By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com

July 25, 2007

For University of Colorado President Hank Brown, Ward Churchill is like a nagging case of institutional herpes. Each time Brown thinks he has salved a sore with some kind of disciplinary action another blister pops up on his body politic.

Even as the CU regents agreed with Brown’s recommendation to fire Churchill after a day-long executive session Tuesday, the remedy appeared little more than an interim step in a long and expensive treatment that - like a stubborn sexually transmitted disease - resulted from a years-old error in judgment.

CU’s seduction by Ward Churchill was consummated with a tenured teaching job for a guy without an academic pedigree and with a taste for controversy. Climb into bed with a guy like that in a moment of radical chic and he’s yours for life.

So, even as the CU regents fired Churchill Tuesday on an 8-1 vote, the inevitability of his law suit against them neutered their resolve.

Sentiments outside the University Memorial Center Tuesday afternoon were exclusively pro-Churchill.

None urged the ethnic studies professor’s firing.

“It’s not about scholarship. It’s about politics,” said one T-shirt popular among students.

“Honor dissent,” read a sign.

“Bull shit,” students shouted after the regents voted.

There was disappointment and anger. Still, you wonder if Churchill, who smokes a lot, might actually die before the witch hunt ends. It’s been two and a half years since vast right-wing conspirators, opportunistic politicians, chagrined university administrators and outraged taxpayers began calling for his job for saying some victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were “little Eichmanns.”

But Churchill has collected his 90-grand publicly subsidized annual salary all along. He has been banned from the classroom presumably to protect the impressionable minds of Generation X Box.

Please, someone throw me in this briar patch.

Churchill’s lawsuit, scheduled to be filed Wednesday in Denver district court, should meander through the court system for another year.

“We’ll be done by year four,”Churchill’s lawyer, David Lane, promised with a grin.

Lane’s plan to take a federal civil rights complaint to a Denver jury is a stroke of genius. But any trial lent an aspect of the absurd to Tuesday’s big media extravaganza. Reporters were informed that the regents would close their ruminations about Churchill’s fate to the public. Then, more than nine hours after going into secret session, the regents unveiled their wholly predictable decision at a press conference in the giant Glen Miller Ballroom.

Metal detectors were in place. Security was everywhere.

Churchill, chatty and relaxed, slumped in a chair in the back, wearing his shoulder-length gray hair tucked behind his ears and wearing sunglasses. News photographers, TV cameramen and reporters surrounded him like Paris Hilton at the LA County Jail.

But this was not a prison. It was, effectively, a theater.

If memory serves, the Glen Miller Ballroom was the same place that the American Indian Movement and other Native American supporters staged a support rally for Churchill, a wanna-be Indian, in 2005. That was shortly after vast right-wing conspirators unearthed the professor’s 2001 “little Eichmanns” quote in an obscure article that was buried and, therefore, without impact until the witch hunters dusted it off to prove what a sordid liberal place the state’s flagship university was.

The plagiarism charges that supposedly cost Churchill his job would not exist without the “little Eichmanns” line. Those who believe otherwise are as naïve about the motives of Churchill’s critics as CU was about the professor’s potential to embarrass the school.

After the regents’ vote Churchill said he looked forward to a trial that “could demonstrate the invalidity of the conclusions” of the CU committee that charged him with academic misconduct, including plagiarism.

Churchill said he “wants to rebut the distortions of the scholarly report” used to fire him. It was, Churchill insisted, anything but scholarly.

But though a vast right-wing conspiracy – not bad research - was the genesis of Churchill’s troubles, it was merely the messenger. The professor’s glib rhetoric created the “little Eichmanns” mess.

And, of course, the University of Colorado knowingly and willingly provided Churchill a respectable forum for his well-documented excesses.

The regents could no more let him keep his job than Brown could have, even with the recommendation of a faculty committee that Churchill be disciplined but not canned.

Whatever it costs to get rid of Churchill will be less than what it will cost CU in lost donations if he hangs around. So his dismissal is not about scholarship or politics. It’s about money.

Off the record, CU fund raisers will tell you that Churchill’s name comes up often in response to solicitations.

On the record, it’s all about due diligence.

Ask Lane if there is any amount of money that would settle the case and he replies, “The answer is always going to be yes. If they gave Ward Churchill three billion dollars, he’d setlle. But Ward Churchilll has to get his reputation back, and that means a jury trial.”

Personally, I’m not sure Churchill can recover his rep. I lost my stomach for the guy when he greeted the controversy created by his Nazi analogy by publicly suggesting that enlisted soldiers in Iraq might kill or maim their superiors, a la “fraggings” in Vietnam. This is not how you play the victim, nor does it create support or good will. I recoil at the thought of one of my tax dollars going to pay for Churchill’s expenses. Most of us defenders of the First Amendment need a gas mask to endure the stench of Churchill’s free speech.

That said, it is also true that Churchill has never been anything except true to his obnoxious, contrary nature. That makes him a whole lot less hypocritical than the school that decided it could no longer afford his services after it hired him knowing he was a provocateur.

The University of Colorado can continue to convene committees and hold hearings and make announcements about how it intends to solve the Churchill problem. The school will always enjoy the same credibility as a John who pays for the services of a prostitute, then claims surprise when an infection results.

A long time ago, CU bet against the odds on Ward Churchill’s sense of discretion.

The university continues to lose big time.

Copyright 2007 by Jim Spencer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.