Update

Two things y’all may be interested in:

Ward will be featured in an documentary premiering on HBO on the the 29th. I haven’t seen it, but the folks involved seem to really get the issues involved. Trailer and schedule here.

Also, the hearing to decide whether or not Ward will be reinstated is on July 1st. It’d be nice to have folks turn out. As far as I know, it’ll be in the same courtroom as the trial, which is:

Denver District Court Courtroom 6
1437 Bannock St.
Denver, CO
80202

I know haven’t been doing a real good job of keep the trial blog up to date since Ward won, and that probably won’t improve. However, I will be posting about highlights on my own page, here.

That’s why we love him

From the Daily Camera.

Churchill, who won a wrongful-termination lawsuit against the university last week, said he doesn’t accept the contention that dissatisfaction with his presence on campus should prevent his reinstatement.

“If it would make a bunch of people uncomfortable on the Boulder campus, what’s the argument?” Churchill said. “They violated my rights, therefore to spare them discomfort I should not be restored to what I was unlawfully deprived of? That’s somewhat tenuous.”

For those at CU who can’t stand having him so close, Churchill has an offer:

“If it really makes you that uncomfortable, you’re free to leave,” he said.

. . .

Churchill said, in the end, it’s up to him whether to accept reinstatement if it is awarded.

He would first have to assess whether CU, which he said had “degenerated to a not very glorified vo-tec, a trade school” still met his standards.

Think again

Stanley Fish weighs in on the verdict for the New York Times. It is, by far, the most reasoned account of Ward Churchill’s so-called academic misconduct to appear in the mainstream media. (Christ, wouldn’t it be fun to have a real newspaper in out fair cowtown?)

Last Thursday, a jury in Denver ruled that the termination of activist-teacher Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado had been wrongful (a term of art) even though a committee of his faculty peers had found him guilty of a variety of sins.

The verdict did not surprise me because I had read the committee’s report and found it less an indictment of Churchill than an example of a perfectly ordinary squabble about research methods and the handling of evidence. The accusations that fill its pages are the kind scholars regularly hurl at their polemical opponents. It’s part of the game. But in most cases, after you’ve trashed the guy’s work in a book or a review, you don’t get to fire him. Which is good, because if the standards for dismissal adopted by the Churchill committee were generally in force, hardly any of us professors would have jobs.

At least two reviewers of my 2001 book “How Milton Works” declared that my reading of “Paradise Lost” rests on an unproven assumption that Milton repeatedly and designedly punned on the homonyms “raised” (elevated), “razed” (destroyed) and “rased” (erased). I was accused of having fabricated these puns out of thin air and of building on the fabrication an interpretive house of cards that fell apart at the slightest touch of rationality and evidence.

I use the criticism of my own work as an example because to talk about the many others who have been accused of incompetence, ignorance, falsification, plagiarism and worse would be bad form. And it wouldn’t prove anything much except that when academics assess one another they routinely say things like, “Professor A obviously has not read the primary sources”; “Professor B draws conclusions the evidence does not support”; “Professor C engages in fanciful speculations and then pretends to build a solid case; he’s just making it up”; “Professor D does not acknowledge that he stole his argument from Professor E who was his teacher (or his student).”

Wonder why the rest of the jury’s not talking?

The Denver Post has finally decided to acknowledge what the jury is actually saying about its verdict, running an interview with Bethany Newill, the only juror talking. (Although they haven’t deigned to correct yesterday’s editorial, which Ms. Newill is directly contradicting.)

To some degree, I think we can all thank Michael Roberts for this story getting out there at all. But, more, we have to be incredibly thankful for the courage of Ms. Newill. She’s doing everything she can to set the record straight, and for her efforts, she is — as the comments in the Denver Post article attest — being attacked by every little chickenshit asshole in Denver. And the attack’s not restricted to comment trolls and bloggers. Caplis and Silverman have launched a couple of dozen snide asides her way, and it’s only a matter of time before the newspapers join in.

Unlike me, she never set out to start a fight. She’s just trying to correct the obvious and continuing lies being thrown out there by the shockjocks at KHOW and the pundits in the local newspapers. And for her trouble, she’s getting the whole-hog smear treatment.

Here’s to her. I wish to God we’d had five more with her courage on CU’s faculty, in the media, or on the board of regents, instead of the gutless clones we were stuck with. We might have averted this idiotic witchhunt altogether. Hell, we might even live in a state with some regard for the, like, Constitution.

Michael Roberts! Redux!

I’ve long been a fan of Michael Roberts’ reporting for Westword, but my regard has been skyrocketing over the last week or so.

And now it’s off the charts.

Michael Roberts has landed the only real interview yet to appear with the only Ward Churchill jury member talking to the media. Make sure you read the whole thing.

