Ward Churchill spoke in Tucson on Friday and Brenda Norrell has posted the footage. Watching the ex-CU professor speak, I can’t help but think about the university students’ loss. They’re missing the lamentably rarefied perspectives he offers of course, but more important, the inspiration gained from such an engaging luminary.

Read more »

According to Censored News, Activist and scholar Ward Churchill will speak at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson, 4831 W. 22nd St., on November 13, 2009 at 7:00 p.m. to benefit O’odham VOICE Against the Wall, which since 2003 has organized and advocated for the traditional O’odham leaders and elders of the Tohono O’odham communities in the southern territory of the United States and northern territory of Mexico. Professor Churchill’s talk is part of the “Apartheid in America: Surviving Occupation in O’odham Lands”

Read more »

Yesterday Judge Larry Naves vacated the jury verdict in the Ward Churchill trial and refused to compel CU to reinstate Churchill saying that to do so would send a message to students that the University of Colorado “tolerates academic misconduct.” This, despite the fact that the jury found that charges of academic misconduct were made in order to silence Churchill without appearing to violate his free speech rights and wrongly fired him based on the trumped up charges.

Read more »

Ward Churchill called them Little Eichmanns, but if that’s giving the World Trade Center workers too much credit, at minimum they were human shields, masking the Command & Control Center of America’s economic war machine.
 
The US military is quick to blame its foes for using human shields, to explain the collateral damage we always inflict –Iraq, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah– but who more deliberately than the USA? The huge weapons industry makes all fifty states legitimate military targets, and now because armed drones are piloted from US soil, the homeland war zone extends into our homeland, for which the American public is the human shield.

Today’s university campuses have to deal with College Republicans, ACTA and NeoMcCarthyists. The latest uneducable creeps shopped their leftist-professor- horror-story to the Anti-Defamation League, to brand their teacher’s criticism of Israel as “anti-Semitic.” UCSB senior Rebecca Joseph and junior Tova Hausman both took exception to Professor William Robinson’s Sociology Listserv email comparing Israel’s mop up operation in Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. Below are the words they cut and pasted together to accuse Robinson.

Read more »

Wouldn’t you think it bad form for Israeli militants to behave like Nazis, while immunizing themselves with the self-righteous indignation that any criticism of their actions can simply be dismissed as “anti-Semitic?” Photographs and confessions emerging from the IDF’s atrocities in Gaza just beg comparison the German Einsatzgruppen in Poland. Earlier this year UC Santa Barbara professor William Robinson forwarded an email photo essay to a UCSB listserv, the already much-circulated side by side comparison to the WWII atrocities. Two students complained, plagiarizing stock IDF lingo. Now the Anti-Defamation League wants Robinson to recant. With IDF propagandists pouring on the bullshit, let’s revisit the documents.

Read more »

When I was assembling my dorm room kit for college, I wanted an army blanket as a bed cover. For reasons I must have understood better then, the heavy duty olive drab wool, emblazoned with a U.S. monogram, was inarguably cool. Its generic quality was iconic, thus it had a caché more authentic than a stack of Izods. I considered my Army blanket to be the No. 2 Pencil of bed linens.

Read more »

In the face of Ward Churchill’s vindication in a Colorado court, and now hearing support for him by fellow academics, Wingnut Holocaust Deniers are rallying behind whichever colleague will grab their dunce baton. The latest denier is academic aspirant, Social Security Administration archivist Larry DeWitt, who’s been nursing a masters from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County campus. His master’s thesis was about little known SSA efforts to mitigate The Wartime Internments & Other “Restrictive Governmental Actions.”

Read more »

Literary theorist and legal scholar, Stanley Fish, weighs in on the report of the “committee of faculty peers” that found Ward Churchill guilty of academic misconduct.
 
“The verdict did not surprise me because I had read the committee’s report and found it less an indictment of Churchill than an example of a perfectly ordinary squabble about research methods and the handling of evidence.”

Read more »

A few interesting things about the Ward Churchill jury came to light today (a sigh of relief from Pirate Ballerina!). The jury thought — right up until the judge gave them their instructions — they were to determine whether Ward Churchill was guilty of academic misconduct. When they realized they needed only to decide only whether the 9/11 essay was a substantial motivating factor in his dismissal, they agreed very quickly that it was.

Read more »

DENVER- Ward Churchill’s saga is bigger than the persecution of a scholar who defies the master narrative, bigger than Native American contentions over how their victor writes its history, bigger than America’s First Amendment Freedom of Speech, it’s WHAT HE SAID.

Read more »

DENVER- The jury ruled for Ward Churchill today, that he was wrongfully terminated, on the basis of his 9/11 essay, and that CU had no other justification to fire him. It remains for the judge to order the university to reinstate the professor, with back pay, and pay Attorney David Lane’s legal fees. In other words, the accusations made against Churchill have been repudiated, and the regents showed themselves to be perjurers. It was my impression the ex-Rocky Mountain News columnists left the courtroom with their tongues between their wobbly knees.

Read more »

DENVER- And it’s a strange lot of penises she covets: there’s Bob Guccione, OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton and… Ward Churchill. In a private email in the midst of the CU firestorm over Churchill’s 9/11 essay, Wesson compared the “thoroughly unpleasant” Churchill to a pornographer, wife-batterer-killer, pedophile and cheat –as attorney David Lane reminded us in his closing arguments today. But it wasn’t the email that tipped me off, nor her fiction-writer persona promotional photo on the motorcycle. It was something which Marianne “My friends call me Mimi” did on her first day of testimony, early in the trial. When she left the witness stand, Wesson did not return to her seat, nor to the chairs located by the defense table for CU-aligned witnesses. During her break, Churchill-slayer Mimi Wesson chose the chair directly behind Ward Churchill.

