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<h1><b>Jury Gets Case of Fired Professor
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/us/02churchill.html?em" eudora="autourl">
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/us/02churchill.html?em<br><br>
</a>By
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/katharine_q_seelye/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
KATHARINE Q. SEELYE</a><br>
Published: April 1, 2009 <br><br>
After a four-week trial, a jury in Denver is deliberating the case of
Ward L. Churchill, a former
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_colorado/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
University of Colorado</a> professor who says he was fired because of an
<a href="http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html">essay he
wrote</a> in which he called victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks “little Eichmanns.” <br><br>
Ward Churchill, left, and his attorney David Lane after closing arguments
in Churchill’s civil suit against the University of Colorado in Denver on
Wednesday. <br><br>
<a name="secondParagraph"></a>The university says Mr. Churchill
plagiarized and falsified parts of his academic research, particularly on
American Indians, and cited this as grounds for his dismissal in July
2007. Mr. Churchill brought a wrongful termination suit against the
university, seeking monetary damages for lost wages and harm to his
reputation. He also wants to be reinstated to his job teaching ethnic
studies. <br>
<br>
The case is seen as a struggle between freedom of speech and academic
integrity, and it has revived the longstanding debate about whether hate
speech deserves protection by the First Amendment.<br><br>
“If we win,” said David Lane, Mr. Churchill’s lawyer, “the symbolic First
Amendment moment of Ward Churchill’s walking back into a classroom will
be overwhelmingly positive.”<br><br>
Ken McConnellogue, a spokesman for the university, said the university’s
case was “nuanced” and “perhaps doesn’t translate as well as a sound-bite
case.” Still, he said, “We believe we’ve put on a compelling case” that
officials fired Mr. Churchill for inferior scholarship, not his 9/11
essay.<br><br>
Mr. Churchill, 61, had been a tenured faculty member at the university’s
campus in Boulder since 1991, and chairman of the ethnic studies
department.<br><br>
On Sept. 12, 2001, he wrote an essay in which he argued that many of
those working in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 were not innocent
bystanders but a “technocratic corps” of “little Eichmanns,” a reference
to
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/adolf_eichmann/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Adolf Eichmann</a>, the Nazi who has been called the architect of the
Holocaust. <br><br>
His suggestion was that their participation in the global financial
system made them complicit in the terrorist attacks, just as Eichmann,
who had said he was only following orders, was responsible for the
extermination of the Jews.<br><br>
The essay garnered little notice at the time but gradually seeped through
the Internet, coming to light in 2005, and then creating an
uproar.<br><br>
At the time, the university defended his essay as free speech. But
accusations began to emerge that in some of his other academic writings,
especially about the persecution of American Indians, he had plagiarized
other scholars and set forth false information.<br><br>
The university said this scholarship not the 9/11 essay prompted a
faculty investigation. And in May 2006, a faculty committee found that
his work including his theory that Capt. John Smith intentionally
introduced smallpox among the Wampanoag Indians in the 17th century was
seriously flawed and had no basis in fact. In July of that year, the
university’s Board of Regents voted 8 to 1 to fire him.<br><br>
His lawyer, Mr. Lane, accused the university of conducting a McCarthy-era
style “witch hunt” against Mr. Churchill, saying officials trumped up the
charges of academic fraud as a pretext for getting rid of him. On the
witness stand last week, Mr. Churchill, a somewhat flamboyant figure
wearing his long hair in a ponytail, said he understood that his essay
had been hurtful to the families of those who were killed on 9/11. But he
also said he wanted the United States to take more responsibility for how
it treated others around the world.<br><br>
“If you make a practice of killing other people’s babies for personal
gain, they will eventually give you a taste of the same thing,” he
said.<br><br>
Throughout the trial, the university maintained that it fired Mr.
Churchill solely “for his research misconduct, for taking other people’s
work and making it his own, for fabricating research, for falsifying
research,” as Steven K. Bosley, a university regent, told the
court.<br><br>
“It was not one time, not even one time on purpose,” Mr. Bosley added.
“It was a pattern of misconduct.” <br><br>
The jury got the case Wednesday afternoon, after hearing closing
arguments. If the jury sides with Mr. Churchill, it will set the damages,
although the judge, Larry J. Naves, can modify the amount. Judge Naves
will decide whether Mr. Churchill should be reinstated.<br><br>
<br><br>
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