There's nothing unique about the University of Colorado in this regard. As long as you're politically correct, you can commit plagiarism to your heart's content and no one will trouble you.
There are rare exceptions when someone really steps in it, as Churchill did with his Eichman comment. Otherwise, nobody cares.
Another scholar and I wrote reviews pointing out that a professor working in my field had falsified many of his footnotes, claiming that evidence was there which a look at the original sources proved was simply untrue. There were more than a dozen footnotes of this kind.
This had no public effect at all. I believe everyone in the field is aware of the facts, but since this professor is politically correct, everyone simply ignores the facts. Indeed, he was shortly afterward offered a top professorship at CUNY graduate center. He will retire with honors when he is ready to do so, and not before. His case is far from unique; I know of another instance of plagiarism from one of my own early books, for which the author suffered no penalty.
Colorado is no better, and no worse, than dozens of other formerly prestigious institutions of higher learning. Regretably, higher education in our country is sick, and seemingly getting worse every day.
Your stories remind me of that Bellesiles cat (from Emory U, IIRC) that wrote the now discredited book on the gun history of America. He was eventually taken down (and taken down hard), but it took a lot of work on the part of a handful of persistent historians. A lot of connected historians were reluctant to look into the charges that Bellesiles was at best a fraud, more likely a propagandist. Persistence and the white-hot spotlight of publicity eventually took him down.
Very true. If you write about race or gender and conclude that the moon is made of green cheese, your job is safe so long as you smooze the left. Lord forbid if you are a military historian, you never even get in the door of most institutions.
You are right on the money. a white, anglo-saxon, protestant, male, conservative has virtually no chance of being hired at any college or university in the US.
You're right. That's why Churchill needs to be fired and there needs to be a law suit. It's the only hope the Colorado taxpayers have for a full airing of the scandal.