Ward Churchill, professor who challenged his dismissal over 9/11 essay, has died at 78

Ward L. Churchill, a professor whose firing by the University of Colorado in 2007 inspired a lawsuit that became a landmark case about academic freedom and free speech, has died. He was 78.

The death was confirmed by his former lawyer, David Lane. No further details were provided.

When he was dismissed, Mr. Churchill had been a tenured professor at the university’s Boulder campus since 1991 and had served as chairperson of its ethnic studies department. In 2007, a faculty panel found that he had plagiarized and falsified parts of his research on Native Americans, prompting his dismissal.

He filed a wrongful termination suit against the university, claiming that the real cause for his firing was to punish him for an essay he had written on Sept. 12, 2001, and published online a few days later, in which he argued that the United States had brought on itself the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In the essay, he compared office workers who had been killed with Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official whose later defense that he was merely “following orders” helped inspire writer Hannah Arendt to develop the concept of “the banality of evil.”

In Mr. Churchill’s essay, titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” he wrote that the financial workers who died at the World Trade Center were not innocent bystanders, but “little Eichmanns” who were part of “a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.”

The essay garnered little notice at the time of its release, nor when it was expanded and published as a book in 2003. But when Mr. Churchill was invited to speak at Hamilton College in New York in 2005, it resurfaced and caused an uproar, and the organizers canceled the event.

Under pressure, including from Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, the university formed a panel to investigate Mr. Churchill’s conduct. It concluded that he had committed serious academic misconduct, including falsifying and fabricating historical details and plagiarizing work by an environmental group and another scholar.

The panel was divided about whether he deserved to be dismissed, with three of the five members in favor, and two recommending a two-year suspension.

The university’s leaders decided to fire him, prompting Mr. Churchill to start his legal challenge. When the lawsuit went to trial in March 2009, Mr. Churchill’s lawyers described the university panel’s search for professional misconduct as a pretext for a foregone decision to dismiss him. Lane, his lawyer, said at the time that Mr. Churchill was the victim of a “howling mob” of university administrators, conservative media, and politicians “falling over themselves” to secure his removal.

In April 2009, the jury found that Mr. Churchill had been wrongfully dismissed, awarding him a symbolic $1 in damages. It found that his political views had been a “substantial or motivating” factor in his dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been dismissed anyway for his academic misconduct.

“The jury’s award is some vindication,” Mr. Churchill said. “I didn’t ask for money, I asked for justice.”

A Denver District Court judge ruled that the university did not have to reinstate or compensate Mr. Churchill, a decision upheld by the Colorado Court of Appeals. In 2012, the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed the lower courts’ rulings.

Ward LeRoy Churchill was born Oct. 2, 1947, in Urbana, Ill., to Jack LeRoy Churchill and Maralyn Lucretia Allen. They divorced when he was a year old. In a 2003 essay in an academic journal, he claimed to be of Muscogee Creek descent through his father and an enrolled member of the United Keetowah Band of Cherokee Indians through his mother.

The Cherokee tribe said in 2005 that he was an associate member rather than a full member. A former member of the tribe’s enrollment committee said Mr. Churchill could not prove his eligibility by blood but was granted associate status based on his advocacy work.

Mr. Churchill grew up in Elmwood, Ill., and graduated in 1965 from Elmwood Community High School, where he played football and basketball. Former classmates told the Denver Post in 2005 that he liked to debate politics, even as a teen.

He joined the U.S. Army in 1966, training as a light-truck driver and projectionist, then served in Vietnam. He told the Denver Post in a 1987 interview that he had attended paratrooper school and was assigned to an elite reconnaissance patrol unit, details that did not appear on his Army record.

He was discharged from the Army in 1968. He said in the 1987 interview that he became active in anti-war leftist circles in Chicago after he returned from Vietnam.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in technological communications from Sangamon State University in Springfield, Ill., (now the University of Illinois Springfield), in 1974, and a master’s degree in communications theory from Sangamon State in 1975.

He was hired by the University of Colorado in 1980 to be the acting director of its American Indian Equal Opportunities Program. In 1991, he became an associate professor in the communications department and received tenure. He became a full professor and transferred to the ethnic studies department in 1997.

His classes were popular enough that up to 60 students would be on the waitlist, Arturo Aldama, a professor in that department, told the Denver Post in 2005.

Mr. Churchill was married four times. His first wife, Dora-Lee Larson, filed to end their common-law marriage in 1984 and accused Mr. Churchill of “past violence and threats.” His second marriage, to Marie Annette Jaimes, a colleague at the University of Colorado, ended in divorce in 1995. That same year, he married Leah Kelly, who was struck and killed by a car while crossing a street near Boulder in 2000 at age 25.

Mr. Churchill’s fourth wife, Natsu Saito, was a fellow professor in the University of Colorado’s ethnic studies department. In 2006, while he was being investigated by the university, Saito resigned to teach at Georgia State University.

Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

In 2017, Mr. Churchill returned to speak at the Boulder campus, and he remained defiant. “Academic freedom in America is dead,” he told the crowd. “I had my identity before I was a professor, I had it while I was a professor, and I have it now.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.