Read more »

Closing arguments will be heard this morning in the Ward Churchill trial and then the case goes to the (very young and earnest) jury.

Read more »

DENVER- Can it be any easier to be a witness to history? Come to the Denver Courthouse this morning before 9 AM. It’s the large columned building opposite the state capitol. Ascend the imposing steps which rise directly from Civic Center Park. Passing the shortest security line, compared to the four ground floor entrances, take a right and go all the way down the hall. Court Room 6 is where Ward Churchill’s case against the University of Colorado will be put in the jury’s hands today.

Read more »

DENVER- For local media wonks who may have lost sight of the national significance of the Churchill v CU trial, the Denver courtroom was visited last week by radical luminary Lynne Stewart, who traveled from New York in a show of solidarity with Churchill’s fight against a systemic quashing of dissent now reaching into US academia.

Read more »

DENVER- Considering the villainous role the Rocky Mountain News played in the vilification of Ward Churchill, their insinuations having been thoroughly discredited in this trial, you’d think the RMN columnists now writing for the Denver Post would be self-conscious about taking the same mocking stance. But they are not. Attorney David Lane chats with them most amicably, but still they file the typical anti-academic hit pieces. Columnist Vincent Carroll summarized Churchill’s recent testimony as: Ward’s world of brazen claims.

Read more »

DENVER- There’s an interesting sideshow at the Churchill v CU case having to do with a cadre of unsavory Ward Churchill online critics. What they are writing is hardly interesting but their unceasing doggedness, repeating only ad hominem attacks, leads one to wonder who they are and what horse do they have, in not only this race, but in Churchill’s ongoing activism. These are the same voices which heckled the DNC organizers, AIM, and the contra-Columbus actions.

Read more »

DENVER- Court Room 6 is packed once again as Ward Churchill takes the stand to detail his wrongful dismissal by CU. His testimony began yesterday afternoon, and Attorney David Lane is outlining the basis for damages. Churchill isn’t asking for money. Says he, “I want my job.” Churchill testified that his publishing output is 5% of his usual, only two or three articles in journals, and four books under contract but still awaiting delivery. But Churchill is quick to reassure the room that the works are forthcoming, and he is upbeat, despite CU committee members having testified, sadly but triumphantly, of having reduced Churchill’s reputation, thirty years and twenty books, to a pitcher of warm spit. Lane asked Churchill: “How does this make you feel?”
“Angry” is Churchill’s reply. “But anger is no new feeling for me.”

Read more »

DENVER- At first the testimony from a CU committee member who voted to dismiss Ward Churchill seemed utterly damning. Dr. Marjorie McIntosh, retired Distinguished Professor of history, gave her testimony by video because she would be lecturing in England at the time of the Churchill v CU trial. She came across like a wise elder, her scolding kind and maternal. She had me convinced that Ward should be sent to his room, but for an indelible pallor that began to infect her testimony as the retired professor grew tired under scrutiny. And like the history of 14th Century England which was her specialization, it became inescapably evident that Marjorie McIntosh was very, very white.

Read more »

DENVER- NMT to the rescue. So far we’ve noticed a strange media dyslexia about the Churchill vs CU trial. When we’ve attended, the proceedings look like a rout for truth and the historical record. When we haven’t made it to Denver and are left to rely on the news coverage, by all accounts Churchill is in trouble. Are the reporters freakin’ blind?

Read more »

DENVER- The Ward Churchill vs. CU trial continues today, featuring the much anticipated testimony of SCRUM hatchet chairwoman Mimi Wesson. But not before two dramatic points had already been made. First, that eugenics did play a part in the disenfranchisement of Native Americans, and second, that a witness brought from California by the plaintiff to talk about The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) would not be allowed to testify. The defense attorney objected that a Psychology School Dean was insufficiently “expert” on ACTA, and the judge concurred. You’re going to have to look it up, and the Denver jury is not even going to hear about it.

Read more »

DENVER- CHURCHILL TRIAL, DAY TWO. University of Colorado defense attorney Patrick O’Rourke wanted the jury to understand that Freedom of Speech was a complicated matter. He asked Dean of CU’s law school, David Getches, to confirm “Is First Amendment Law hard?” “Yes it is.” “Are you an expert on First Amendment law?” “No, I am not.” O’Rourke also got former Governor Bill Owens to admit the First Amendment concept was “tricky.” But no one could have conveyed it better than O’Rourke himself. He described how CU scoured Professor Ward Churchill’s work “to look for First Amendment violations.” Pretending to detail the school’s concern for protecting Churchill’s academic freedom, O’Rourke explained that when it was concluded that Churchill’s 9/11 Little Eichmann essay was protected speech, CU set about to find other instances where “what he said might violate the First Amendment.”

DENVER- Opening statements were made and two witnesses gave their testimony today at the Churchill vs. CU academic freedom trial, while a hungry media waited. ROUND ONE, CHURCHILL. Details to follow.

DENVER- I chose this militant stance. Next time I want to circulate between the four queues waiting to enter the courthouse, dressed in a toga and carrying a Coleman lantern, as a Diogenes might ask: “Is there one American among us who is NOT a Little Eichmann?”