Churchill defends scholarly works

Controversial professor Ward Churchill told a Denver jury Tuesday that he wants vindication, not money, from the University of Colorado.

“I want restitution and basically acknowledgment that the entire process by which I was terminated is fraudulent,” Churchill said.

Churchill concluded his testimony Tuesday afternoon before a standing-room-only crowd in Denver District Court after continuing to defend his academic record during several hours of cross-examination by CU’s attorney.

He said the process the university used to fire him for plagiarism and fabrication was loaded against him and impossible to satisfy.

“Every time I presented an answer to a question, I was presented with another question, ever more tedious,” he said. “The object is to finally arrive at a point where it can be said that I have failed to support whatever is stated.”

He said he did not provide documentation for some of the arguments in his works about smallpox epidemics that killed American Indians because they were common knowledge or based on oral tradition.

“I have no written order by Adolph Hitler that he assigned someone to carry out the Final Solution, but I know he did it,” Churchill said.

CU attorney Patrick O’Rourke contended it was unlikely that all of the committees CU assigned to investigate allegations of academic misconduct were biased against Churchill.

Churchill responded that panel members were protecting their own positions at the university while pressure mounted to fire him. An outside panel of scholars would have made the process more fair, he said.

Churchill sued CU for wrongful termination, contending that the university violated his First Amendment rights by firing him because of a line in an essay in which he compared the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to “little Eichmanns,” in reference to Nazi Adolph Eichmann.

Churchill said he was trying to demonstrate that the U.S. would suffer repercussions from its foreign policy.

“I had a real simple proposition,” he said. “If you make a practice of killing other people’s babies for personal gain, quality of life, eventually they’re going to give you a taste of the same thing.”

He said that babies being killed in Iraq were just as innocent as an American child killed on a plane crashed in the 9/11 attacks.

MORE: Churchill testifies in free-speech suit