The American Association of University Professors is urging a state appeals court to order the University of Colorado to reinstate Ward Churchill, the ethnic-studies professor fired in 2007 following an uproar over an essay in which he argued that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had been provoked by America’s conduct abroad. A state-court jury last year concluded that the university had violated Mr. Churchill’s free-speech rights in dismissing him, but the judge handling the case vacated the jury’s decision and refused to reinstate the professor, holding that the state officials named in his lawsuit were immune from litigation. In a supporting brief submitted on Thursday, the AAUP joined the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Coalition Against Censorship in arguing that the state judge had erred in refusing to offer Mr. Churchill a remedy for the violation of his rights.
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30 Responses to AAUP Files Brief Calling for Ward Churchill’s Reinstatement
akprof - February 19, 2010 at 3:40 pm
This guy just won’t go away. The real error occurred when CU tenured him!
11294136 - February 19, 2010 at 3:47 pm
He was fired for a lot more than that!
bigfig - February 19, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Mr. Churchill’s claim to be an American Indian were baldly false, yet he was allowed to play that role from the time he arrived. His work as an artist were plagerized. He is bad news in more ways than one can count, and his presence among that faculty is toxic, pure and simple. Perhaps the bigger questions are these: How did the review and tenure process at CU fail to understand who this character really was? Was granting him tenure simply a matter of procedural sloppiness, or were (is) there some structural or ideological blinders that are hard-wired into that system?
bpilgrim - February 19, 2010 at 4:08 pm
But none of the other things he did would have been scrutinized had he not written that essay. Essentially, he was railroaded because he took a very unpopular stance about 9/11. And really, is it ever wise to be on the same side of an argument with Bill O’Reilly?
wmartin46 - February 19, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Tenure is the real problem here. Get rid of tenure and these sorts of problems won’t exist. No one should have a right to a job for life.
dr_redrum - February 19, 2010 at 4:13 pm
“A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.”
11272784 - February 19, 2010 at 4:20 pm
I live nearby and followed this – Churchill is a complete academic and personal fraud. He is the last person who should be teaching anyone anything, as he has no personal integrity. He has stolen others’ work, both textual and artwork. The AAUP is completely wrong on this and should shun this charlatan. He deserves no help.
erc38 - February 19, 2010 at 4:23 pm
The committee members who conducted the fishing expedition intended to revoke Churchill’s tenure are a bunch of sycophants. They are the ones who committed academic misconduct. Despite what you think of Churchill’s personable qualities, it is not a justification for his persecution.The most egregious misconduct that they could find consisted of a recursive citation. Compare that with what the Harvard Professor of Law, Dershowitz, did when he borrowed citations form a previously published academic work. Dershowitz unequivocably committed plagiarism and no persecuted him because he says what is popular. All of the allegations against Churchill were dubious to begin with and arguably refuted. Even the jury in the civil case agreed that Churchill had been unfairly persecuted.
tenstring - February 19, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Interesting to watch the pile-on — keeps you from having to deal with what he said doesn’t it? What he said is basically true – the CIA calls it “Blowback.” But talking about what’s true seems to be anathema these days. Hell for that matter, we don’t even really know what happened on 9/11 . . .
11272784 - February 19, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Churchill is definitely a plagiarist. He also stole artwork from others and presented it with his name on it. Those assertions have not been refuted, and are facts.
11272784 - February 19, 2010 at 4:51 pm
By the way – the constitution may guarantee freedom of speech, but it does NOT guarantee freedom from the consequences of that free speech.
drhypersonic - February 19, 2010 at 5:03 pm
It’s sad how a once-great and important organization–the AAUP–has descended into the chaos of PC group-think. In the AAUP world, issues such as whether a Professor has actually done the original work he claims he has; has actually honestly stated what his background and qualifications are; has done work on his own without plagiarizing from others; and has fosted a positive, respectful and–yes–scholarly atmosphere within the classroom and university; are unimportant. Instead, what is important is to ram a self-serving radical fraud down the throat of the academic establishment, and expect the tax-payers of the state to pay the bill. For shame.
procrustes - February 19, 2010 at 5:05 pm
If Churchill were merely guilty of saying offensive things, the AAUP might have a case. A properly constituted peer review panel found serious issues regarding his scholarship and the process by which he was granted tenure. If Colorado has anything to answer for, it is a lax and irregular appointment and tenure process. The AAUP again illustrates it politicization and strident irrelevance.
