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.

There are a lot of things wrong with this picture, the most obvious being:

1. Only two committees directly examined evidence in this case. One was an Investigative Committee which found violations on seven counts, but only one of its five members recommended dismissal. After throwing out come of those charges, three of the five members of an Appeal Panel recommended a one-year suspension. In other words, a majority of both groups examining the evidence did not recommend firing Professor Churchill. We fail to see any unanimity.

2. CU President Hank Brown decided to override the recommendation of the Appeal Panel. In doing so, Brown—apparently now an American Indian Studies expert—decided that the Panel was wrong regarding Professor Churchill’s interpretation of the General Allotment Act of 1887 and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990.

3. CU has characterized the charges against Ward Churchill as falsification and fabrication of evidence and plagiarism. In fact, the specific findings of the Appeal Panel were that he (a) failed to provide sufficient evidence on three facts relating to an 1837 smallpox epidemic; (b) cited to material he had ghostwritten (tho’ no one can point to any standard prohibiting this); (c) published an article in which a co-author’s name was deleted by the magazine; and (d) copyedited a piece (written and edited by others) which, unknown to him, plagiarized Fay Cohen.

Even if these were true, they don’t constitute grounds for firing a tenured full professor with nearly 30 years of exemplary service.

4. Brown’s recommendation to fire relies exclusively on the Investigative Committee’s Report, yet that Committee itself has been charged with research misconduct in five separate research complaints. Click here to read them:

• May 10, 2007 complaint against Investigative Committee by 11 professors, (including 2 experts in American Indian Studies)
• May 28, 2007 complaint against Investigative Committee by 5 professors and 2 attorneys (including 4 Indigenous scholars)

(Note: Ward Churchill was not involved in the drafting or filing of either of these.)

• July 12, 2007 complaint filed by Ward Churchill against Michael Radelet and Investigative Committee.
• July 18, 2007 complaint filed against Marjorie McIntosh and Investigative Committee (plagiarism)
• July 19, 2007 complaint filed against Marjorie McIntosh and Investigative Committee (falsification, fabrication, misrepresentation)

These complaints extensively document instances of falsification and fabrication of evidence, misrepresentation of sources, and plagiarism in the Investigative Committee’s Report.

5. Just before the Regents’ meeting, the University of Colorado dismissed all five of these complaints without investigation. The reason? All of a sudden, the Investigative Committee Report wasn’t “research” subject to scholarly standards.

Never mind that the Report runs 124 pages, with 254 footnotes, and was published by the University. Never mind that the professors on the committee claimed to be adhering to scholarly standards in their Report.

The Investigative Committee, apparently, can engage in plagiarism, misrepresentation, falsification, and/or fabrication of evidence with impunity, and their Report can then be used to dismiss Professor Churchill on the same charges. And we are to believe that CU fired Ward Churchill, not for his political statements, but to uphold “academic integrity”?

In doing so, they overrode the recommendation of the review panel of the University’s Privilege and Tenure (P&T) Committee, instead endorsing CU President Hank Brown’s recommendation to fire. They also disregarded the University’s refusal to investigate the numerous research misconduct complaints filed against the May 9, 2006 Investigative Committee Report which provides the only justification for Brown’s recommendation.

Although relying on the May 9 Report to fire Prof. Churchill, the University now claims that Report wasn’t actually scholarship, and can’t be held to the same standards it applied to Prof. Churchill. (Click here, here and here to read the charges of falsification and fabrication of evidence, as well as plagiarism, against the Investigative Committee. Click here to read Ward Churchill’s response to the dismissal of those complaints.)

On July 24, the Regents convened at 8:00 am, simply to announce that they were moving into executive (i.e., closed) session. The Regents refused requests for public comment by students, faculty and community members. They denied Professor Churchill’s request that the presentations by the P&T Committee panel, the University, and Ward Churchill be open to the public. They did not seem to see the irony in citing Professor Churchill’s confidentiality rights as the basis for their decision. To read Ward Churchill’s submission to Regents, click here.

