Brief Thoughts on Ward

From someone at CU:

The one thing that makes me feel OK about this, is that our faculty peers have found him [Ward Churchill] guilty of academic misconduct serious enough to recommend sacking him. The only people I trust to do, or at least to try to do, the right thing in this situation are the faculty. That various faculty committees more or less determined that he is a fraud is the biggest thing that makes me feel OK about the firing. Only caveat there is that those of us who love this place really love this place. It is a wonderful institution that has been stained in the last several years with lots of bad things. The little voice in the back of my mind does wonder whether even faculty might have let this sway their judgment toward the expediency of firing Ward (in terms of getting some of the stink off of CU) over the long-term and more general interest in protecting speech and tenure. I hope it’s not the latter, and for the moment I satisfy myself that faculty acted correctly (and certainly not as instruments of some neo-con conspiracy).

Right. There’s obviously a danger of rush to judgment in such situations, but the fact that he was convicted of academic misconduct by a group of people with a deep, vested interest in maintaining the protections and integrity of tenure helps relieve me of the concern that Churchill was railroaded. While the initial investigation may have been motivated by Churchill’s political statements, I think there’s good reason to believe that the conclusion wasn’t.