Former University of Colorado Boulder professor Ward Churchill, a controversial symbol of academic freedom and free speech who was fired after comparing 9/11 victims to a notorious Nazi, has died, his former attorney confirmed. He was 78.
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David Lane confirmed Churchill’s death in an email to The Denver Post, but did not specify how or when the man died.
Churchill had been a tenured professor at the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus for more than 15 years and had served as chairman of its ethnic studies department when he was fired in 2007.
The Board of Regents said they fired Churchill for academic misconduct, alleging plagiarism and fabrication in his research on Native Americans. But Churchill sued the university for wrongful termination, claiming the real cause for his dismissal was to penalize him for an essay he had written after 9/11, in which he argued that the United States had provoked the attacks.
Churchill’s essay referred to some victims in the attack at New York’s World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns,” who were complicit in the evil of “America’s global financial empire.” The statement references Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi leader who helped orchestrate the Holocaust.
The contentious academic-freedom battle went all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court.
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In 2009, a Denver jury found that CU unlawfully terminated Churchill for exercising his free speech and awarded him symbolic $1 in damages, but the judge did not order CU to reinstate him as a professor.
The state Court of Appeals and state Supreme Court heard Churchill’s appeal, but both upheld the lower court’s decision that the man was not entitled to reinstatement or back pay. Churchill then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to take the case.
“The court never said his First Amendment rights were not violated. They simply said the Regents are above the law, which is a dangerous precedent,” Lane said at the time of the decision.
Churchill was born on Oct. 2, 1947, in Urbana, Ill., to Jack LeRoy Churchill and Maralyn Lucretia Allen.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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