February 3, 2005

Professor Is Assailed by Legislature and Vandals

Colorado lawmakers yesterday denounced an embattled professor whose scheduled appearance at an upstate New York college was canceled amid protests over his writings on the Sept. 11 attacks, in which he compared the victims to Nazis.

The professor, Ward Churchill, meanwhile, rebuffed calls to resign and said yesterday that his truck had been painted with swastikas overnight as it sat in his driveway. The Boulder County Sheriff's Department said it was investigating.

Calling his written remarks an "evil and inflammatory blow to the healing process," the Colorado House of Representatives unanimously approved a resolution condemning Professor Churchill. "The victims of the World Trade Center were innocent in every sense of the word and should always be remembered as innocent," the resolution states.

The uproar concerns a three-year-old essay by Professor Churchill, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In it, he called the workers killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 "little Eichmanns," technocrats who had a role in their country's economic power and its foreign policy, which included the 1991 gulf war.

The Colorado governor, Bill Owens, has called for the university to fire Professor Churchill, but yesterday, Michael Carrigan, a newly elected member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, said it was unlikely that any action would be taken when the board holds an emergency meeting today. "He can be fired, but not tomorrow," Mr. Carrigan said yesterday.

Professor Churchill said in an interview yesterday that he would sue if fired. "I am on firm legal ground," he said, adding that several lawyers who specialize in free speech have already contacted him. He said he had received more than 100 death threats.

The essay surfaced only after Professor Churchill accepted an invitation to speak at Hamilton College, near Utica, N.Y., about his area of expertise, American Indian activism.

After the essay was brought to light, Hamilton College said it had to honor its invitation in the interests of free speech, though the college president, Joan Hinde Stewart, said she found the remarks personally repugnant.

The college received thousands of e-mail messages and telephone calls protesting the planned panel discussion. On Tuesday, it abruptly canceled the discussion, which had been scheduled for tonight, after a caller threatened to bring a gun to the event and the local police said they could not guarantee Professor Churchill's safety.

At the University of Colorado, Professor Churchill resigned as chairman of the ethnic studies department on Monday but remains a teacher. Some students have protested his remarks, though he said more support him.

In his essay, Professor Churchill wrote of what he saw as the tie between the trade center victims and the deaths of Iraqis in the 1991 war, and after. "They were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cellphones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants," he wrote.

"If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it," he added.

Some Colorado lawmakers called on the Legislature yesterday to cut financing for the ethnic studies department at the university, saying that Professor Churchill has a right to free speech but that taxpayers do not have to subsidize his views.

The conservative news commentator Bill O'Reilly, who repeatedly urged viewers to send e-mail protests to Hamilton College, was running a poll on his Web site yesterday asking viewers if Professor Churchill should be fired. On his program last night, Mr. O'Reilly called the vandalism and death threats an "unfortunate plight."

At Hamilton, students scheduled a meeting called "Academic Freedom" for next Wednesday to discuss all the issues that swirled around campus, said a spokeswoman, Vige Barrie.

Mindy Sink contributed reporting from Denver for this article.