Colorado University panel recommends firing controversial professor

Diverse Issues in Higher Education, June 29, 2006

DENVER

A University of Colorado committee has recommended firing a professor who called some of the World Trade Center victims "little Eichmanns," citing repeated incidents of research misconduct.

Ward Churchill, an American Indian tenured professor of ethnic studies, denied the allegations and is promising a lawsuit.

"Baloney. That's my one-word-response," he says, noting that there have been previous calls for his removal, "whether or not it was legal."

In a written statement, Churchill dismissed the investigation as an attempt to silence him.

"This process has not demonstrated that I engaged in any serious research misconduct but that, after more than a year of painstaking review, those charged with firing me could find nothing more than a few footnotes and questions of attribution to quibble over," he wrote.

The panel did not address his essay relating the 2001 terrorist attacks to U.S. abuses abroad. The essay referred to some World Trade Center victims as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who carried out Adolf Hitler's plan to exterminate European Jews during World War II.

Churchill's case has been cited by conservatives as an example of a liberal bias on college campuses.

--Associated Press