The Denver Post
Churchill artwork mirrors artist's
By Arthur Kane
Denver Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 25, 2005 -
New questions arose Thursday about the professional history of controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill when his artwork was shown to be nearly identical to that of a well-known Western artist.
Churchill once sold prints under his name that bear an uncanny resemblance to a drawing done by the late artist Thomas E. Mails, CBS4 reporter Raj Chohan reported Thursday night.
The print made by Churchill in 1981, called "Winter Attack," appears to be a mirror image of a pen-and-ink sketch in a 1972 book called "The Mystic Warriors of the Plains" by Mails.
Churchill, after first angrily refusing to talk to Chohan on camera, admitted the work was based on Mails' rendering and said he had noted that fact during the initial release of "Winter Attack."
Boulder County resident Duke Prentup, who had paid about $100 for the Churchill work, discovered the similarity while leafing through a book of Mails' work, according to the CBS4 report.
Meanwhile, how Churchill came to win accelerated tenure at CU continued to be questioned. Churchill was never formally offered a job at California State University at Northridge, although CU officials believed he had been when they shortcut the hiring process to give him a tenured position, a Cal State spokeswoman said Thursday.
Michael Pacanowsky, head of the CU communications department at the time, wrote on Jan. 10, 1991, that the process to find Churchill a job had to be accelerated because of the competing offer, but Cal State spokeswoman Carmen Chandler said the controversial professor was never officially offered a job.
"We have (records of) every formal offer, and there is no record any formal offer was made" to Churchill, Chandler said Thursday. "We also don't look at people without a Ph.D."
Pacanowsky wrote in the January 1991 letter that he was asked to appoint Churchill to the communications department after the Cal State offer.
"I was initially told we had some time to consider the matter. ... Unfortunately, Ward has been offered a full professorship at Cal State-Northridge, and we need to make our decision well before the end of January," wrote Pacanowsky, who was returning from Germany on Thursday and could not be reached for comment.
E-mails and memorandums from 1991 show that the supposed competing offer was the primary justification for swiftly promoting Churchill from a one-semester temporary teaching job he had barely started into a full-time tenured faculty slot. But the records don't say who created the belief that Cal State-Northridge was competing for Churchill's services.
A Feb. 8, 1991, memo from Evelyn Hu-DeHart, director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, wrote that Churchill's job was a "special opportunity" position, which is often a job to help hire a more diverse faculty.
Administrators did not have to submit a search plan or advertise the position, she wrote, but the department decided to advertise the position and came up with three finalists, including Churchill.
Hu-DeHart, now at Brown University, refused to discuss the matter over the phone but answered some questions by e-mail this week.
She said Churchill would have had to prove he had an offer from Cal State and that he was more "senior" than a University of Arizona candidate despite never being a professor.
"'Senior' can be defined in more than one way, for example, by scholarship and number of publications," Hu-DeHart wrote via e-mail.
Cal State's Chandler said there could have been some informal talks between Churchill and the school, but any record of that may have been destroyed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Records of formal offers were preserved.
George Wayne, a former CU employee who at the time was an administrator at another Cal State campus, said he knows Churchill was a candidate for a job at Northridge because he was contacted by a Cal State colleague about Churchill sometime around 1991. Wayne did not remember who contacted him.
Churchill could not be reached for comment Thursday.
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