Three newspapers in Colorado have editorials about Ward this morning.
From the Boulder Daily Camera:
Anyone who still believes that the Ward Churchill inquiry is a right-wing witch hunt should read the investigative committee's report on his work.
With devastating clarity, the committee has concluded that Churchill engaged in a pattern of falsification, fabrication, plagiarism and other forms of research misconduct. These conclusions should surprise no one.
Churchill is, of course, the bellicose professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado who argued that the "little Eichmanns" in the World Trade Center deserved to die. Churchill's savage and inaccurate epithet was an outrage. But as the university emphasized last year, he has the First Amendment right to be outrageous.
What he does not have the right to do, however, is to use a tenured position to commit repeated instances of academic fraud.
From the Rocky Mountain News, which has led the charge against Ward Churchill:
Unless University of Colorado officials harbor a secret death wish for their institution, Ward Churchill will never teach another class in Boulder. The university has been given all of the justification it needs - in more than a hundred pages of meticulously argued and documented prose from an investigative committee of five honest scholars - to put this fraud out to pasture.
Churchill has been found guilty of gross and repeated academic misconduct. He makes stuff up as it suits him, filches from other people's writings, casually mischaracterizes other scholars' conclusions, and ghost-writes the work of others and then cites it in his own writings as if it were an independent source.
His misconduct is deliberate, systematic and beyond the pale, just as we've insisted for many months.
The committee report recounts the squalid details, as well as the pathetic maneuvering by Churchill during the probe to justify his work. Indeed, the full report is worth reading if for no other reason than to see how Churchill would shift his explanations for the obvious problems with his work in a futile attempt to stave off the inevitable condemnation
From the Denver Post:
After all the pressure to rush to judgment, the University of Colorado has rightly given professor Ward Churchill his due process, and a group of his peers has found he plagiarized, fabricated and falsified material during his years in academia.
It'd be bad enough if these were slapdash mistakes, but to the contrary, the Churchill committee found his "misconduct was deliberate and not a matter of an occasional careless error." There was "serious deviation from accepted practices" in university research, and the panel found that Churchill did not comply with established standards regarding author credit on publications.
The results of such a painstaking examination serve to amplify the course we urged many months ago:
Ward Churchill should quit his position at CU, the sooner the better, and spare the university any theatrics over his dismissal. His lack of academic integrity makes him unfit for tenure in Boulder, or on any campus, for that matter.
The end of this story seems pretty clear to me. But Ward Churchill won't go down quietly, that's not his style. Besides, he probably needs the money from his University of Colorado position. After the DePaul debacle, Ward's public speaking bookings dropped off. University administrators, despite their left-wing leanings, realize Ward's baggage is too much for them to handle. Yes, he's had a few appearances with David Horowitz this year, but that's only a temporary set-up for Churchill. Ward Churchill's books don't sell well. Yes, he could write a "tell-all" life story, but admitted liar Jayson Blair did that, and his book flopped. How many people want to shell out $30 for a "non-fiction" book from a truth challenged author?
Look for more on this developing story from Pirate Ballerina.
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