UPDATED: Ward Churchill Fired By University of Colorado

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Churchill is being fired because he was a plagiarist and lied about his background. It has nothing to do with his comments about 9/11, though those comments didn't help - they helped ignite an interest in his background, which was quite revealing.

"Today, I issued to Professor Churchill a notice of intent to dismiss him from his faculty position at the University of Colorado Boulder," CU Interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano said Monday afternoon.

Churchill has 10 days to appeal, which entails making a request to have the university president or chancellor forward the recommendation to the faculty senate Committee on Privilege and Tenure. A special panel will then conduct hearings on the matter and make a recommendation to the president on whether grounds for dismissal are supported.


Another committee found Churchill guilty of research misconduct and another panel recommended that he be fired because of "repeated and deliberate" infractions of scholarship rules.

Churchill's attorney promptly called a news conference Monday afternoon to announce that his client does intend to appeal to the tenure committee. He also mentioned going to court.

Churchill, who ignited a firestorm by calling some of the World Trade Center victims "little Eichmanns" in an essay he wrote after Sept. 11, 2001, has vowed to sue the school if he was fired.

"We're going to a real court because we can trust juries to do the right thing," said Churchill's attorney David Lane. "Churchill says this all completely bogus. Let's see if a jury and a Federal District Court agrees with the committee. Or see if everything that's happened here is retaliation for Ward Churchill's First Amendment free speech relating to 9/11."

The tenured professor of ethnic studies has repeatedly denied all accusations of misconduct.

He told The Associate Press in mid-June, "The basic situation here is that there was a call by high officials in the state, notably the governor but hardly restricted to the governor, for my termination clear back last February, whether or not it was legal. They were willing to take the heat and go to court if necessary to stand behind an illegitimate investigation."

When his essay was brought to light in January 2005, Gov. Bill Owens, state lawmakers and relatives of Sept. 11, 2001 victims in New York immediately denounced it. University officials concluded Churchill could not be fired for the essay, but in March 2005 they launched an investigation into allegations of plagiarism and other research misconduct.

"A committee last year began to look at his writings including his essay on 9/11," said DiStefano. "We determined his writings were protected under the First Amendment. However, during that process there were allegations of research misconduct."

Last month, an investigative subcommittee concluded that Churchill repeatedly fabricated his research, plagiarized others' work and strayed from the "bedrock principles of scholarship."

While one expects the leftists and Churchill backers to claim that he's losing his job because of his exercise of free speech, he's being fired because of academic misconduct that undermines the university's mission to provide an education and unethical conduct by a professor.

UPDATE:
The final decision is expected later today. The calls for his being dismissed have grown over the past two years since it was revealed that he engaged in falsifying evidence, plagiarism, and inventing stories in the course of his 'research.'

UPDATE:
Pirate Ballerina is live blogging the developing situation at CU.

UPDATE:
Fixed typo in title and more importantly, note that it is now official. Churchill has been fired from his professorship at the University of Colorado (video and more at Hot Air). Expect him to whine and seethe over the firing, but the proof of his academic misconduct is incontrovertible.

Of course, he'll claim that the university was denying him free speech. Nonsense. He can say whatever he want. He can even say it on the college campus no matter how distasteful it would be. That isn't what got him fired. That only got people to take a closer look at his work, and that closer inspection showed serious discrepancies in his CV and his works.

He can't invent evidence and plagiarize. That got him fired.

UPDATE:
Others blogging his firing from the University of Colorado: Michelle Malkin, Ed Driscoll, and Weasel Zippers.

UPDATE:
Pirate Ballerina is all over this story. Still others weigh in: Sister Toldjah and Gateway Pundit.

UPDATE:
So how is the AP reporting the firing? Well, they headline that “Professor fired for 9/11-Nazi comparison.” Another AP report states "Colorado Prof Fired After 9-11 Comments." Even Drudge gets the story conflated, where he posts: "Professor Ward Churchill Fired After 9-11 Remarks... " The stories themselves do note that he was fired for academic misconduct, not his outrageous comments about 9/11.