None of the Regents recused themselves from the vote, even those who had previously and publicly denounced Ward Churchill. President Brown had already refused to recuse himself, denying that he had had any involvement with Lynne Cheney’s neoconservative American Council of Trustees and Academics (ACTA) for a decade. (Brown was a founding member of ACTA, which issued its How Many Ward Churchills? report just before the May 2006 Investigative Committee Report was released. For more on the CU-ACTA connection, click here.)

The Regents were scheduled to re-open for their public vote at 4:00 p.m., but didn’t reconvene until nearly 5:30. Many speculate that they were attempting to convince the lone holdout, Regent Cindy Carlisle. Despite the 95 degree heat, hundreds of Ward Churchill’s supporters, recognizing the importance of this decision, remained in the packed auditorium. The Regents, surrounded by security, hastily took their vote and retreated to their scripted press conference. Most of the press, however, followed the Churchill supporters, led by the AIM drum and flag, to the press conference organized by CU students and faculty.

For some of the better media coverage of the day, see http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/25/145254. To get a feel for the event, see footage at http://www.dailycamera.com/video/cameratv/. (E-mail us at wcsn@wardchuchill.net if you’ve got other good video links.)

With the two and one-half year pretense that the University’s “investigations” weren’t really about Prof. Churchill’s constitutionally protected political statements finally completed, CU Pres. Brown immediately reported his accomplishment to CU donors. On the other side, David Lane immediately filed suit to vindicate Ward Churchill’s First Amendment rights.

A Denver jury will now decide have the opportunity to see if it thinks this was about footnotes and citation, or politics and money.

I don’t know how long it will last up there so please fwd it to friends, especially to those who were not able to be inside during the press conf.

http://www.9news.com/news/top-article.aspx?storyid=74224
–Look in the left-hand sidebar under “9News Video”

Here are the direct links:
http://www.9news.com/video/player.aspx?aid=38135&bw=
http://www.9news.com/video/player.aspx?aid=38132&bw=

Some of the better coverage of this issue can be found here.

Based on the May 9, 2006 Report of a University of Colorado (CU) Investigative Committee, President Hank Brown has recommended that I be dismissed for “research misconduct.” From the beginning, it has been clear that going through my scholarship with a fine-tooth comb was simply a pretext to fire me for my constitutionally protected speech.

The fraudulent nature of CU’s “investigation” has been clearly documented by 5 sets of research misconduct complaints filed against the Investigative Committee. Two sets of these complaints were filed in May 2007 by 9 CU professors, 6 outside professors and 2 attorneys. I have since filed three additional sets of research misconduct charges. These 5 complaints document, among other things, falsification and fabrication of evidence and plagiarism by the Committee in its Report on my scholarship.

Today I was informed that the University of Colorado will not investigate these charges against the Investigative Committee because its activities “did not constitute research.” This is astonishing, given that the Committee members were purportedly selected on the basis of their scholarly credentials and claim throughout the Report to be engaged in scholarly research and analysis.

The May 9 Report is 124 pages long, with 254 footnotes and 5 appendices. It was immediately published and disseminated under the University’s imprimatur. Investigative Committee Chair Mimi Wesson has publicly acknowledged at least one “error” in the Report and stated that in the interest of “research integrity” the Committee will “take steps to ensure that the error is corrected for the scholarly record.”

President Brown claims that I should be fired to preserve “academic integrity.” Yet he relies on a Report which the University refuses to investigate against credible and well-documented charges of falsifications, fabrications, and plagiarism.

The University cannot have it both ways. If the Investigative Committee’s Report is scholarship, it must be held to the same standards to which it claims to be holding me accountable. If it is not, President Brown’s recommendation is based on no credible evidence at all.

The Regents will vote on President Brown’s recommendation on July 24. We will see if they simply rubber stamp this charade.

Professor Ward Churchill
Boulder, Colorado
July 21, 2007

To the members of the University of Colorado Board of Regents:

Later this month, the Board of Regents will meet to consider a recommendation, made by University of Colorado President Hank Brown, that Professor Ward Churchill’s employment be terminated.

We write on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union—an organization long dedicated to preserving the principles of the First Amendment and academic freedom—to urge you to reject this recommendation.

