Ward Churchill Is Fired By University
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BOULDER, Colo. — The University of Colorado’s governing board yesterday fired a professor whose essay likening some victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks to a Nazi leader provoked national outrage and led to an investigation of research misconduct.
Ward Churchill, who had vowed to sue if the Board of Regents took action against him, said immediately after the 8–1 vote was announced: “New game, new game.” Three faculty committees had accused Mr. Churchill of plagiarism, falsification, and other misconduct. The research allegations stem from some of Mr. Churchill’s other writings, although the investigation began after the controversy over his September 11 essay.
“The decision was really pretty basic,” the university’s president, Hank Brown, said, adding that the school had little choice but to fire Mr. Churchill to protect the integrity of the university’s research.
Mr. Churchill’s essay mentioning September 11 victims and Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann prompted a chorus of demands for his firing, but university officials concluded that it was protected speech under the First Amendment.
Mr. Brown had recommended in May that the regents fire Mr. Churchill after faculty committees accused him of misconduct in some of his academic writing. The allegations included misrepresenting the effects of federal laws on American Indians, fabricating evidence that the Army deliberately spread smallpox to Mandan Indians in 1837, and claiming the work of a Canadian environmental group as his own. But the essay that thrust Mr. Churchill into the national spotlight, titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” was not part of the investigation.
That essay and a follow-up book argued that the September 11 attacks were a response to a long history of American abuses. Mr. Churchill said some of those killed in the World Trade Center collapse were part of “a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire” and called them “little Eichmanns.”
Mr. Churchill has said Eichmann was a bureaucrat who carried out policies like the Holocaust that were planned by others.
