Legal News

Jury Weighs Wrongful Termination Suit for Prof Who Penned 9/11 Essay

By Jennifer Forsyth

On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, penned an essay that suggested that some Americans were finally getting what they had long deserved. In one of the most incendiary phrases in the essay titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” he described some of those killed in the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns” a reference to the Nazi who kept the trains running for Hitler’s death camps.

In the passage, Churchill wrote … they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” – a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

It took four more years for that essay to become public but when it did, oh boy. Outrage poured in and administrators at the university regents expressed their shock and dismay. But did they fire him for it? Was that the reason the university voted to boot him in October 2007? Churchill says yes in his wrongful termination suit. The university says nope–rather that he was fired for “research misconduct,” namely, fabricating or falsely representing research as his own, according to this story in the Denver Post.

But many supporters say Churchill was targeted for exercising his First Amendment rights and that he should prevail in the name of academic freedom. For an essay on the spectacle surrounding this trial, see this guest essay in Friday’s WSJ. And click here for an transcript of a Churchill speech at CU in 2005 titled: “What Did I Really Say? And Why Did I Say It?”

Today, after a four-week trial, a Denver jury began deliberations. According to this report, Churchill’s attorney, David Lane told the jury in closing statements: “The job you are now undertaking is quite possibly the most important decision you will ever have to make. … You are in charge of preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Photo: AP

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 01, 2009 (boomark / email).