research misconduct ignored evidence to the contrary provided by professors who know his work best, ignored evidence from a committee of scholars who found the investigating committee itself guilty of research misconduct, and ignored all Indigenous evidence and perspectives that are critical of Eurocentric versions of the history of the European invasion of the Americas.

Research misconduct is in the eye of the beholder. Euroamerican teachers and scholars have taught and written for several centuries that Columbus discovered America. That is a more profound and easily provable case of research misconduct than anything of which Churchill has been accused. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been here at least 13,000 years and more likely, according to recent DNA research, 50,000 years. This Columbus lie, which is at the foundation of Eurocentric American history, dehumanizes all those who are now called American Indians by discrediting any of their accomplishments as not being human accomplishments.

Everyone who has perpetuated this myth over the years should be found guilty of deceit, research misconduct and racism, according to the standards of the investigating committee.

The 1987 edition of the standard American history textbook, American History: A Survey begins by saying, “For thousands of centuries — centuries in which human races were evolving, forming communities and building the beginnings of national civilizations in Africa, Asia and Europe — the continents we know as the Americas stood empty of mankind and its works” The book informed its readers that American history “is the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed.” Now that is a very egregious form of “research misconduct.” That statement bears no resemblance to the truth and serves only to continue to misinform and to indoctrinate students in Eurocentric lies.

The committee should have read the 2005 national best selling book 1491, by Charles Mann, for a thorough critique of the statements quoted in American History, and for extensive support for Churchill’s arguments about the history of the Americas. Summarizing research and writing over the last 30-40 years, Mann shows that in 1491 the population of the Americas surpassed that of Europe, that American cities such as Tenochtitlan were larger than any found in Europe at the same time and, unlike European cities, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens and clean streets. I would add that nowhere in Indigenous America in the areas of my research (North and Central America) have any jails been found, so far as I have been able to determine. The earliest American cities were thriving before the Egyptians built their pyramids, and the feats of Indigenous American agriculture were unparalleled anywhere else. The journal Science recently pronounced the development of corn from its ancient noble grass ancestors as probably the greatest botanical achievement of genetic engineering in human history.

The European invasion of the Americas reduced an Indigenous population estimated by many scholars at nearly 100 million or more by 90-95 percent. Shelburne Cook and Woodrow Borah of the University of California at Berkeley spent decades reconstructing the aboriginal population of central Mexico where they determined the population to have been 25.2 million before Cortez’s invasion. Just 100 years later in 1623 only 700,000 had survived the Spanish conquest which destroyed not only millions of people but amazing architecture, art, culture and science, burning nearly all the books in their extensive libraries. The highly regarded historian Richard White has described the results of the invasion of Indigenous America as “the greatest human catastrophe in the history of the planet.”

Most people think the Churchill problem began with his planned speech in 2005 at Hamilton College — after it was shown that he had written that some of the victims of 9/11 were not entirely innocent (CIA agents housed in the building and some technocrats of Western militarism and financial imperialism according to Churchill’s clarification of what he meant in a later press release) and were instead akin to “little Eichmanns.” My essay is not intended to discuss the appropriateness or validity of his statement or its clarification, but to discuss the attack on Churchill from the perspectives, perceptions and practices of research misconduct as they apply to American history and American Indians. The truth about the beginning of the Churchill controversy is that it began with the right wing attack on Churchill after Churchill and others protested a Columbus Day parade in Denver in October 2004.

The Historical Context

It should be pointed out here that in 1861 Cheyenne leader Black Kettle had been invited to Fort Lyon to negotiate a peace with the the United States. He did so, ceding much of Cheyenne territory to the U.S. and agreeing to live south of Sand Creek. The Cheyenne were given a U.S. flag that they were told they should raise whenever threatened and no one would attack them. In 1864, the Reverend Colonel Chivington led 800 troops of Colorado territorial militia in an unprovoked attack on a sleeping village of mostly women and children at Sand Creek (the younger men were out hunting). The villagers raised the U.S. flag as a sign of peace, but Chivington wanted genocide, massacring the village of 53 older men and 110 women and children, mutilating the bodies of the Cheyenne villagers. They took the Cheyenne scalps and genitalia back to Denver, marching down the streets with Indian genitalia held up on sticks, celebrating their genocidal trophies and their evidence that Indians would never again be able to reproduce.

In 1864 The Rocky Mountain News, one of the Denver papers that convicted Churchill in the press and called for his termination, described the massacre of 110 women and children and 53 older men by 800 Colorado volunteers this way: “Among the brilliant feats of arms in Indian warfare, the recent campaign of our Colorado volunteers will stand in history with few rivals, and none to exceed it in final results.... Among the killed were all the Cheyenne chiefs, Black Kettle, White Antelope, Little Robe, Left Hand, Knock Knee, One Eye, and another, name unknown. Not a single prominent man of the tribe remains, and the tribe itself is almost annihilated.... All acquitted themselves well, and Colorado soldiers have again covered themselves with glory.” History has shown the account of this massacre to be a gross case of research and journalistic misconduct.

One historian called Sand Creek the American My Lai. Former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell called Sand Creek “one of the most disgraceful moments of American history.”

One of the participants in this massacre was David Nichols who was honored by the University of Colorado by having a dormitory on campus named after him. In the 1980s my daughter and other First Nations students at UC protested this name, and the name was eventually changed in 1989 to Cheyenne Arapaho Hall. This local history is not irrelevant to understanding how Colorado to understanding the protests of the Columbus Day parades in Denver, and how Colorado has dealt with Churchill his termination or extermination.

Angry over the acquittal of Churchill and the other protesters of the Columbus Day parade, the right wing searched Churchill’s writing for something with which they could destroy him. That is when they found and publicized his comment, written in 2001, about some victims of 9/11 not being totally innocent. Later they discovered that it would be difficult to fire him on the grounds of his unpopular essay, so they went after his scholarship, looking for something they could call “research misconduct.” Forty-four pages in the “official investigation” (or shall we call it an inquisition) are devoted to trying to disprove Churchill’s contention that U.S. agents deliberately gave Indians small pox invested blankets in 1837-1840, while this represents only three paragraphs in any of Churchill’s 12 books and represents less than a thousandth of one percent of the genocide inflicted on Indigenous peoples. This attack on his position is all done from Eurocentric perspectives, biases and paradigms, totally discounting Indigenous perspectives and oral traditions. Yet universities like Colorado hypocritically claim to support and cherish diversity and dissent while denying validity to non-Euroamerican perspectives and traditions.

University officials said their deliberations did not consider Churchill’s essay about the causes of the 9/11 attack in which a short phrase found in one sentence has been used to indict and convict Churchill in the press. That position is, to say the least, not credible, and is being put forth simply to position the university in the upcoming court battle. Churchill’s attorney, David Lane, says that in order to show that Churchill’s First Amendment rights were violated all he has to do is show that Churchill’s unpopular phrase in that essay was a factor in his dismissal, not the whole cause. Everyone knows that without the publicity surrounding that phrase promoted by the right wing, there would never have been any investigation of his scholarship, which in the previous 30 years the university had found exemplary and worthy of promotion and reward.

Those who deny or ignore the American Holocaust are not being investigated. The scholars and journalists who perpetuate the Eurocentric biases disguised as American history are not being investigated for research misconduct, and are not being fired from their teaching or their positions in the media. The protestations of the university about preserving academic and research integrity ring hollow. The firing of Churchill is itself a form of research misconduct and represents a clear attempt by the right wing to silence Indigenous perspectives and to deny the American Holocaust.

Gary Witherspoon is a professor of anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Washington. The original story and user comments can be viewed online at Original report