THIS IS AWFUL - AT 6:51 P.M. ET:   Reader Joseph J. Gallick alert us to this depressing story from the Denver Post:

Ward Churchill won his case against the University of Colorado today as a Denver jury unanimously decided he was fired in retaliation for his controversial essay on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The jury gave Churchill $1 for past losses, finding he was fired over protected free speech.

COMMENT:  This is awful, and will have a profoundly negative effect on universities.  It's no doubt true that attention focused on Churchill because of his outrageous comments about the 9-11 attacks.  (He referred to those killed as "little Eichmanns.)  But that is irrelevant.  If attention focuses on a citizen because he ran a red light, and the police then, using legitimate procedures, find he murdered someone, we don't dismiss the murder charge because it wasn't what attracted the authorities in the first place.

The University of Colorado conducted a proper investigation of this "scholar," and found serious academic violations.  This is not a free speech case.  Plagiarism, which the university discovered, is not free speech.  I'd love to know who was on this jury.

This is very bad.  Churchill, a pseudo-scholar, will now become a poster child for a warped, sick version of "academic freedom," a term already misused repeatedly on campuses.  He will become a star on the left-wing speaker circuit.  He will be the Obama of college professors. 

Meanwhile, real scholars, who seek the truth in their work, and maintain the highest standards, languish in the ideological shadows.

Make no mistake:  This is a setback for a university system already suffocating from political correctness and corrupt "scholarship."   

April 2, 2009