I am just adding my voice to the chorus on this one - Ward Churchill may not be someone I agree with, or can even support, but the academy has joined the rest of the country in walking the knife's edge.
On Monday, the interim chancellor of the University of Colorado, Phil DiStefano, recommended the termination of Churchill's position at the University of Colorado. Consequently all his teaching and research duties have been ended, though he is still being paid until the Board of Regents makes its final decision. (For more in-depth coverage, you may check The New York Times , The Rocky Mountain News, and, on a different note, Inside Higher Ed.)
What is interesting to me is that the faculty investigating this noted themselves that Churchill was hired and promoted by a university who knew he was an activist and that he has not been traditionally credentialed with either a Ph.D. or J.D. For years, allegations of research misconduct had flown around Churchill's work. Yet it is when his opinions draw national attention and disdain for being "unpatriotic" that an investigation is convened (though DiStefano pleads that one has nothing to do with the other). The faculty on the committee were themselves divided on how Churchill should be punished with only one of the five members recommending all out dismissal and termination of tenure (you can see the faculty's own reports on the University of Colorado's website).
DiStefano's call for Churchill's dismissal is now a sad academic mirror of the criticisms of free speech plaguing the country. Just this week, President Bush himself joined a chorus of conservatives condemning The New York Times for actually reporting news to the U.S. public (check out the Canadian perspective here). Not unlike Churchill, The New York Times has made some serious mistakes before, but actually reporting real news isn't one of them. Of course what do you expect in a country where press freedom is lower than that of the bulk of the Western world (including my favorite countries in the Western hemisphere, Costa Rica and Canada - see here for more information on the USA's low ranking)?
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The image of Ward Churchill on the left is taken from the Washington Post article. The image on the right is from Satya.
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