The investigation of Professor Churchill’s scholarship is the result of widespread publicity in early 2005 about certain unpopular views Professor Churchill expressed several years earlier in an essay about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Prominent public officials, including members of the legislature and the then-Governor of Colorado, quickly called for Professor Churchill’s termination. The Board of Regents called an emergency meeting, at which the Chancellor announced his plan for an immediate investigation of all of Professor Churchill’s writing and speeches to determine whether they provided any grounds for dismissal.

It is undisputed, however, that Professor Churchill’s views are protected by the First Amendment and cannot serve as a legal basis for any adverse employment action. Nevertheless, the University soon launched the investigation of Professor Churchill’s scholarship in an effort to find more defensible grounds for sanctioning him.

The investigative committee found six charges of research misconduct to be sustained. The Appeals Panel of the Privilege and Tenure Committee concluded that only three of those were valid. Only one member of the five-member investigative committee believed that dismissal was an appropriate sanction, and a majority of the appeals panel concluded that termination was not warranted. Despite these conclusions, the University President has recommended termination, thus urging the same result as the elected officials who publicly called for Professor Churchill’s termination in 2005. The current Governor of Colorado has now added his voice to those clamoring for Professor Churchill to be fired.

We believe the poisoned atmosphere in which this investigation was launched, and the circumstances under which it was initiated, have irretrievably tainted the process. The investigation of Professor Churchill’s scholarship cannot be separated from the indefensible lynch-mob furor that generated the initial calls for his termination. Firing Professor Churchill in these circumstances does not send a message about academic rigor and standards of professional integrity. On the contrary, it sends a warning to the academic community that politically unpopular dissenters speak out at their peril.

Accepting President Brown’s recommendation in these circumstances poses too great a risk that other members of the academic community will respond by choosing to silence themselves or temper the public expression of their views out of fear that they, too, will be subjected to detailed fishing expeditions and censure. Such a result not only undermines academic freedom, it also diminishes the range and breadth of public debate that is vital to a flourishing democracy. We urge you to reject President Brown’s recommendation.

Sincerely,
Anthony Romero
Executive Director
ACLU

Cathryn Hazouri
Executive Director
ACLU of Colorado

Dear Steve Ludwig, Cindy Carlisle, Patricia Hayes, Michael Carrigan, Tom Lucero, Steve Bosley, Kyle Hybl, Paul Schauer, and Tillie Bishop:

I don’t envy your position as regents of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

On the one hand I envy the attainments that result in your serving on a Board of Regents. I myself am a mere professor of history. On the other hand, I do not envy your sitting on a board asked to produce a landmark decision in the history of academic freedom in this country.

That burden I believe is what is on your desk right now. A very weighty decision that places the deciders in the limelight.

As I understand the history of my vocation, scholars once got together, formed academic institutions, doubled as classroom teachers and administrators and built institutions of learning. At some point a professional managerial stratum emerged to facilitate the scholar’s classroom work, freeing up the scholar’s time by providing needed auxiliary services. As the college or university became more like a corporation, boards like yours emerged and wound up making or least approving the main decisions affecting academic life. Since then there’s always been an uneasy balance between “faculty governance” and the administrators’ role.

Professors, once masters of their institutions, became more like employees in a firm. Some people think that’s how it should be, or that it should be more and more like that. A favorite target for them, as you know, is the institution of tenure which operates to strengthen the faculty role. Some think professors ought to be judged on the product they produce, and how much of it they produce—for their employers (who, again, weren’t even there initially). They should be graded on how many tuition-paying students they attract to the institution, how big their enrollments are, how well they contribute to corporate America by influencing young minds to better contribute to that America and its global ambitions.

Some would like to apply an ideological litmus test to us academic employees: they might for example suppose that all professors, just to assume their positions in society, ought to agree and actively propagate that the U.S. is the best country in the world, its capitalist system generally admirable (maybe even “the end of history”), its history (while containing some unfortunate aspects) generally inspirational, its wars if sometimes mistaken always undertaken with honorable motives. There are some commentators hostile to us for being disproportionately irreligious, disinclined to believe with the majority of Americans in the literal truth of Bible stories, much more likely to understand science within the matrix of the theory of evolution, far less likely than the population at large to believe the government when it offers its explanation for its wars. But maybe we do that precisely because of our educational backgrounds.

