The U of Colorado has been in the process of finding a way of getting rid of the troublesome Prof. Ward Churchill. Mainly, they need a process that will get him 86ed and that will result in a lawsuit they can win. There will be a lawsuit, of course.

If you don’t recall, Churchill is the guy wrote an article suggesting that the victims of September 11 weren’t so innocent. Democracy Now summarizes:

The current controversy began in February with an article published on the front page of the Hamilton College newspaper, The Spectator. The College, which is located in upstate New York, had invited Professor Churchill to speak at the school in the beginning of February. The article highlighted statements Churchill made in an essay about the September 11th attacks. The essay was called “Some People Push Back; on the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” Among other things, the article said that many of the people killed in the Pentagon and the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 were not innocent civilians.

The passage that received the most attention was Churchill’s labeling of the people described as a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire” as “little Eichmanns.” (Story.)

Once the firestorm started, it became clear that it would be suicide to go after Churchill on grounds that could be construed as violations of academic integrity, so his critics had to find a Plan B. Fortunately, he appeared to have provided them with a juicy one – rampant plagiarism. So an investigation ensued.

The committee has now done its work, and it looks bad for Ward. You can download all the study results you want here, but the media summary is the most concise.

Based on its investigation of those allegations, the Committee unanimously found, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Professor Churchill committed several forms of academic misconduct as defined in the policy statements of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Colorado system:

1. Falsification, as discussed in Allegations A, B, C, and D.
2. Fabrication, as discussed in Allegations C and D.
3. Plagiarism, as discussed in Allegations E and G.
4. Failure to comply with established standards regarding author names on publications, as discussed most fully in Allegation F but also in Allegations A, B, and D.
5. Serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research, as discussed in Allegation D.
…
The Committee noted additionally that Professor Churchill was disrespectful of Indian oral traditions when dealing with the Mandan/Fort Clark smallpox epidemic of 1837, both in his essays and during the course of this investigation, as discussed in Allegation D.
…
The Committee found that Professor Churchill’s misconduct was deliberate and not a matter of an occasional careless error. The Committee found that similar patterns recurred throughout the essays it examined. The Committee therefore concluded that the degree of his misconduct was serious, but differed on the sanction warranted. The Committee’s report states as follows:

While we are unanimous in finding that Professor Churchill’s research misconduct is serious and that we should express the degree of that seriousness through a recommendation about sanctions, our discussions have not led to unanimity about what particular sanctions are warranted. What follows, then, is the only portion of our report that presents multiple views.

• Two members of the Committee conclude and recommend that Professor Churchill should not be dismissed. They reach this conclusion because they do not think his conduct so serious as to satisfy the criteria for revocation of tenure and dismissal set forth in section 5.C.1 of the Law of the Regents, because they are troubled by the circumstances under which these allegations
have been made, and because they believe that his dismissal would have an adverse effect on other scholars’ ability to conduct their research with due freedom. These two members agree and recommend that the most appropriate sanction, following any required additional procedures as specified by the University’s rules, is a suspension from University employment without pay
for a term of two years.

• Three members of the Committee believe that Professor Churchill’s research misconduct is so serious that it satisfies the criteria for revocation of tenure and dismissal specified in section 5.C.1 of the Laws of the Regents, and hence that revocation of tenure and dismissal, after completion of all appropriate procedures, is not an improper sanction. One of these members believes and recommends that dismissal is the most appropriate sanction; the other two believe and recommend that the most appropriate sanction is suspension from University employment without pay for a term of five years.

So it looks like the best he can hope for is two years without pay, which is probably about how long it will take to get the lawsuit to trial.

Past the inflammatory rhetoric he employed, there is some merit to the deeper argument Churchill was trying to get at in the “little Eichmanns” piece. But if you’re going to war on that front, you need to make sure your flanks are covered, and questionable research ethics is about as bad a sin as an academic can commit.

If the report is accurate, he seems to have given them clear cause to do whatever they want, and I strongly suspect that the political angles here are the only thing that kep the committee from a unanimous recommendation that he be hung.

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