Ward Churchill`s free-speech case against the University of Colorado will be revived in the Colorado Supreme Court — and the fired professor`s attorney says Churchill wants his job on the Boulder campus back.
The Supreme Court announced Tuesday it will hear Churchill`s appeal, including one key argument about the quasi-judicial immunity doctrine that Churchill and his attorney argue is threatening academic freedom and tenure, and chilling free speech at universities.
“When the regents violate the Constitution, should they be on the hook for it?” attorney David Lane said. “The lower courts have said ‘No,` and the Colorado Supreme Court is going to chime in and we`ll see what they say.”
A three-judge panel with the Colorado Court of Appeals in November upheld a district court judge`s decision to deny giving Churchill his job back.
The appeals court ruled that former Denver Chief District Judge Larry Naves was right to rule in favor of the university by finding that the school was entitled to “quasi-judicial immunity” in terminating Churchill from his job as an ethnic studies professor in 2007.
CU`s regents voted 8-1 to fire Churchill nearly four years ago because of academic-misconduct violations. Faculty members tasked with investigating Churchill`s body of work found patterns of plagiarism, fabricated facts and other academic-misconduct violations they said were deliberate.
Churchill sued the university, alleging he was really fired because of his controversial speech. The professor`s 9/11 essay ignited national furor because it called some victims “little Eichmanns,” a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who helped carry out Hitler`s plan to exterminate Europe`s Jews during World War II.
Lane expects that oral arguments at the supreme court level will happen at the beginning of 2012 and a ruling could be made by that spring.