As professors of languages, we tend not to believe that Hebrew was the original language and that others exist because God inflicted them on us when humans tried to reach Heaven by constructing the Tower of Babel. As professors of astronomy, we tend to reject the idea that the sun and moon ever “stood still” as the Book of Joshua records, or that the earth preceded the existence of the sun moon and stars. As professors of history, we tend to question whether human beings have only been around just 6000 years. We’re also less likely than the general population to believe in astrology, the geocentric theory, creationism theory, the flat earth theory, the theory that God gave America to His white people as a promised land. Yes, we are more critical of government and less inclined to identify ourselves as “conservatives” than the general population, although we have some fine critically thinking conservatives among us.

We don’t assume a need to obey past or consensus views. That as you know makes some people in Colorado and elsewhere uncomfortable. Some see professors generically as a big far-left problem and threat to “family values” and seek to shelter their children from all we represent. As guardians of an educational institution, I would hope such attitudes trouble you.

You are surely familiar with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded in 1995 by Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife Lynne Cheney and Joseph Lieberman, which thinks that America’s colleges and university faculty have been the “weak link in America’s response” to Sept. 11. And you may know that the vice president was a key figure in promoting the war on Iraq based on lies and the upcoming attack on Iran based on lies. That’s their notion of an appropriate response to 9-11, and they want you and me on board that program.

If you’re paying attention you realize that the neoconservative faction in the administration (of which Cheney seems the de facto head) has nothing but contempt for logic and reason as these pertain to U.S. policy. It promotes and perhaps lives in a world of myth and delusion.

New York Times columnist Ron Suskind reported in 2002 that one top administration official had responded to something he’d written with a contemptuous dismissal of “what we [the Bush administration neoconservatives] call the reality-based community.” He alluded to people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” But of course it’s precisely that judicious study that traditional academe has been all about. I’d like to think that you as a university regent are personally committed to that ideal. What is better, after all, in the life of the mind, than the judicious study of discernible reality? Can we advance on it through wanton abandonment of logic in the service of apocalyptically violent fantasies? Some people think so, and want academe to embrace their view.

“We’re an empire now,” the above-mentioned anonymous source (in this era when anonymous sources say so many influential things) told Suskind, “and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

There in a nutshell—in this senior administration official’s statement—is the neoconservative argument against academia, and more broadly against the human mind, the thought process that you as a volunteer servant of a university ought to cherish, facilitate and protect. We create our own reality, he says. On the other side of this mad creativity is the will to destroy: to wipe out the Bill of Rights, the possibility for meaningful public discourse, the existence of universities like yours as credible forums for such debate.

The president of University of Colorado is currently Hank Brown, a Lynne Cheney crony and ACTA member. Do you suppose he wants the university to be such a forum for discourse? If not, might you be able—in a rare departure from regents’ traditional role as rubber-stampers—countermand him?

Professor Churchill became a public figure for a brief essay he wrote after 9-11 that compared some of the victims of the attack on the Twin Towers to Adolf Eichmann. Historians draw historical analogies all the time, some very appropriate, some not. (As an example of inappropriate analogies, I’d suggest comparisons between Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are made routinely by politicians, journalists and others framing public opinion who somehow escape any consequences from their irresponsible speech.)

Churchill’s statement produced a little controversy during that immediate post-9-11 period, when ACTA issued a report which, according to Roberto Gonzalez of the San Jose Mercury News , “in a chilling use of doublespeak” affirms “he right of professors to speak out, yet condemns those who have attempted to give context to Sept. 11, encourage critical thinking, or share knowledge about other cultures.” In that report “Faculty are accused of being ’short on patriotism’ for attempting to give students the analytical tools they need to become informed citizens. Many of those blacklisted are top scholars in their fields, and it appears that the report represents a kind of academic terrorism designed to strike fear into other academics by making examples of respected professors.”

Soon after 9-11 political satirist Bill Maher on his ABC show “Politically Incorrect” happened to agree with a (conservative) political commentator guest on his program that the 9-11 attackers were not, whatever else they were, “cowardly” as the Bush administration had suggested, and that U.S. officials had indeed “been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” Recall how in our free speech, free enterprise system FedEx, Sears Roebuck and other sponsors withdrew support for Maher’s show, ultimately resulting in its cancellation, while President Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer declared—in specific response to a reporter’s question about Maher—that people “need to watch what they say.” Recall how this administration proceeded to say so many false things to justify a war of aggression against Iraq. Recall how central Cheney was to these efforts, insisting on an al-Qaeda-Iraq link that academics—people using reasoned analysis, people you are supposed to be there to support—have thoroughly discredited.

