Angry in the Great White North

It has been over four years since Ward Churchill wrote his infamous essay blaming the victims of 9/11 for their own deaths, comparing the people who died in the World Trade Center "little Eichmanns", after Adolf Eichmann, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man and the Nazi official responsible for organizing the Holocaust.

It has been over three years since Ward Churchill was accused of plagiarism, of lying about his academic credentials, and of misrepresenting himself as a Native American.

It has been over two years since the process of firing him from this position as a tenured professor at the University of Colorada.

Some people think this has been long enough. Too long, even. Steps are being taken to, well, eliminate some steps:

The University of Colorado Board of Regents on Thursday drastically shortened the amount of time it takes to fire a tenured professor, approving what CU officials believe to be one of the quickest faculty-dismissal timelines in the country.

Under the new timeline, the process will take about 100 days. In the past, it could take years for the university to fire a tenured professor for misconduct.

The 100-day timeline speeds up several steps in the process and eliminates a handful of others after the university president receives the hearing committee's report. Heckler said none of the other universities that the tenure committee studied have such a rapid timeline.

For all his writings and agitation, this new process of removing tenured professors will be Ward Churchill's only lasting legacy:

The new timeline, as well as several other changes CU has made to its tenure processes, is due largely to the controversy surrounding CU-Boulder ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill, who in an essay compared Sept. 11, 2001, victims to Nazis and who, after a lengthy investigation, was accused of plagiarizing, fabricating and falsifying material in his research and writings.

CU's chancellor at the time, Phil DiStefano, started the process to fire Churchill in June 2006. Churchill's case is still pending, two years after the initial review of his research was launched.

"We've been working on this for two years, so we're all talked out," joked Mark Heckler, who is provost of the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center and who chaired the university's tenure-review committee.

Heckler said the tenure committee examined the dismissal policies of 16 other large universities. It found that CU's policies were largely in line with what other universities do.

"While that was fine, we decided we needed to have a more rigorous process and we needed to tighten the timelines," he said.

One hundred days? In academic terms, that's the same as giving Ward Churchill the bum's rush out the door. I suppose that's appropriate, since it is likely that Ward Churchill is going to be the academic equivalent of vagrant -- I can't see any self-respecting college or university letting him grade undergraduate book reports, much less giving him tenure. Then again, not all colleges have that much self-respect. Maybe he can teach "The Social Construction of Silence" at Bennington College. Presumably he won't get into too much trouble if he doesn't talk much.

Ward Churchill responds...sort of. If you are interested in Ward Churchill's point of view, check out the Ward Churchill Solidarity Network blog.