Embattled professor won't back down, weary of free speech fight

BOULDER - Stacks of papers sit on a sun-drenched table in the home of Ward Churchill, some full of praise and others full of dark threats and unprintable insults.

In one message, liberal scholar Noam Chomsky calls Churchill's achievements of inestimable value, while an e-mail in another pile warns: "If you ever come to Florida, I will personally bash your (expletive) brains in."

This is Churchill's new life: Since January, the University of Colorado professor has been at the center of a firestorm over free speech for likening some Sept. 11 victims to Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi architect of the Holocaust. The governors of two states have called for his ouster and two attorneys with a Denver radio show have spent weeks compiling data they say proves Churchill is a rotten professor at best, a seditionist at worst.

In a two-hour interview with the Associated Press, Churchill said he won't back down as the school investigates his scholarship and claims of misbehavior to see if he can be fired. But he wearily acknowledged the uproar now dominates his life and makes it difficult to focus on his job.

"I'm struggling desperately to be able to deliver to my students what they signed up for," Churchill said, slumped in a corner chair and chain-smoking Pall Malls. "All of my time is devoted to responding to gratuitous (expletive). Every day there's a new idiocy."

The latest charges leveled at the tenured professor of ethnic studies are that he plagiarized others' work and threatened physical violence against critics. He denies both claims, though he said he did threaten to sue a woman he said was harassing his family and spreading false stories.

"Now that's not a cordial conversation. And yes, I supposed you could make a case that the object is to intimidate," he said. "But it's by exercise of legal right, not by beating the woman up. If I was inclined to do that, she'd have been beaten up a long time ago."

The new charges have reportedly been forwarded to the school committee reviewing Churchill's work. CU spokeswoman Pauline Hale said she could not comment on details of the probe. The university chancellor is expected to make a recommendation on Churchill's future March 28.

Churchill has many critics, some of them on his own campus. Law professor Paul Campos, who has criticized Churchill in columns in the Rocky Mountain News, said Churchill's writings are unfair and unbalanced, and that there is evidence he has plagiarized and fabricated material.

"That goes beyond being an ideological hack and having no balance or nuance or intelligence in your work," he said. "It goes into the realm of academic fraud, which is a firing offense."

Churchill said his critics have mangled the facts, sometimes even misquoting each other in a rush to condemn him.

He said the inquiry is not merely an investigation of his work but a pretext for a broader campaign to discourage critical thinking and reduce higher education to "an advanced vo-tech" where students are taught skills useful to corporations.

"It's not about me, and it's not about 'little Eichmanns,' either," he said, using a phrase from his Sept. 11, 2001, essay that started the controversy.

He also defended his scholarship, citing his induction into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College in Atlanta and an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights for "On The Justice of Roosting Chickens," a book based on the essay.

He also offers nine pages of endorsements from other scholars, including Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard Falk, formerly at Princeton and now a visiting professor of global studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.