BOULDER, Colo.
Former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill may have lost his job, but he hasn’t lost his nerve.
“I said something that people in power and with money didn’t like,” he said, explaining his firing by university regents on July 24 by an 8-1 vote.
Churchill, whose claims of American Indian ancestry have been challenged, said in an exclusive interview with Diverse that he plans to take the university to court over his dismissal.
The university “has not met its burden of proof,” that he had committed “research misconduct,” Churchill said, referring to the reason cited for his firing.
“I didn’t engage in plagiarism,” he said, noting that the scholars whose work he is accused of stealing have refused to lodge complaints against him. Rather, it has been found that he ghost wrote some of the material he’s been accused of using.
“There’s been misrepresentation at every step of the way,” he said, speaking from his home near Boulder, Colo.
That the university has been unable to collect any substantial evidence to support their accusations, despite more than two years of investigation, shows the case against him “was all a lie,” he adds.
Churchill’s troubles began in early 2005 when protests erupted over an invitation for him to speak at Hamilton College in upstate New York. The protests were sparked when a Syracuse, N.Y., newspaper noted that he’d written an essay in which he referred to some victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as “little Eichmanns.”
Those words had appeared in an op-ed published Sept. 12, 2001, online by Dark Night Field Notes. In the article, Churchill gave his explanation of the possible causes of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The essay was later expanded and published as a book titled On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality, by AK Press in 2003.
In that essay, Churchill argued that those who died in the World Trade Towers were not innocent victims. Rather, whether they understood it or not, they were part of a global empire headed by the United States that he compared to Germany’s former Third Reich.
