April Fools Day apparently lasted through April 2 this year, at least in Boulder, Colorado.
That’s when a jury decided in favor of Ward Churchill, a former ethnic-studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. The jury found that CU had fired Churchill in retaliation for his controversial essay about the 9/11 terrorism attacks in violation of his freedom of speech. They awarded Churchill $1 in damages.
Predictably, both sides claimed some sort of victory from the four-year battle pitting free speech of tenured faculty against academic integrity, which until yesterday had been waged mostly in the media. CU president Bruce Benson responded to the verdict in a statement saying that it “doesn’t change the fact that more than 20 of Ward Churchill’s faculty peers on three separate panels unanimously found he engaged in deliberate and repeated plagiarism, falsification and fabrication that fell below the minimum standards of professional conduct.”
The brouhaha goes all the way back to the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when Churchill wrote an essay, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.“ But it didn’t become a full-blown national controversy until 2005 when a Hamilton College student found the little-known essay and protested Churchill’s scheduled speech on that campus.
In the essay – which was more a stream-of-consciousness rant – Churchill outlined his belief that 9/11 was a reprisal for unjust U.S. Middle East policy and global capitalism:
“As for those in the World Trade Center… Well, really, let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire — the ‘mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved — and they did so both willingly and knowingly… If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”
Good stuff, eh? CU launched an investigation to determine if the essay was protected speech, but once Churchill was in the spotlight, allegations surfaced that he had engaged in plagiarism and academic misconduct in writings and in presenting himself as a Native American (which launched its own controversy). Another faculty investigation led the CU regents to fire the tenured professor in 2007.
Throughout the process, CU system spokesman Ken McConnellogue (a seasoned pro in issues management) and the CU-Boulder communications team did as good a job as possible in mitigating damage and embarrassment from the never-ending saga. They kept important stakeholders informed within the limitations of the legal process, they assiduously stayed on message and on strategy, and they gave leaders and friends solid talking points. And they managed to do all that without fanning the flames any further, which is no mean feat.
The real culprits were those who hired Churchill in the first place, along with the jurors who allowed the concept of academic freedom to be disgraced in this tawdry spectacle. The fact is, the verdict may force CU to reinstate a professor who has failed to comply with even minimal of academic standards. Tenure, it seems, has become a lifetime designation without regard to academic ability or integrity. It raises an embarrassing question for higher education: How bad does a tenured professor have to be before he can be fired?
