School Moves to Fire 9/11 Essayist Churchill

The University of Colorado on Monday moved to fire a professor whose essay likening some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to a Nazi caused a national outcry.

Phil DiStefano, interim chancellor of the Boulder campus, delivered a notice of recommended termination to ethnic studies professor Ward L. Churchill on Monday morning. DiStefano said the professor was being fired for shoddy research and for plagiarism, and the university said it considered Churchill’s reference to World Trade Center workers as “little Eichmanns” to be free speech.

“We want to protect academic freedom and freedom of expression,” DiStefano said at a news conference in Boulder. “However ... we take research misconduct very seriously.”

Churchill’s attorney, David Lane, said the move was no surprise and vowed to fight the termination in a federal lawsuit.

“For a year and a half, they’ve been looking for good excuses to fire Ward Churchill for his free speech,” Lane said.

“He will be fired, and I trust a jury of his peers in court to see through this sham.”

Churchill has 10 business days to appeal the decision to a faculty panel, which can make a separate recommendation on Churchill’s fate.

The university system’s Board of Regents will make the final decision.

The controversy began in January 2005, when Churchill was scheduled to speak at a New York college. Its student newspaper unearthed his 2001 essay, which called the Pentagon and its occupants “military targets” and referred to the “technocratic corps” in the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns.” Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi in charge of administering the Jews’ extermination in the Holocaust.

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and some regents of the University of Colorado system have called for Churchill to be fired.

An academic panel found that the controversial essay was protected speech, but that Churchill had committed research misconduct and plagiarism in his writings on Native American history.

Some members of that panel warned that firing Churchill could chill political speech on campus, but a second panel recommended termination.