This is a guest post by Don Eron, one of the authors of the just-published “Report on the Termination of Ward Churchill.“
The new AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom contains a report by the AAUP’s Colorado conference chronicling the University of Colorado’s prosecution of Native American studies professor Ward Churchill, in response to Churchill’s characterization of some victims of the 9/11 attacks as “little Eichmanns.” Under intense pressure from the media, the legislature, and university regents to fire him, the University of Colorado administration found that Churchill’s speech was constitutionally protected, but charged him with numerous, unrelated allegations of academic misconduct. A faculty committee appointed by the administration convicted Churchill, who was subsequently fired by the university’s Board of Regents.
“The Report on the Termination of Ward Churchill” concludes that the faculty committee convicted Churchill of academic crimes that he did not commit. To arrive at its conclusions, the faculty committee declared a standard method of interpretation to be academic misconduct, disregarded Churchill’s sources and then claimed he had no sources, faulted him for citation practices that some on the committee use themselves, and contrived new charges against Churchill based on standards designed to protect scholars in Churchill’s position.
As Colorado conference members Suzanne Hudson, Myron Hulen, and I document in extensive detail, the prosecution of Ward Churchill represents, on every level, a collapse of institutions charged with protecting academic freedom—from the University’s Board of Regents to the Colorado administration and its lawyers to the faculty committee who convicted Churchill of academic crimes that he did not commit to the national AAUP, which declined to investigate arguably the most notorious academic freedom case in a generation, in part because Churchill was convicted by a faculty committee.
In Ward Churchill’s introduction to our report, he discusses Ellen Schrecker’s essay, “Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain,” published in the inaugural issue of JAF, in which he finds that Schrecker uncritically perpetuates numerous myths stemming from the University of Colorado investigation. Churchill also addresses the circumstances surrounding the national AAUP decision not to investigate, and the subsequent decision of the Colorado Conference to investigate. He argues that organizational and historical constraints within the AAUP inhibit the group’s ability to function as a useful watchdog for academic freedom, particularly in the prosecution of radicals.
