Ward Churchill and Death of Academic Freedom (part II)

By David R. Hoffman

…continued.

Click here to read Part I.

	Ward Churchill and Death of Academic Freedom
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Recently neo-fascists opposed to Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama’s nominee to the United States Supreme Court, have argued that she doesn’t respect the “sanctity” of the law and chooses instead to be guided by her personal beliefs.

But if there is such a thing as “sanctity” of the law, why are so many Supreme Court cases decided by five-four votes split along ideological lines? Where is this concern when self-loathing Clarence Thomas uses his experiences at Yale University, not the law, to dismantle affirmative action programs, or when Antonin Scalia unethically hears cases where his political cronies are litigants. And why was there no impeachment talk when Thomas, Scalia and others of their ilk violated judicial ethics by refusing to recuse themselves in Bush v. Gore, the case that illegally elevated George W. Bush to the White House during the coup of 2000.

The reality is that Naves, undoubtedly because of his contempt for Churchill’s viewpoints, ignored the law. In doing so, however, he issued one of the most spurious, and dangerous, decisions in modern legal history.

According to the Associated Press, Naves opined that granting Churchill any type of judicial relief “would create a perception that the school [CU] tolerated research misconduct.”

But this argument is both disingenuous and contemptuous of the legal process. Jurors had already heard the case, deliberated and decided that the “research misconduct” allegations were simply a pretext used by CU’s regents to camouflage the fact that they fired Churchill because of the opinions he expressed in his essay. Thanks to the machinations of Naves, these jurors have belatedly discovered they were simply part of a show trial in a kangaroo court, and that their verdict, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “signified nothing.”

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