Re: NY Times: Ward Churchill, Professor Who Challenged His Dismissal, Dies at 78

What pissed you off so much?
Dennis


On Wed, Aug 12, 2026 at 2:39 PM Michael Kowalski via groups.io
<[email protected]> wrote:

> I had to read his book before all this came out. Wish I could get my money
> back.
>      Mike K
>
>
> Sent from the all new AOL app for iOS
> <https://aolapp.onelink.me/eG2g?pid=NativePlacement&c=US_Acquisition_YMktg_320_EmailSignature_AttributionDL&af_sub1=Acquisition&af_sub2=US_YMktg&af_sub3=&af_sub4=100002473&af_sub5=SentFromNewAOLApp__Interstitial_&af_ios_store_cpp=ce85ce34-ad0f-4811-a92b-a172743b064e&af_android_url=https%3A%2F%2Fplay.google.com%2Fstore%2Fapps%2Fdetails%3Fid%3Dcom.aol.mobile.aolapp%26listing%3Demail_signature_attribution>
>
> On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, 2:22 PM, Alan Ginsberg via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/us/ward-churchill-dead.html
>
>
> His inflammatory essay about the Sept. 11 attacks prompted his dismissal
> by the University of Colorado for unrelated research misconduct. A jury
> later found that he had been wrongfully terminated for his views.
>
>
> Ward L. Churchill, a professor whose firing by the University of Colorado
> in 2007 inspired a lawsuit that became a landmark case about academic
> freedom and free speech, has died. He was 78.
>
> The death was confirmed by his former lawyer, David Lane. No further
> details were provided.
>
> When he was dismissed, Mr. Churchill had been a tenured professor at the
> university’s Boulder campus since 1991 and had served as chairman of its
> ethnic studies department. In 2007, a faculty panel found that he had
> plagiarized and falsified parts of his research on Native Americans,
> prompting his dismissal.
>
> He filed a wrongful termination suit against the university, claiming that
> the real cause for his firing was to punish him for an essay he had written
> on Sept. 12, 2001, and published online a few days later, in which he
> argued that the United States had brought on itself the Sept. 11 terrorist
> attacks.
>
> In the essay, he compared office workers who had been killed to Adolf
> Eichmann, a Nazi official whose later defense that he was merely “following
> orders” helped inspire the writer Hannah Arendt to develop the concept of
> “the banality of evil.”
>
>
> In Mr. Churchill’s essay, titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of
> Roosting Chickens,” he wrote that the financial workers who died at the
> World Trade Center were not innocent bystanders, but “little Eichmanns” who
> were part of “a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global
> financial empire.”
>
> The essay garnered little notice at the time of its release, nor when it
> was expanded and published as a book in 2003. But when Mr. Churchill was
> invited to speak at Hamilton College in New York in 2005, it resurfaced and caused
> an uproar
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/education/college-cancels-speech-by-professor-who-disparaged-911-attack.html>,
> and the organizers canceled the event.
>
> Under pressure, including from Governor Bill Owens
> <https://www.denverpost.com/2005/06/08/more-radical-comments-by-prof-weighed/>
> of Colorado, the university formed a panel to investigate Mr. Churchill’s
> conduct. It concluded that he had committed serious academic misconduct,
> including falsifying and fabricating historical details and plagiarizing
> work by an environmental group and another scholar.
>
> The panel was divided about whether he deserved to be dismissed, with
> three of the five members in favor, and two recommending a two-year
> suspension.
>
>
> The university’s leaders decided to fire him
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/us/25professor.html>, prompting Mr.
> Churchill to start his legal challenge. When the lawsuit went to trial in
> March 2009, Mr. Churchill’s lawyers described the university panel’s search
> for professional misconduct as a pretext for a foregone decision to dismiss
> him. Mr. Lane, his lawyer, said at the time that Mr. Churchill was the
> victim of a “howling mob” of university administrators, conservative media
> and politicians “falling over themselves” to secure his removal.
>
> In April 2009, the jury found that Mr. Churchill had been wrongfully
> dismissed, awarding him a symbolic $1 in damages. It found that his
> political views had been a “substantial or motivating” factor in his
> dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been
> dismissed anyway for his academic misconduct.
>
> “The jury’s award is some vindication,” Mr. Churchill said. “I didn’t ask
> for money, I asked for justice.”
>
> A Denver District Court judge ruled that the university did not have to
> reinstate or compensate Mr. Churchill, a decision which was upheld by the
> Colorado Court of Appeals. In 2012, the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed
> the lower courts’ rulings
> <https://law.justia.com/cases/colorado/supreme-court/2012/11sc25.html>.
>
> Ward LeRoy Churchill was born on Oct. 2, 1947, in Urbana, Ill., to Jack
> LeRoy Churchill and Maralyn Lucretia Allen. They divorced when he was a
> year old. In a 2003 essay
> <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08854300308428341> in an
> academic journal, he claimed to be of Muscogee Creek descent through his
> father, and an enrolled member of the United Keetowah Band of Cherokee
> Indians through his mother.
>
> The Cherokee tribe said
> <https://www.denverpost.com/2005/05/19/tribe-shifts-stand-acknowledges-churchills-alleged-cherokee-ancestry/>
> in 2005 that he was an associate member rather than a full member. A former
> member of the tribe’s enrollment committee said that Mr. Churchill could
> not prove his eligibility by blood but was granted associate status based
> on his advocacy work.
>
> Mr. Churchill grew up in Elmwood, Ill., and graduated in 1965 from Elmwood
> Community High School, where he played football and basketball. Former
> classmates told The Denver Post in 2005 that he liked to debate politics,
> even as a teen.
>
> He joined the United States Army in 1966, training as a light-truck driver
> and projectionist, then served in Vietnam. He told The Denver Post in a
> 1987 interview that he had attended paratrooper school and was assigned to
> an elite reconnaissance patrol unit, details which did not appear on his
> Army record.
>
> He was discharged from the Army in 1968. He said in the 1987 interview
> that he became active in antiwar leftist circles in Chicago after he
> returned from Vietnam.
>
> He received a bachelor’s degree in technological communications from
> Sangamon State University in Springfield, Ill. (now the University of
> Illinois Springfield), in 1974, and a master’s degree in communications
> theory from Sangamon State in 1975.
>
> He was hired by the University of Colorado in 1980 to be the acting
> director of its American Indian Equal Opportunities Program. In 1991, he
> became an associate professor in the communications department and received
> tenure. He became a full professor and transferred to the ethnic studies
> department in 1997.
>
> His classes were popular enough that up to 60 students would be on the
> wait list, Arturo Aldama, a professor in that department, told The Denver
> Post in 2005.
>
> Mr. Churchill was married four times. His first wife, Dora-Lee Larson,
> filed to end their common-law marriage in 1984 and accused Mr. Churchill of
> “past violence and threats.” His second marriage, to Marie Annette Jaimes,
> a colleague at the University of Colorado, ended in divorce in 1995. That
> same year, he married Leah Kelly, who was struck and killed by a car while
> crossing a street near Boulder in 2000, at the age of 25.
>
> Mr. Churchill’s fourth wife, Natsu Saito, was a fellow professor in the
> University of Colorado’s ethnic studies department. In 2006, while he was
> being investigated by the university, Ms. Saito resigned
> <https://www.summitdaily.com/news/wife-of-embattled-professor-resigns-cu-post/>
> to teach at Georgia State University.
>
> Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
>
> In 2017, Mr. Churchill returned to speak at the Boulder campus, and he
> remained defiant. “Academic freedom in America is dead,” he told the crowd.
> “I had my identity before I was a professor, I had it while I was a
> professor, and I have it now.”
>
> Alexandra E. Petri contributed reporting.
>
> Francesca Regalado <https://www.nytimes.com/by/francesca-regalado> is a
> Times reporter covering breaking news.
>
>
> 
>
>


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#42960): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42960
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120722332/6024700
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/10173629/6024700/1441833971/xyzzy [[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-