gharbisonne - February 19, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Oh good grief. Churchill was a complete charlatan, without a doctorate, who serially lied about his past, and got his position at Boulder because of his faked claim to being Native American, a non-qualification even if it were true. AAUP’s support of him is yet another reason to have nothing to do with AAUP.
tee_bee - February 19, 2010 at 5:56 pm
What is it about the AAUP that makes it take up the causes of obvious frauds instead of dealing with real issues? Seems like every time they see a windmill, they get out their lance.
tesmith - February 19, 2010 at 6:02 pm
Well said and exactly the case as stated by #13 & 14. The AAUP brings disgrace to itself by such advocacy of falsehoods. Has the Chronicle lost touch with the reality of what caused Churchhill’s undoing or has this venue of news just lowered itself to the chorus of media misinformation and skewed facts? Both seem to be true and has become the routine for many of recent Chronicle reports. I have just cancelled my subscription.
princeton67 - February 19, 2010 at 6:30 pm
That he is a plagiarist and a liar is true but irrelevant. As the brief article notes, he was “fired in 2007 following an uproar over an essay in which he argued that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had been provoked by America’s conduct abroad.” He was found innocent by a jury. He should be reinstated.THEN, the charges of plagiarism and ethnic lying can be applied and fought out.The AAUP is doing nothing more than the ACLU when it supports the right of Nazis or the KKK to parade: upholding the law for the repugnant.
mrmars - February 19, 2010 at 6:59 pm
I don’t feel qualified to comment on how deserving Mr. Churchill is or is not in regard to getting his job back. I’m not trained in his area of expertise, and I can’t even claim to have followed his story closely. What little I do recall of this on-going soap opera is in agreement with some of the statements made above: that the more rocks that were turned over in an attempt to sort things out, the more “snakes” were found. So on the surface it seems reasonable that Mr. Churchill should suffer the consequences of all of these irregularities – assuming that they are in fact real.However, the larger issue – as pointed out by post #4 above – is that none of this would have come to light, at least not when it did, had he not written his 9/11 article, and had it not been so controversial. So in a sense this becomes analogous to the Miranda case in criminal law. The issue isn’t whether he is guilty of whatever he might be guilty of, but the process that was used to dig up the incriminating evidence. If ever there was a test case for the validity of academic tenure, this is it. And the AAUP and others are right to take up the case in support of Mr. Churchill. Whether Mr. Churchill deserved to be tenured in the first place is irrelevant. Once he had been, it should have protected him from the witch hunt that followed, even if a broom or two was found in his closet as a result.What is at stake here is not Mr. Churchill’s future, but yours! If anyone’s tenure rights can be violated with impunity, then tenure itself is useless in the same sense that if a criminal’s rights can be violated so can those of the innocent.
gharbisonne - February 19, 2010 at 7:37 pm
One should choose one’s battles. If one is going to fight for tenure, fight for it under circumstances where the faculty member actually deserves his job. The idea that holding an academic job is deserving of all the protection a criminal defendant has is bizarre.
mrmars - February 19, 2010 at 8:11 pm
Holding a tenured academic job is deserving of all of the rights that tenure is supposed to provide, nothing more and nothing less. If these rights can be abridged for someone who is later deemed to be unsavory or objectionable in some way, solely on the basis of information unearthed in the persecution of a freedom of speech issue of the sort that tenure is supposed to protect against, then in effect these rights don’t really exist for any of us IMHO. The comparison to a criminal rights issue was an analogy, nothing more.
rambo - February 19, 2010 at 8:53 pm
his research is lacking…
stinkcat - February 19, 2010 at 10:24 pm
I wonder just how much old Ward has been harmed by having his tenure taken away? After all, his freedom of speech has not been affected in any way. Replacing his $100,000 or so that CU was paying him probably is not that difficult for him these days. So, the question is: has he been harmed? If so, in what way?
orienteer2 - February 20, 2010 at 5:19 am
Not liking Churchill, but having had to research his case closely, the evidence is that, whatever people may say, he is a serious scholar. The claims to his plagiarism are very skimply, referring to a tiny tiny proportion of his overall work, and that in relation to material not published in any scholarly medium. Others stuff on which he has been challenged is properly the subject of historical debate among scholars; but certainly no more in error than (a) that which does sometime happen when people do historical work (b) that others get away with all the time – within the normal margins. So some of the comments here about his work are from people who clearly have no place in any scholarly community, not least, because their claims have no basis in evidence whatsoever.I have heard him speak, again sitting in the audience and trying to be objective, and clearly he is no fraud intellectually. Some of the stuff he said was, from my point of view, well, just plain wrong. But that doesn’t make a Federal case. Or it shouldn’t.
