July 7, 2006

A Second Look, or Double Jeopardy?

To the Editor:

Severely punishing Ward Churchill, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, for plagiarism and fabrication may seriously chill the speech of controversial professors everywhere ("Ward Churchill Committed Misconduct, Panel Finds," The Chronicle, May 26). Churchill's academic misconduct is not in serious doubt; some of the charges against him, as you report, "had been well known by scholars years before," but those charges "had not been brought up formally until after the