Inside Higher Ed: The Ward Churchill Endgame
When a faculty panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder last year found Ward Churchill guilty of repeated and intentional instances of research misconduct, the committee included in its report a metaphor for the way many people view the Churchill case:
If a police officer doesn’t like the bumper sticker on a driver’s car and so stops the driver for speeding, is a ticket justified as long as the driver was really speeding?
Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado System, gave his answer on Friday and it’s clear that to Brown, speeding is speeding. He formally recommended that Churchill, who has tenure as an ethnic studies professor at Boulder, be fired. In a detailed letter to the Board of Regents, Brown said that Churchill’s violations of academic research norms were too serious and too numerous to ignore — regardless of the circumstances that led to all the scrutiny.
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