Aug 9, 2006 4:46 pm US/Mountain
Lawyer: CU Should Help Pay For Churchill's Defense
BOULDER, Colo. (AP) ―
University of Colorado officials have rejected a claim by the attorney for professor Ward Churchill that school rules call for the university to contribute $20,000 to help him fight his dismissal on allegations of research misconduct.
Churchill, who touched off a controversy by comparing some World Trade Center victims to a Nazi, is accused of misrepresenting historical facts and evidence and of plagiarism.
He has denied the charges and said he has been targeted because he is a dissident scholar.
Churchill's attorney, David Lane, said a bylaw of the university Faculty Senate calls on the school to contribute up to $20,000 in legal fees for a professor facing a dismissal hearing.
When he was turned down Tuesday, Lane wrote a letter to school officials calling on them to drop the attempt to fire Churchill if they are unwilling to pay for his defense in "the most important matter in his entire professional career."
CU spokesman Ken McConnellogue said the university's governing Board of Regents decided in 2002 not to adopt the Faculty Senate bylaw, effectively superseding it.
In June, a faculty committee and the top official of the university's Boulder campus recommended that Churchill be fired.
The committee said Churchill misrepresented the effects of federal laws on American Indians and that he wrongly claimed evidence indicated Capt. John Smith exposed Indians to smallpox in the 1600s. It also said he committed plagiarism by claiming the work of a Canadian environmental group as his own.
Churchill requested a review of the recommendation by the university's Privilege and Tenure Committee, and he is expected to have a hearing this fall. The committee's findings will forwarded to the school president before a final decision on whether he is fired.
Churchill has vowed to sue if he is dismissed.
The professor penned a 2001 essay that compared white-collar workers at the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, a key planner of the Holocaust. The essay attracted little attention until January 2005, when he was invited to speak at a New York college.
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