Legal News

Author of ?Little Eichmanns? Passage Loses Appeal for Job

By Ashby Jones

On its face, the logic seems a little screwy. In April, a Colorado jury ruled that Ward Churchill, a former University of Colorado professor, was wrongfully terminated for his controversial political views. But on Tuesday, in a ruling meant to be consistent with the jury’s finding, a Denver judge on Tuesday declined to give Churchill his job back. Click here and here for reports from the NYT and Denver Post, respectively.

The backstory: CU began investigating Churchill after an essay surfaced in which he had called some victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks “little Eichmanns.” The entire passage is just too, well, something, not to reprise here. Wrote Churchill:

[The 9/11 victims] 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.

After the statement surfaced, some four years after it was written, there were calls for Churchill’s dismissal. Subsequently, the university launched an investigation of his writing and found that he engaged in repeated acts of plagiarism over a period of years. CU said he was fired, in 2007, for academic misconduct. Churchill and his supporters said that the university manufactured a case against him to appease his critics, among whom was then-Gov. Bill Owens.

Click here and here for previous LB posts on the situation.

In any event, on Tuesday, the judge on the case, Larry Naves, ruled that the jury’s damages award — $1 — dictated that he not award Churchill a substantive remedy. Wrote Naves: "If I am required to enter an order that is 'consistent with the jury's findings,' I cannot order a remedy that 'disregards the jury's implicit finding' that Professor Churchill has suffered no actual damages that an award of reinstatement would prospectively remedy.”

According to the NYT, Churchill's lawyer, David Lane, said he would appeal the decision.

"To me, this is judicial activism in its worst form," Lane said. "What is really a shame here is that a jury said Ward Churchill's free speech was violated, and yet Judge Naves goes on for almost 50 pages, saying in so many words, 'Too bad.' "

"At the moment, we feel very satisfied," said Bronson Hilliard, a university spokesman. "There was an important principle at stake here, and that is academic integrity, which is at the heart of everything we do in research and teaching. We feel very gratified at the outcome."

Photo: AP

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 08, 2009 (boomark / email).