Misc.: Ward Churchill

At every U.S. university, there are a few professors more adept at getting headlines than most. Such a man has been Ward Churchill, iconoclastic professor of ethnic studies and defender of the Native American.

Churchill, whose dress, demeanor, ever-present sunglasses and long, mid-part hairstyle all projected the image of the gun-totin' campus revolutionary, made more claims to Native American heritage than he could support. In this, he was hardly alone, as many a campus has had faculty who, for whatever reasons, claimed to be of American Indian extraction but whose nearest connection to same was wearing a bow tie and an Arrow shirt.

Churchill, then at the University of Colorado at Boulder, found national celebrity--more of it than he might have wished--in 2001, soon after the 9/11 tragedy. He published an essay in which he opined that some of the Americans working in the World Trade Center were "little Eichmanns" and got what they had coming to them. These comments about the chickens coming home to roost infuriated most Americans and put him in the position of being an embarrassment to his university, which began examining his scholarship for signs of academic misconduct.

The outspoken professor was fired in 2007 for a combination of what his university deemed falsification and plagiarism. Churchill sued for wrongful termination, and a jury found in his favor, although they awarded him nominal damages: $1.

That verdict was overturned by a judge in 2009.