After receiving that email from the CU board of regents a couple days ago (see March 24), I decided to do a Google news search this morning. I came across two kind of interesting articles:
- “What’s Next for Ward Churchill?” in Boulder, CO’s The Daily Camera, though it’s an AP story so it will probably show up in a bunch of other places, too. In the nutshell, Churchill isn’t in trouble anymore for the 9/11 essay that started this mess in the first place. However, he is under investigation for plagiarism and for “research misconduct,” and this investigation could literally go on for years.
- “Ward Churchill: A contentious life,” by Charlie Brennan in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News. This is more or less a feature story that tells the tale of Churchill’s rather interesting and colorful life, and it covers both sides of some of the various controversies about him (is he or isn’t he a Native American, how he managed to become a tenured professor at a major research university with an MA, how he is or isn’t a great scholar, etc., etc.). I thought the piece was pretty balanced and interesting, but I tell ya, you’d have a hard time making up a better “bad guy academic” than the one portrayed here.
Well, good luck to CU and Churchill and everybody else. I think conservative commentators have moved on to the Schiavo story, so I suspect this episode will fade and Churchill will exit in one fashion or another (buy-out, retirement, or canned) relatively quietly.