Ward Churchill has been relieved of his teaching duties at the University of Colorado.

The University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to terminate controversial professor Ward Churchill on Tuesday evening.

“This case was an example not of mistakes, but an effort to falsify history and fabricate history and in the final analysis, this individual did not express regret or apologize,” said Brown. “This is a faculty that has an outstanding reputation and this move today protects that reputation.”

I have personally found this man to be a black mark on an Institute of Higher Learning and I believe his (through his attorney) behavior following today’s hearing just continued his pattern of arrogance.

“It sends absolutely an atrocious message to the academic community all over the country, which is: if you stick your neck out and make politically inflammatory comments, your reputation will be destroyed by the university bent on destroying you and ultimately your tenured position will be forfeited,” said Lane. “To the public at large the message is: there will be a payback for free speech.”

Mr. Churchill needs to accept personal responsibility for the real reasons he was terminated.
Details of the allegations which aided the Board of Regents in their decision to release the Professor can be found here with a synopsis of this report at this site.

If you’re in the mood to hear what the “eggheads” have to say about US war in Iraq, visit H-Diplo. You’ll find that they’re not just a bunch of “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Actually, there’s a variety of opinion.

Dr. Walker kicked it off with this essay, and you’ll find one response here and four more here.

Since entering academia in the late 1980s, I’ve heard a steady drumbeat of accusations that college professors indoctrinate, or try to anyway, their students with leftist, secular propaganda.

There’s no doubt that there is a higher percentage of liberals and leftists in academia than in the US population at large, though that percentage varies a great deal across displines and types of colleges. For example, more sociologists are on the left than economists, and there’s a higher percentage of conservatives in community colleges than in small liberal arts colleges.

Still, I’ve always wondered why, if academia is under the thumb of a leftist hegemony, colleges still have produced generation after generation of conservatives and Republicans. It may just be that students aren’t as pliant as the accusation makes them out to be, and it may just be that professors spend their time teaching the content and methods of their field rather than trying to brainwash their students.

It also appears that professors aren’t beating religion out of their students. Inside Higher Ed shares a report today that

Whether the source is God and Man at Yale or any number of more recent studies, the conflict between a college education and the faith that students bring to campus (secular campuses at least) is well accepted. The more you pursue a higher education, the more likely you are to abandon your faith — at least that’s what conventional wisdom holds.

“Actually we’ve just been wrong about this for quite a while,” said Mark D. Regnerus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the authors of a new study that suggests students who attend and graduate from college are more likely than others to hold on to their faith.

According to a survey of young adults, 76% of those who never attended college reported a decline in attending church services, compared to 59% of those with a bachelor’s degree or higher. 24% of those without any college reported a decline in the importance of religion, compared to 15% of those with a college degree.

The flip side of this story is that those are pretty big declines in church attendance, though I wonder how many will start attending again if they settle down, get married, have kids.