Just
deserts for Churchill
Firing was inevitable after recent report
Rocky
Mountain News
June 27, 2006
After hiring, promoting and for many years lionizing an academic
fraud, the University of Colorado decided Monday to fire him, having
been left with no choice after 18 months of blistering controversy and
ghastly revelations regarding his scholarly misconduct.
The suspense over Ward Churchill's fate essentially ended two weeks
ago, when two-thirds of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct
recommended his ouster. But most doubt vanished in May, when an
investigative panel of scholars issued a devastating analysis of the
professor's research shenanigans.
The heavy lifting in this saga was conducted by Churchill's peers, in
other words - as well as by the press, but that's another story - and
they deserve high praise for the labor.
If we appear somewhat stingy with compliments for the CU hierarchy,
it's no accident. Todd Gleeson, dean of the College of Arts &
Sciences, not only was showering Churchill with praise long after he
might have worried that his ethnic studies professor was a scandal
waiting to happen, but Gleeson also privately mocked a 2004 complaint
from someone who heard Churchill give a speech at Macalester College in
St. Paul and wondered if it was "the educational mission of your
institution to employ someone who encourages students to terrorist
action."
After the furor broke over Churchill's "Little Eichmanns" essay - an
essay, by the way, that justifies a "dose of medicine" against the U.S.
in the form of chemical or biological weapons - Interim Chancellor Phil
DiStefano released a tepid statement distancing the university from the
renegade professor but revealing little sign of genuine outrage. CU's
president at the time, Elizabeth Hoffman, eventually would wax
indignant, but against Churchill's critics, claiming they were the
vanguard of a "new McCarthyism."
Winston Churchill once quipped that "You can always count on Americans
to do the right thing after they have exhausted all the other
possibilities." As if to prove Churchill right, CU officials eventually
recognized not only the utter public relations disaster on their hands
but also, by golly, that the critics who charged Churchill with
disgraceful scholarship seemed to have an awful lot of hard evidence on
their side.
Of course, it takes a great deal of due process to fire a tenured
professor, even one as transparently ill-equipped for the classroom as
Churchill. Hence the long wait before DiStefano could finally say,
"Today, I issued to Professor Churchill a notice of intent to dismiss
him from his faculty position at the University of Colorado, Boulder."
In this case, justice delayed is still justice.
Copyright 2006, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.