I was fortunate, coming right off the nasty battles over "Academic Freedom" on Colorado colleges campuses in early 2004, that I knew Dr. Oneida Meranto.

Dr. Meranto, a (genuine) Native American professor of political science at Metro State, knows all about Ward Churchill. The day the Churchill "little Eichmanns" scandal exploded across the right wing AM dial, I was in her "Politics of Higher Education" class. And you can imagine how we felt, just a few months after barely saving her job from a particularly vicious David Horowitz-masterminded College Republican smear campaign. More than one of us were scrapping for a fight over Ward Churchill's free speech.

Dr. Meranto knew better, of course. Knew that Ward Churchill, quite apart from the lynch-mob political motives underlying the time and place of his deconstruction, was guilty of

'Deliberate misconduct'

Churchill attracted national criticism after an online essay he wrote likened some victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks to an infamous Nazi bureaucrat. Panel members in the report said the controversial 2001 essay played no role in their deliberation and said they were skeptical about the circumstances that prompted the academic misconduct allegation.

"Nevertheless, serious claims of academic misconduct have been lodged, and they require full investigation and responsible and fair treatment," the report said...

The investigative panel found that Churchill plagiarized passages from a pamphlet published by a Canadian environmental group and the writings of a Canadian professor on fishing rights. The report also says Churchill fabricated evidence regarding the spread of smallpox and government-mandated blood standards requiring American Indians to prove their ancestry.

Committee members raised concern about attribution in Churchill's written work, saying that they found a pattern where he would cite his own work and attribute it to other scholars in the field. They rejected Churchill's argument that the practice is common.

"Some scholars may experience vicarious negative effects from Professor Churchill's conduct, ranging from increased public skepticism about the integrity and value of their work to outright hostility to the academy as a whole," the report said.

Meaning that he discredits legitimate research within his field. It seems clear in retrospect that these academic dishonesty allegations should have been policed and dealt with by the University well before Ward Churchill became the poster child of the public education-bashing fringe right. That's how Dr. Meranto explained it, and by gum...

It's too bad, too. Because the world needs professors who are brutally candid and credible under scrutiny. Churchill only managed a shabby try at the former.