DENVER – The University of Colorado professor who likened some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi official has appealed to keep his job as school officials move to fire him for what they say is research misconduct.
Interim Chancellor Philip DeStefano last week said the university should fire ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill; a faculty committee concluded last month that he committed misconduct.
Churchill requested a review Wednesday, the school announced. The process includes a confidential hearing, with the committee's findings forwarded to the school president.
Churchill has vowed to sue if he is fired.
The professor penned a 2001 essay that compared white-collar workers at the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, a key planner of the Holocaust. The essay attracted little attention until January 2005, when he was invited to speak at a New York college.
Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and others called for Churchill to be fired. University officials ordered an investigation into his scholarship.
School investigators said that Churchill misrepresented the effects of federal laws on American Indians and that he wrongly claimed evidence indicated Capt. John Smith exposed Indians to smallpox in the 1600s. It also said he committed plagiarism by claiming the work of a Canadian environmental group as his own.
Churchill said that the investigation was an attempt to dump him because of outside pressure, and that no professor's work could stand up to such scrutiny.
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