Ward Churchill Solidarity Network

Shareef Aleem Trial Postponed

Shareef Aleem’s trial on charges arising out of the CU Board of Regents meeting in February 2005 has been postponed again, and is now scheduled for January 2007. Check back for updates.

Shareef Aleem Retrial - August 21 at Adams County Justice Center

Denver activist faces 16 years for asking the CU Board of Regents to allow students to speak at a public meeting concerning Ward Churchill. Come and show CU your support for freedom of speech … details here.

National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Denounces the Attacks on Ward Churchill, Ethnic Studies, and Academic Freedom

Let it be resolved, that the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies hereby denounces the attacks on Professor Ward Churchill, on Ethnic Studies and similar disciplines and on the values of academic freedom and academic tenure.

Let it be further resolved, that NACCS wholeheartedly recommits itself to maintaining the spaces of critical interrogation and intervention to all forms of domination … read the entire resolution.

Emergency Summit on the Latest Indian Wars Gains Additional Endorsers

Partial list of endorsers (affiliations listed for identification purposes only):

• Kathleen Cleaver, Senior Research Fellow, Emory Law School; Lecturer, African American Studies, Yale University
• Sumi Cho, Professor, DePaul University College of Law
• Noam Chomsky, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Jim Craven (Blackfoot), Professor of Economics and Chair, Business Division, Clark College
• Carrie Dann (Western Shoshone), elder and activist
• Elisa Facio, Assoc. Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado-Boulder
• Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice, Princeton University; Distinguished Visiting Professor, Univ.of California at Santa Barbara
• Julie Fishel, attorney, Western Shoshone Defense Project
• Gil Gott, Assoc. Professor and Graduate Director, International Studies, DePaul University
• Jennifer Harbury, attorney, author and human rights activist
• Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Professor of History and Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University
• Moana Jackson (Maori), attorney and professor, Auckland, New Zealand
• Kevin Johnson, Assoc. Dean, University of California at Davis Law School
• Yuri Kochiyama, activist
• Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe), activist and author
• Charles Lawrence, Professor, Georgetown Law Center
• Holly Maguigan, Professor, New York University Law School
• Barbara Mann (Seneca), author and lecturer, University of Toledo
• Eric Mann, author and Director, Labor/Community Strategy Center, Los Angeles
• Mari Matsuda, Professor, Georgetown Law Center
• Russell Means (Oglala Lakota), activist, author and attorney
• Glenn T. Morris (Shawnee), Professor of Political Science, University of Colorado – Denver
• Robert Perkinson, Asst. Professor, American Studies, University of Hawai’i
• Natsu Taylor Saito, Professor, Georgia State University College of Law
• David E. Stannard, Professor of American Studies, University of Hawai’i
• Tink Tinker (Osage), Professor, Iliff Seminary
• Haunani-Kay Trask (Kanaka Maoli), Professor, Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai’i
• Sharon Venne (Cree), attorney and author, Edmonton, Alberta
• Ling-chi Wang, Professor, Asian American & Ethnic Studies, University of California at Berkeley
• Michael Yellow Bird (Arikara-Hidatsa), Assoc. Professor, Indigenous Nations Studies, University of Kansas ; Director, Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Critical and Intuitive Thinking
• Eric Yamamoto, Professor, University of Hawai’i School of Law

See here for details.

Letter from CU Ethnic Studies Faculty Member Benjamin Whitmer - Aug. 11, 2006

Sent to the local media and copied to Hank Brown, Phil DiStefano, Weldon Lodwick and the CU Regents.

I have been a part-time adjunct faculty member of CU Boulder’s Ethnic Studies department since January of 2005, beginning just a few weeks before the Ward Churchill controversy broke. During the time since I’ve had the pleasure of being a first-hand eyewitness as events unfolded, and thought I’d share some a few impressions as CU barrels towards the preordained conclusion of its pig-circus.

I’ve seen hundreds of death threats and racial slurs pour into the Ethnic Studies department, which CU administrators neither condemned nor made any attempt to stop, instead posting a memo on the department’s door stating that the views therein should not be confused with the views of CU, ensuring the faculty understood they were being hung out to dry.

* I’ve passed a gentleman day after day as he stood outside the Ethnic Studies department holding a sign that contained the most offensive possible racial slurs, and who was only reluctantly removed by CU after repeated requests by students, ensuring the Ethnic Studies student population understood they were being cut loose as well.

* I’ve listened to hack journalists, politicians and radio jocks fill hundred of hours worth of air time with the kind of sleazy innuendo and flat-out lying about Ward Churchill that would make Walter Winchell renounce journalism in shame, which CU administrators encouraged, pandering slavishly to the local media.

* I’ve heard scores of CU faculty members express private support for Ward Churchill, while, with a few notable exceptions, always finding a way to weasel out of making their beliefs public. This was the most disheartening spectacle of all. While I expect administrators to evince the lowest kind of cowardice and servility, I had harbored some illusions about faculty members. After all, what’s the use of the protection granted by tenure if you’re too spineless to stand for anything?

* However, I’ve also seen Ward Churchill, Natsu Saito and the rest of the Ethnic Studies faculty resist the worst kind of bigotry and lynch-mob rhetoric with a kind of grace and courage that I can only hope to emulate. Watching most of CU’s faculty scuttle over themselves to prove their own craven mediocrity, I have been immensely proud to be a member of Ethnic Studies.

Into the future, I expect nothing but Ward Churchill’s firing from CU. Just as I expect CU will continue to marginalize Ethnic Studies in the interest of mollifying the lynch mob drummed up by the local media. Likewise, I have no doubt but that CU will continue to earn its well-deserved national reputation of being profoundly hostile to faculty and students of color.

They say, after all, that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Benjamin Whitmer
Adjunct Faculty
University of Colorado at Boulder, Ethnic Studies

Churchill Denied Legal Fees Required by University Rules

Ward Churchill has one internal appeal to the University of Colorado’s Privilege and Tenure (P&T) Committee before former Interim Chancellor DiStefano’s recommendation to fire him goes to President Brown and then to the Board of Regents.

According to the CU Rules, in such an appeal:

The university shall contribute up to $20,000 of the reasonable fee of an attorney for services directly related to the representation of the faculty member in a dismissal for cause case, so as to facilitate the proceeding and to ensure that the faculty member’s case is effectively presented.

On August 8, 2006, the chair of the P&T Committee informed Ward Churchill’s lawyer David Lane that there is no money to pay him because the funds are not “authorized by Board of Regents policy.

In other words, the University is again violating its own rules and procedures – as well as its responsibility to protect academic freedom, and the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, due process, and equal protection – in order to fire Ward Churchill. Read attorney David Lane’s response.

For numerous other examples of such violations in this case, see Timeline.