The really ferocious rightwing response to Churchill’s essay, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” began in January 2005. Fueled by anti-academics such as Fox News’ David Horowitz, it brought Churchill into the spotlight. Your president at the time, Elizabeth Hoffman (a Republican), told the faculty she feared of a “new McCarthyism” a week before resigning her post. Her successor Brown has campaigned tirelessly for Churchill’s dismissal and has brought this decision to your desk.

Boulder has rejected the student body vote for Churchill as “favorite professor;” your alumni association in an action unprecedented in the award’s 44 years withheld it from the recipient. Your Standing Committee on Research Misconduct under the strong influence of ACTA—which most of us in academia see as a dangerous, fringe operation—has determined that Churchill has engaged in “serious research misconduct” after a witchhunt. That investigative travesty would never have occurred had he not expressed a critical view of U.S. imperialism during a time when this administration was striving, with much success, to stifle dissent while cynically exploiting the emotions unleashed by the 9-11 attacks to seize unprecedented power while preparing for generations of war on multiple ill-defined enemies.

Churchill’s words of dissent, as you know, were constitutionally protected freedom of speech. So he could not be dismissed merely for the thought-crime of writing “The Justice of Roosting Chickens.” But some people thought that despite his tenured status based on his prolific writings, student evaluations and record of service he had to be sacked on some basis, for some reason. As a practical matter they needed to get something on this professor. So they arranged to re-examine his entire career seeking some cause to sack him on grounds other than the nakedly political.

What do they come up with? A handful of accusations of plagiarism far less serious than those brought against presidential historian Doris Kerns Goodwin—those not raised by the presumed victims of such plagiarism but a zealous ideologically driven team led by a former assistant attorney general of Texas. Six controversial counts of fabricating or falsifying information pertaining to the history of Native Americans.

I’d suggest that is boards of regents in this country were to investigate and punish the falsification of Native American history by scholars, or if society in general were to investigate such falsification in the media, popular culture and political discourse, we’d all be in for a very time-consuming process resulting in a whole lot of people out of jobs.

The American Association of University Professors at Boulder has issued a statement of protest at this attack on Churchill. “We believe,” they declare, “that the investigation now is widely perceived to be a pretext for firing Churchill when the real reason for dismissal is his politics.” Your own Promotion and Tenure Committee report acknowledges that “but for his exercise of his First Amendment rights, Professor Churchill would not have been subjected to the Research Misconduct and Enforcement Process.”

Isn’t that obvious to you? Isn’t it also clear that a vote to endorse the foregone decision of ACTA’s Brown to fire this professor will be viewed in the long run not as a vote for high academic standards, but a vote to baldly align your institution with the Bush-Cheney administration and its standard of “new realities” based on militarism, unquestioning nationalism, intimidation, and contempt for judicious study? A vote to, as Gonzalez put it, “strike fear into other academics”? Is that what a university trustee should want to do?

Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, has said it well: “All of us who value academic freedom should now stand in full solidarity with Ward Churchill. The outcome of his case at the University of Colorado is the best litmus test we have to tell whether the right-wing’s assaults on learning and liberty will stifle campus life in this country. Never in my lifetime have we in America more needed the sort of vigorous debate and creative controversy that Ward Churchill’s distinguished career epitomizes. We all stand to lose if his principled defense fails.”

I urge you to end this travesty and avoid what will surely be a deep stain on the history of the university and academic freedom in general. This is a deeply troubled country in desperate need of more articulate dissent as its Cheneys in the halls of political and academic power arrogantly abuse that power, driving us towards more disastrous war. You can abet them by striving to silence one voice (although I doubt Churchill will be silenced and may if the country doesn’t descend into fascism perhaps get a good job elsewhere). Or you can just say no to McCarthyism. It’s your own shame or honor at stake. Think about how your kids, who might be like the students who voted Churchill best professor, will think about you in the future.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu