CU plans to fire Churchill

The interim chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder announced today that CU wants to fire ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill.

"Today I issued to Professor Churchill a notice of intent to dismiss him from his faculty position here at the University of Colorado," said Phil DiStefano at a press conference.

Struggling to hold off the schadenfreude.

A university committee that investigates academic misconduct recommended two weeks ago that Churchill be fired for a "pattern of repeated, intentional misrepresentation."

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In a 20-page report, the committee agreed with a May investigative committee report that Churchill intentionally falsified his research, plagiarized other people's work and ghostwrote articles and then cited them to buttress his work.

Thus saith Mr. Churchill:

Churchill and his attorney have threatened to sue CU if he is fired. They accuse the university of retaliating against the tenured professor because of his essay saying some World Trade Center terrorism victims were not innocent and comparing them to a Nazi bureaucrat.

Churchill said at the time that the investigative committee's report read like a warning to other scholars to "lay low."

"Do not challenge orthodoxy," Churchill wrote in his response to the committee. "If you do, expect to be targeted for elimination and understand that the university will not be constrained by its own rules - or the Constitution - in its attempts to silence you."

He's not really that stupid, is he? He's not that stupid. To be that stupid, you would have to think that being truly offensive about X absolves you of any guilt if you happen to engage in Y. Perhaps he would be better off saying "Do not challenge orthodoxy IF YOU HAVE ENGAGED IN PLAGIARISM OR OTHER BEHAVIOR THAT SHOULD GET YOU FIRED."

Because the fact is that CU hired him because he was thought to be an American Indian. And that right there means they deserve the black eye they got when it was discovered that he was playing them for fools. No one ever looked into the allegations of plagiarism and lying about his ethnicity and so forth until he opened his mouth about the WTC and people started wondering who the hell he was. CU would still have countenanced him if they had dared.