Churchill testifies in free-speech suit

Controversial professor Ward Churchill took the witness stand Monday in his free-speech lawsuit against the University of Colorado, defending himself against the allegations of plagiarism and fabrication that led to his firing.

He said his problems began after “right-wing” media seized upon a line in an obscure essay in which he compared the victims of the 9/11 attacks to “little Eichmanns,” a reference to Nazi Adolf Eichmann.

“My mistake was in assuming that people knew who he was,” Churchill said. “He was a bureaucrat, a desk murderer” who filed paperwork that led to the extermination of Jews and others under Adolph Hitler’s rule. Eichmann “never killed anyone” personally but was indirectly responsible for the murders of many people, Churchill said.

“I was saying that it was time the U.S. took responsibility for doing what it was doing in the world, that it’s time for the U.S. to see what it’s like to be on the receiving end of what it’s dishing out,” he said.

He said he never meant to hurt survivors of the attacks, and that he believes they wouldn’t even have heard about the essay if it hadn’t become the subject of a media storm.

“I couldn’t go to bed without some reporter trying to crawl through my window to get comment,” he said.

The furor over the essay led to efforts by CU to remove him, Churchill said.

CU fired Churchill in 2007 after university investigations concluded that he had committed academic misconduct, including plagiarism and fabrication of material. His lawsuit contends that he was dismissed because of the essay, in violation of his First Amendment rights. He seeks to regain his job.

During his testimony Monday, Churchill walked the Denver District Court jury through several examples that CU cited in dismissing him, maintaining that he had done nothing wrong.

One of those examples involved an essay that Churchill was accused of plagiarizing and using to support his own research. Churchill said he wrote the essay after the author failed to produce it on time for a collection that his wife was editing. He said the essay ran under the other scholar’s name and that she adopted the work as her own.

He cited biographies of famous people, as well as President John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, as works written largely by ghostwriters who later cited them in their own scholarly works.

Churchill also defended statements that he has made about smallpox being introduced into American Indian populations by the Army and perhaps earlier by Capt. John Smith in the 1600s.

He said that many school textbooks contain information about the cause of smallpox epidemics that wiped out large numbers of American Indians.

“I considered this common knowledge,” he said. “This has been taught to schoolchildren. I had heard this all my life.”

Churchill will continue his testimony Tuesday.

Click here to read the Rocky Mountain News special investigation into the allegations against Churchill.