Campos: Buy off high plains grifter (Ward Churchill)

Rocky Mountain News column ^ | March 15th, 2005 | Paul Campos

[ajolympian2004]

In The Great Gatsby, Nick, the naive young narrator, is stunned when he learns that his friend Jay Gatsby's "business associate" Meyer Wolfscheim is the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. "How did he happen to do that?" he asks Gatsby.

"He just saw the opportunity," Gatsby replies. Astonished, Nick asks "why isn't he in jail?" Gatsby responds suavely to his young friend's flustered innocence. "They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man."

By now, innocent observers might be wondering why "they can't get" Ward Churchill, or at least put him out on the street. The answer is that, like so many talented American con men, from Arnold Rothstein (who actually did fix the 1919 World Series), to Ken Lay and Dennis Kozlowski, he's a smart man.

Churchill has spent his academic career running an increasingly elaborate scam - the sort of thing that's known among grifters as "the long con." Whatever else one might say about Churchill, it must be admitted that he has an abundance of the trait which marks all truly great con men: shameless audacity. Confronted by an academic job market that would normally laugh in the face of someone with his lack of credentials, Churchill hit upon an ingenious scheme: He decided to become an Indian.

Taking advantage of the natural reluctance most people have to question someone's ethnic self-identification, Churchill, who has no detectable Indian ancestry, simply began insisting that he was, in fact, an Indian. Everything that has happened since has been enabled by Churchill's continuing use of that phony claim to get away with the academic equivalent of murder.

Last week, according to a reliable source, the University of Colorado reached an agreement with Churchill, in which he agreed to resign in return for a payment roughly equivalent to three years worth of salary and benefits.

Understandably, this news provoked a firestorm of protest among people who were appalled by the prospect that CU appeared to be rewarding Churchill for his misbehavior. That backlash seems to have killed the deal, at least for the moment.

As a part of the group that Churchill has labeled his "white Republican critics" (I'm actually a Mexican-American Democrat, but, as we have seen, facts aren't professor Churchill's strong point) I'm in favor of the proposed settlement. Here's why.

First, it will likely save the university, and therefore Colorado's taxpayers, a great deal of money. Even if one assumes that in the absence of a deal CU will fire Churchill, and then win the lawsuit he is sure to file, the sum of the settlement is considerably less than what CU will have to pay to defend the lawsuit, which could easily drag on for years.

But there's a far more important consideration: What if, in the end, Churchill wins his suit? He will then spend another 10 or 20 years at a university that will now be helpless to do anything about the situation. With all threat of sanction removed, it's hard to imagine how bad Churchill's behavior is likely to become. Under such circumstances, the damage he might do to the university, and especially to students who are imprudent enough to expect minimal competence and civility from all their professors, is incalculable.

Of course it's extremely distasteful to pay Churchill anything. If life and law were fair, he would have been fired long ago. But they aren't - and one consequence of this is that there's a real risk Churchill will win his lawsuit.

CU already made one disastrous decision when it hired Churchill. It would be even more disastrous not to get rid of this high plains grifter immediately, at what is, all things considered, a bargain price.

===
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

[AnAmericanMother]

We can get the other side's attorney fees here in a couple of ways - for abusive litigation, particular statutory actions, or abusive appeals on the state side, or Rule 11 on the Federal side.

The standard to prove it is pretty high - I only got Rule 11 penalties for a client once, it was a firm of crooks that I had had a run-in with before, I usually do business on a handshake but the second time we met I documented everything and sent the most self-serving correspondence you ever saw . . . when they tried to shaft our client we were ready. The judge was not at all amused, and our client got all his attorney fees back - free litigation!