Clashes with Churchill found

University of Colorado officials received repeated complaints about Ward Churchill's demeanor and temper, beginning two years before he was granted a tenured faculty position despite never going through the normal review.

Churchill was promoted at the university, and there is no record in documents released Wednesday indicating that he has ever been disciplined for inappropriate conduct.

Additionally, a university spokeswoman said Wednesday that while Churchill was required to sign an oath pledging to "support the constitutions of the United States and Colorado" as a condition of employment, the university has not been able to find a signed copy.

University officials who supervised Churchill said they had no recollection of the complaints in Churchill's personnel file, but those on the receiving end of what they described as Churchill's temper said they had not forgotten.

Retired university administrator and journalism professor Joanne Easley Arnold said she received a call from Churchill in 1989 during a controversy over the naming of a dormitory on campus. She was trying to get the dorm named for a former director of student housing. Churchill, not yet a professor, was pushing to have it named for the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

"He suggested I should back off my proposal and if I didn't, I would get hurt," Arnold said after she was contacted by The Denver Post. "I was shocked, and that's why my dean heard about it."

David Lane, a Denver lawyer representing Churchill, dismissed any claims of wrongdoing by his client.

"Obviously, the police didn't get involved ... and I doubt anything happened," Lane said.

CU officials are reviewing Churchill's writings and speeches after it was reported that he had likened some of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center victims to a top Nazi and made other controversial statements. Gov. Bill Owens and others have urged CU to fire Churchill.

The Arnold incident, which came five years after an allegation by Churchill's first ex-wife that he had threatened violence, is not documented in Churchill's file. She reported it to the dean of the journalism school, Arnold said.

Kaye Howe, a former administrator who had recommended Churchill for a one-semester teaching position at CU, also was not aware of the alleged threat but was not surprised.

In 1990, Howe was a vice chancellor and Churchill's supervisor at his job as director of the University Learning Center. She served as a reference for Churchill for a one-semester teaching job but expected him to return to the center. She was surprised when he received a tenured teaching job.

"The tenure process is a laborious and long one, and it's very rarely given early," she said.

Three years after receiving tenure, Churchill was again accused of inappropriate behavior.

In April 1994, two women wrote Charles Middleton, then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, about a March 28 incident outside the San Francisco Press Club involving Churchill and his wife at the time, Marie Jaimes.

"Carol Standing Elk was leaving the Press Club when Marie Annette Jaimes brutally attacked and injured her," Deborah J. Cruze wrote in a letter to Middleton in Churchill's file. "Then, as Ms. Standing Elk was trying to recover from the attack, she was spit on by Ward Churchill."

Cruze could not be reached for comment, but Lane dismissed the incident, saying it comes from a person who did not like Churchill.

"Maybe she needed to be physically attacked," he said. "Maybe his wife acted in self-defense. Maybe she needed to be spit on."

Middleton, who at the time told Cruze the university would investigate, said Wednesday he did not remember the incident.

Here's an article on the incident with Carol Standing Elk.
It was reported here:
www.nanews.org/archive/1994/nanews02.016

(although the site is down at present) and repeated here:

nugeboard.tednugent.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/208037-3.html

I can't believe that such a complaint would be lodged with UC and nothing done. I wonder if his ex-wife's record reflects this incident?

"Ward Churchill Spits in the Face of Wounded Indian Elder

At approximately 10:45 on Monday Morning, March 28, 1994, Carole Standing Elk, longtime Board Member of the National American Indian Movement and Director of California AIM, was violently attacked and physically battered by
Ward Churchill and Marie Annette Jaimes, both professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Mrs. Standing Elk and three other Indian women - all grandmothers and members of AIM, including Mrs. Standing Elk's 88-year-old mother, Mrs. Barbara Eastman, a traditional Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota elder from Sisseton, South Dakota - were attempting to leave the exclusive San Franciso Press Club,which they had entered to attend a press conference scheduled by Mr. Churchill, Ms. Jaimes and several of their associates. Churchill and Jaimes's group were expected to announce the results of a scandalous "tribunal" that this group had staged the previous two days, wherein this group had purported to "convict" AIM co-founder Clyde Bellecourt and
National AIM Director Vernon Bellecourt of "complicity in genocide" and other sensational charges.

As Mrs. Standing Elk and the three other Indian women were exiting from the Press Club doorway, Jaimes leaped at Mrs. Standing Elk from behind, knocking off Mrs. Standing Elk's eyeglasses, and began hitting Mrs. Standing Elk in the face and clawing at the victim while shouting obscenities, leaving Mrs. Standing Elk with a fractured bone in her wrist and open wounds on her face and arm. Jaimes was immediately restrained by a nearby San Francisco police officer; and as Mrs. Standing Elk was attempting to recover from this violent, unprovoked attack, Ward Churchill lunged toward Mrs. Standing Elk from where he had been standing near the street curb, leaned over the victim, and spit in Mrs. Standing Elk's face. Both Mr. Churchill and Ms. Jaimes were detained by the police for violently attacking Mrs. Standing Elk.

This incident is the latest in a series of vicious attacks on American Indian people and AIM leaders coordinated and supervised by Ward Churchill, who recently has been exposed by the national Indian press as a non-Indian
fraudulently posing as a "radical Indian activist" for purpose of marketing his writings and artwork to an unsuspecting public. Presently, Churchill is under investigation by the administration of the University of Colorado for falsely representing himself as an Indian to the university and the public, and for his long history of violent and threatening conduct toward American Indian people and AIM leaders.

In November 1993, Mr. Churchill and his associate Glenn Morris, a professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Denver, were permanently expelled from AIM and all AIM chapters by unanimous vote of AIM's National Board of Directors because of these two individuals' many
years of manipulative and subversive vities "misdirecting, disrupting, and sowing division in order to discredit and neutralize the leadership of the American Indian Movement." Churchill and Morris's involvement with the
International Indian Treaty Council had been similarly severed in 1986 in a strongly worded directive issued by that organization's leadership because of Churchill and Morris's "extremely divisive and damaging" activities.

American Indian Movement leaders believe that this violent attack on Mrs. Standing Elk by Marie Annette Jaimes and Ward Churchill is in retaliation for Mrs. Standing Elk's role in forwarding information concerning AIM's serious grievances against Churchill to the office of Judith Albino, president of the University of Colorado."

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