Ward Churchill Awarded $1 in Wrongful Termination Suit

Posted by Tana Ganeva, AlterNet at 2:00 PM on April 3, 2009.

This is probably making some interns over at Fox news salivate: the Denver Post reports that Ward Churchill, the iconoclastic scholar condemned for an essay in which he referred to victims of the 9/11 attacks on the WTC as “little Eichmanns”, has won his wrongful termination suit against the University of Colorado:

Ward Churchill won his case against the University of Colorado today as a Denver jury unanimously decided he was fired in retaliation for his controversial essay about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The jury gave Churchill $1 for past losses, finding he was fired over protected free speech.

No doubt this story will be repeated ad nauseum by conservatives as a sign of liberal degeneracy, at least once they stop screeching about the “OMG! Obama gave the Queen of England an iPod!” storyline.

The reason Churchill’s face will probably grace FOX news for a while is that the professor is one of those very difficult posterchildren for free speech, since his opinions diverge from those of most sane people. But, it’s kinda sad that we constantly have to be reminded that that’s the point of free speech. After all, we don't need to protect popular speech.

Churchill was fired in 2007 on the pretense that he had engaged in shoddy research. But one need not be a conspiracy theorist to recognize that the termination had far more to do with the controversy swirling around Churchill's essay. At the time, Right wingers ecstatically grasped onto the issue, using Churchill to bolster one of their favorite talking points: liberalism run amok in America's Universities.

Seems like at the time University of Colorado officials buckled under conservative pressure. It's promising that the Colorado jurors disagreed with the University's very strange interpretation of 'free speech'.

Tagged as: 9/11, free speech, ward churchill