Belated Finding that CU Violated Ward Churchill’s Rights
August 9, 2007 on 2:15 am | In AnalysisIn late January 2005 the media and local politicians decided that Ward Churchill’s 3-year-old essay on U.S. policy and the 9/11 attacks was suddenly front page “news,” and the CU administration immediately launched its “public relations” campaign against Prof. Churchill in violation of its own rules governing personnel matters.
Beginning in June 2005, Ward Churchill filed grievances with the Privilege and Tenure (P&T) Committee for this and numerous other violations of his rights under CU’s stated policies and rules. The P&T Committee, however, notified him that it would not hear the grievances until after the investigations were complete – i.e., until after the damage had been done.
A week after he had been fired, Ward Churchill was notified that a P&T panel had decided that, in fact, former Interim Chancellor Philip DiStefano and the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct (SCRM) had breached his rights to confidentiality.
The University publicly announced and posted numerous allegations against Ward Churchill and the May 2006 SCRM Investigative Report on which it purports to have fired him. It did not announce the dropping of most of those allegations, or post the P&T Appeal Panel’s Report of April 11, 2007, which dismissed several of the charges in the Investigative Report and concluded that but for the controversy over Prof. Churchill’s 9/11 remarks, the investigation would not have occurred.
The University has never posted or made publicly accessible any of Professor Churchill’s responses or submissions. It has said nothing about the five complaints of research misconduct filed against the SCRM Investigative Report, about how it has refused to investigate those complaints, or—most significantly—how the SCRM is now claiming that its own findings do not constitute “scholarship.”
Because of this imbalance in what the University has made public, Ward Churchill has made the documentary record of the internal appeal and dismissal process available.
Click here to read key documents.
