Jun 28, 2006 12:26 am US/Mountain
Churchill: Termination Case Will End Up In Court
BOULDER, Colo. (AP) ―
Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who compared some World Trade Center victims to a Nazi and who the top university official said should be fired for academic misconduct, said Tuesday he is being treated unfairly and predicted that his case would end up in court after a lengthy and costly appeal.
"Even if the allegations at issue were true -- and they certainly are not -- they do not constitute offenses for which faculty members can, under any ordinary circumstances, be terminated," Churchill said in a statement.
University officials did not immediately return phone calls left after hours.
The school's committee on research misconduct said Churchill "has committed serious, repeated, and deliberate research misconduct." Interim Chancellor Philip DiStefano agreed and on Monday recommended that Churchill be fired.
Churchill said he will appeal DiStefano's recommendation to a faculty committee, a process he said will likely take months and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies, has denied allegations of plagiarism.
"Hopefully, the members of (the faculty committee) who review my case will display the sort of integrity conspicuously lacking in their predecessors on the investigative panel and the (school's committee on research misconduct)," he wrote. "That would do much to constrain the magnitude of damage sustained by the university -- and consequently the taxpayers -- when my case goes to court, as it ultimately will."
His attorney, David Lane, has said Churchill will sue if his termination is upheld by the university.
In an essay written shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Churchill described some of the victims in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, a key planner in the Holocaust. The essay was largely ignored until January 2005, when it came to light before Churchill was to speak at Hamilton College in upstate New York.
The essay triggered calls for Churchill to be fired, but university officials concluded he could not be dismissed because of free speech protections. They did order an investigation into allegations of academic misconduct, which concluded two weeks ago.
Churchill said the investigation into the work was politically motivated and skewed toward finding a "legally defensible" reason for firing him.
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