Ward Churchill Wrap-Up

University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill has drawn widespread public attention before for brash statements he made about 9/11 victims in an essay he wrote following the terrorist attacks in 2001, when he compared those who died in that attack to the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. The controversial essay went fairly unnoticed until January 2005, when it came up before a scheduled speech at Hamilton College. The investigation into allegations of research misconduct and plagiarism ensued shortly after the speech surfaced, in March 2005.

The Report of the Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder, released May 9, 2006, found that Churchill repeatedly fabricated facts, misrepresented sources and plagiarized others’ original work.

In the report, Professor Thomas Brown of Lamar University says that “[o]ne must reluctantly conclude that Churchill fabricated the most crucial details of his genocide story. Churchill radically misrepresented the sources he cites in support of his genocide charges, sources which say essentially the opposite of what Churchill attributes to them.” The report went into in-depth analysis concerning Allegation D, with the committee concluding that Churchill’s “behavior shows considerable disrespect for the native oral tradition by employing it as a defense against research misconduct while failing to use or acknowledge it in his published scholarship,” which forms “a pattern of deliberate academic misconduct involving falsification, fabrication and serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research.”

In addition to various counts of source misrepresentation and overall research misconduct, Churchill was found guilty of plagiarizing near-verbatim from a pamphlet called “The Water Plot,” published in 1972 by the Dam the Dams Campaign. In the report, Churchill claimed that he was not responsible for putting his name as the sole author without attribution to the Dam the Dams group, and that the editor took the group’s name off the essay without Churchill’s consent. Churchill, however, was the editor of two of the volumes in which the work in question appears, which falsifies his innocence claim and reveals the deliberate nature of his actions.

Churchill was found guilty of plagiarizing yet another original work, this time by Professor Fay G. Cohen of Dalhousie University Nova Scotia, in Allegation G. In the report, “Cohen gives an account of her transactions with Churchill that is entirely incompatible with his claimed lack of participation in the misappropriation of her work. Disputes with Churchill over the editing and production of her essay led Cohen to withdraw it from [Churchill’s] volume. Shortly thereafter, however, it appeared in that volume, somewhat altered and credited to the Institute of Natural Progress.”

Katherine Duncan is an intern with Accuracy in Academia.