College won't pursue inquiry
Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News
Published June 11, 2005 at midnight
A complaint by University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill alleging research misconduct and fraud against one of his academic critics will not be pursued by that professor's school.
Churchill, whose own work is under review by CU's standing committee on research misconduct, filed a complaint earlier this week against Thomas Brown, a sociology professor at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.
Brown is among the scholars who have accused Churchill of committing research misconduct by repeatedly writing - without factual basis - that the U.S. Army perpetrated genocide by deliberately spreading smallpox among the Mandan Indians in the Upper Missouri River Valley in 1837 through the distribution of smallpox-infested blankets.
That allegation is among several charges against Churchill, a tenured member of the CU Ethnic Studies Department, which are the subject of an ongoing inquiry by the CU committee.
"I met with (Lamar's) top administrators today and they notified me of their decision," Brown wrote in an e-mail Friday afternoon.
In a related development Friday, KHOW-AM (630) radio talk show host Dan Caplis filed a formal complaint with CU alleging that Churchill plagiarized a defunct environmental group's 1972 pamphlet on a long-since abandoned scheme to dam Canada's major rivers to divert water to the United States and Mexico.
The allegation concerning the aborted Canadian water diversion plan was first reported June 3 in the Rocky Mountain News.
Although Caplis has filed a formal complaint, the committee still cannot add new allegations to its workload during the current "inquiry" phase of its work.
However, if the committee decides one or more of the charges against Churchill already under consideration should be forwarded for full investigation, Caplis' new complaint could be incorporated into the committee's investigation at that point.
Churchill did not respond to requests for comment on Friday's developments.
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