It’s spectacular stuff, and punches holes the size of traincars in the rightwing narrative being spun in the Denver Post and Daily Camera, not to mention KHOW.

Lying liars and the lies they tell

This from the Denver Post’s editorial board. Which, I’m thinking, now includes Vincent Carroll.

Ward Churchill got a dollar more than he deserved.

A jury decided Thursday that the former University of Colorado professor was fired in retaliation for a controversial essay, yet awarded him a mere dollar in damages, the minimum allowable.

Maybe the jury came to the conclusion there was enough blame to go around. How else do you explain the rationale?

Hmm, maybe the geniuses at the Denver Post just missed yesterday’s call into the Caplis and Silverman show by one of the jurors. Y’know, the one where she explained exactly why they voted for nominal damages.

Or maybe the staff at the Denver Post are, well, still lying. I’d guess that after four years of it, it might be kind of hard to break the habit.

The good news keeps coming

Word has it that CU is responsible for David Lane’s lawyer fees. And, as I hear it, they’re in the seven figure range.

I don’t think you could wipe this grin off my face with a tire iron.

Caplis and Silverman get cross-examined by Churchill juror

Starting at 36:15 here, one of the jurors, Bethany, calls in to KHOW, to correct Caplis and Silverman’s assertion that only one juror wanted to give Ward Churchill a lump sum, to make it clear that the jurors considered CU’s allegations of academic misconduct laughable, and to explain the reason for the $1 award for damages — the short answer being that David Lane never presented any case at all as to what the damages should be, so they didn’t have any evidence to consider. Which is probably because, as Ward Churchill and David Lane have been saying all along, this isn’t about money.

It’s about getting his job back.

Listen to it. It doesn’t get any more delicious than this.

And you’ll excuse me this moment of excess

(Cover the kids’ ears.)

I’ve spent the last four years watching a good man get his name drug through the mud for making the eminently reasonable point that you ought not be killing other peoples’ kids. And that if you are in the business of killing other peoples’ kids, they have the absolute right to fight back in any way they can.

I’ve seen the most vicious smear campaign of my lifetime. A horde of shiteating columnists and radio shockjocks have made it their life’s work to destroy one man. They went after his life, his livelihood, his family, and his reputation. There is no level to which they haven’t stooped to ruin him.

I’ve watched Denver’s local media crawl like dogs to eat the shit of their canine superiors in the rightwing national media. There has not been a single article in the Denver media to actually interrogate the trumped-up charges of academic misconduct levelled by the hopelessly biased CU investigative committee. Not one. Like with their coverage of the Iraq war (or for that matter, the preceding sanctions), they have gone to incredible lengths to never actually investigate the shit they were more than willing to eat out of the paws of their presumed betters.

Moreover, in that so-called bastion of higher learning at CU, I can count on my fingers and toes those faculty members who were willing to actually stand up and point out the absurdity of the smear campaign launched against Ward Churchill. Almost to a man or woman, they refused to make any kind of stand for the principles they pretended, every day, to represent. Nothing has been more disheartening than the absolute, unmitigated cowardice of the faculty of my alma mater. I’ve met pedophiles and rapists with whom I’d rather share an occupation.

But, I’ve also watched Ward Churchill, with his family, put their stake in the ground and refused to back up an inch. That’s what courage is, and I’ve been proud as hell just to witness it. In the last round of McCarthyism, there were very few to fight back. I think of Dashiell Hammett, and I think of Ward Churchill.

So this one’s for CU. And for Bill O’Reilly, Caplis and Silverman, Vincent Carroll, and the rest of the Denver media. 

Fuck you.

Ward wins!

From the New York Times.

A jury found on Thursday that the University of Colorado had wrongfully dismissed a professor who drew national attention for an essay in which he called some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks “little Eichmanns.”

There’s some inside scuttlebutt here. David Lane got to talk to the jurors after the case, and word has it they had the following couple of salient points to offer:

1. Up until the reading of the final instructions by the judge, the jurors thought they were to be deliberating on whether or not Ward had committed academic fraud, pure and simple. It’s an understandable error, given the nature of the witnesses.  Their unanimous finding was that Ward hadn’t committed any fraud worthy of the name.
2. The jurors were disgusted by the repetition of Ward’s protected speech by O’Rourke, including the quotes from the audio that Craig Silverman kept pushing at O’Rourke; they felt this clearly showed the nature of CU’s witchhunt. 

As to the award, Ward Churchill never asked for money. In fact he told the jury repeatedly he didn’t want a cent. What he does want is his job back. And given the nature of this verdict, one has to ask how justice could be served if he doesn’t get it. More to come.