22040721 - February 20, 2010 at 11:39 am
1. I’ll bet that none of the people who commented here were on the personnel commmittee that recommended tenure for Churchill. We should all know better than to second guess a committe decision based on what we’ve read in the papers. 2. Shame on the ticker for implying that the essay in question merely asserted that U.S. actions overseas provoked the 9-11 terrorists. Lots of people have done that. I think it was more about his assertion that the people who died in the WTC were little Eichmans who deserved their violent deaths (including, I suppose maintenance and food service workers).3. Tenure and freedom of speech are important issues that deserve a more thoughtful debate than pithy one-liners or heuristic devices like, if Bill O’Reilly agrees, I must then disagree.
div411 - February 20, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Leave it to the AAUP to take up a silly cause. The AAUP is a worthless, spineless organization run by persons who never made it in academia. It never accomplishes a thing. It has no clout. No university cares about being blacklisted. And it has no legal standing. Would it ever dare challenge Harvard or Yale to shorten the tenure process to the six years max. allowed to all other universities? I was denied tenure after nine years at one of these places.
snwiedmann - February 22, 2010 at 7:38 am
I am sooooo happy I let my membership in AAUP lapse. I would hate to think my dues were going to support Churchill.
12100026 - February 22, 2010 at 11:02 am
For those who assert that Ward Churchill is a serious academic, take note of his publishers: City Lights Books: They describe themselves: “City Lights is a landmark independent bookstore and publisher that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics.”AK Press They describe themselves this way: “AK Press is a worker run book publisher and distributor organized around anarchist principles. All decision-making, including which titles we distribute and what we publish, is made collectively. Our goal is to make available radical books and other materials, titles that are published by independent presses, not the corporate giants, titles with which you can make a positive change in the world.” South End Press: They describe themselves: “South End Press is a nonprofit, collectively run book publisher with more than 250 titles in print. Since our founding in 1977, we have tried to meet the needs of readers who are exploring, or are already committed to, the politics of radical social change.” Now I am sure that these publishers do a fine job with their books but they are hardly academic publishers of the type that professors are normally expected to publishers, particularly professors at flagship, research universities. A sustained record of publishing at presses like these might cause a reflective person to wonder if Professor Churchill was dodging peer review. Again, it calls into questions decisions about tenure and promotion at CU.
mandingo - February 22, 2010 at 12:32 pm
Mr. Churchill is not a serious scholar. He was a superannuated school boy hanging around campus because he had a good racket going. Some folks never grow up. As for The AAUP, you beclown yourselves with this nonsense.
dmaratto - February 22, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Mention this guy’s name and people start the internet version of a food fight.The curious thing here is how “grey” are the issues involved, and yet how many supposed ‘critical thinkers’ refuse to see it that way, preferring to view the situation as an “if…then” matter, as clearly defined as the layers of an Oreo cookie.Churchill may be a fraud, charlatan and plagiarist, who was also fired wrongfully for his political views on 9/11. That is entirely possible, but apparently unsatisfying for everyone who would like to believe that he is *either* a liar and fraud who shouldn’t have been allowed to be a professor in the first place, *or* a serious scholar who was subjected to unjust persecution because of his opinions.One commenter alluded to the Miranda case (the origin of “You have the right to remain silent”) and it is helpful to remember that, in that situation and many others from history, the person around whom the argument for protection of rights and freedoms was centered was no angel (Miranda, for example, was a robber and rapist). So you can argue for the principles (freedom of speech, free discourse, academic freedom and protections) involved in the Churchill affair without having to agree with, like, or approve of the man, his work, and anything else.
cwinton - February 22, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Whatever the back story RE 9/11 that put Churchill under scrutiny, by any reckoning he proved to be a fraud and a plagiarist and was rightfully released from his academic position as a result. Get over it.