It's hard to make out what the jury was thinking. The $1 was intended as a slap, the jury asked the judge if they could award $0.
"When you tell the truth about the master narrative, the master slaps you down for it," [Churchill attorney David] Lane said. "Basically, white guys in suits write history," he added later.One can only assume that the lawyer was appealing to some narrow ideology on the part of at least some of the jury. Perhaps some jurors were persuaded to vote on Churchill's behalf knowing that more ideological jurors would settle for the $1 (or in their mind at the time $0) verdict.
It's difficult to argue that there was not sufficient cause for firing. Churchill's plagiarizing was done with the same blatancy and juvenile desire for attention that motivated his essay on "little Eichmanns".
I suppose that without the little Eichmanns essay, Churchill would have flown under the radar like most professors whose classes are little more than ideological rants or unprepared class discussions. Such professors are little more than gurus, popular among the self-selected students who gather around them.
A quick perusal of Churchill's academic credentials (at least to the extent that Wikipedia records them) should have made CU embarrassed to hire him in the first place:
Churchill received his B.A. in technological communications in 1974 and M.A. in communications theory in 1975, both from Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois at Springfield. Churchill began working as an affirmative action officer at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1978. He also lectured on Indian issues in the ethnic studies program. In 1990, he was hired as an associate professor, although he did not possess the academic doctorate usually required for such a position. The following year he was granted tenure in the communications department, without the usual six-year probationary period, after being declined by the sociology and political science departments. He was presented with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Alfred University after giving a lecture there about American Indian history in 1992. He moved to the new ethnic studies department in 1996 and was promoted to full professor in 1997. He became chair of the department in June 2002.So he had no earned doctorate, just a lot of opinions and an ability to convince a gullible administration that he had a desirable ancestry. Clearly, Colorado University was in need of an "ethnic studies" department and was unconcerned with what went on there. Just as disturbing is that Churchill could manage early tenure in the communications department without an earned doctorate after being turned down by two other departments.
That he would have anything resembling expertise in all three of those areas demonstrates that there are no standards. Apparently, any fool can be a communications professor and can at least fake at sociology and political science.
Will he get his job back? Probably not. Now that Churchill has been uncovered, CU would be foolish to allow him to get back on the faculty. The retaliation from donors and the continuing melodrama would produce a distraction that the university won't want any part of. They'll gladly take the PR hit from a big settlement than put up with his ongoing presence.
Unfortunately, Ward Churchill is the tip of the academic iceberg.
