Join Jessica tonight live at 9 p.m. to discuss the latest on the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative.

Colorado takes aim at race, sex preferences
By Valerie Richardson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published April 24, 2007

DENVER — Civil rights advocates kicked off a four-state campaign yesterday aimed at ending government race and sex preferences by emulating the success of last year’s Michigan ballot initiative. Organizers are planning to promote similar proposals in Colorado, Missouri, Arizona and Oklahoma for the November 2008 ballot.

“We’re calling it the Super Tuesday of Equality,” said Valery Pech Orr, executive director of the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, the first of the four proposed ballot measures announced this week.

Helping to lead the effort is Ward Connerly, the former University of California regent who sponsored the first such initiative 11 years ago in California. That measure, Proposition 209, was approved handily by voters despite strong opposition from liberal organizations. Similar measures have since passed in Washington and most recently Michigan, where voters approved Proposal 2 in November 58 percent to 42 percent.

Mr. Connerly and other organizers are scheduled to appear in Kansas City today to announce a Missouri initiative, followed by announcements later this week in Oklahoma and Arizona.

The proposed language of the Colorado measure mirrors that of earlier measures: “The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”

While several efforts to abolish preferences have failed in the Colorado legislature, organizers said they think voters will be receptive to the proposal. They pointed to the furor surrounding University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who is under investigation for comments comparing victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks to Nazis.

Mr. Churchill was awarded a full professorship despite weak academic credentials, and critics say the university gave him special treatment because he claimed Cherokee Indian ancestry, which is now in dispute.

“We know people are with us on this in the aftermath of Ward Churchill,” said Jessica Peck Corry of the Independence Institute based in Golden, Colo. “People are clearly saying that enough is enough — it’s time to start treating women and minorities as the competent people we are.”

Mr. Connerly disagrees with supporters of preferences who say such policies are needed to “level the playing field” for minorities and women. He and other initiative organizers say preference programs often harm the groups they intend to help. At universities, they say, the dropout rate is higher for minority students who fell short of standard admissions requirements but were admitted on the basis of racial preferences.

Since preferences were banned in California’s public universities, Mr. Connerly said, the dropout rate for minority students has plummeted while the graduation rate has soared. “Once we eliminated preferences, retention went up,” he said. “This perceived benefit [of preferences] has mismatched them. It’s placed them in a context where they’re doomed to fail.”

The Colorado proposal goes before the state’s legislative council on Thursday. If the language is approved, supporters may begin gathering the 76,000 signatures needed to put it on the 2008 ballot.

While the measure would eliminate preferences in government contracting and hiring, Mr. Connerly said the focus will likely fall on university admissions and the tenure process.

Mrs. Corry, who sat on the university’s diversity commission, said there are about 1,000 applicants for every tenure-track position, and that race is a factor in hiring decisions. “You’ll find it very, very hard for a competent white applicant — even an exceptional one — to have a shot at these positions,” she said.

Linda Chavez, a former labor secretary who is serving as the Colorado initiative’s honorary co-chairwoman, recalled how she was involved with the University of Colorado’s first preference program, started in 1968, aimed at poor, rural Hispanic students. She said the program was originally supposed to help students polish their academic skills, but that the focus soon shifted.

“I saw it transformed from giving someone a leg up to ‘We’re going to hold you to completely different standards,’ ” said Mrs. Chavez. “I tried to teach grammar and writing, but other leaders wanted to radicalize it, tell them, ‘It’s racism that’s kept you down.’ ”

By RACHEL BERNS Colorado Daily Staff
Wednesday, April 11, 2007 8:53 PM MDT

For the past two years, Professor Ward Churchill has faced an ongoing battle with his employers at CU. Now, almost a year after being recommended for dismissal by former Chancellor Phil DiStefano, powerful scholars from across the nation are speaking out to reverse Churchill’s discharge.

Law Professor Derrick Bell of New York University’s School of Law, Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other prominent professors are involved in this effort and published a letter in the recent edition of the New York Review of Books.

“The New York Review of Books is the most widely read periodical by intellectuals in America and other parts of the world,” said Reggie Dylan on April 2, who worked with Professor Richard Falk in drafting the letter. “(The letter’s) purpose is to draw attention and to make people aware of the gravity of the case and to call on them to do everything they can to challenge the administration.”

In early 2005, Churchill’s Internet-published essay regarding the 9/11 terrorist attacks became a source of criticism. In it, he questioned the innocence of many killed that day and caused an outrage. While Interim Chancellor DiStefano supported Churchill’s right to freedom of speech, he publicly condemned the statements made in the essay.

After over a year of review and investigation, the University’s Standing Committee on Research Misconduct recommended that Churchill be penalized for repeated acts of “serious research misconduct” in June of 2006. In August of that year, the University of Colorado Student Union (UCSU) passed a resolution supporting the university’s decision to fire Professor Churchill.

Shortly after, scholars from across the country began showing their support for Churchill. Dylan said that the opposition for the case has been kept out of the public eye until recently and that there are a growing number of scholars from around the country who support the reversal of the pending dismissal. The publication of the letter is meant to encourage more people to speak out.

He said that the letter is just the beginning of a new wave of outrage and that newspapers from around the country are asking that copies of the letter be printed in their papers.

The letter states, in part, “The relentless pursuit of and punitive approach of the University of Colorado at Boulder to Professor Ward Churchill is a revealing instance of the ethos that is currently threatening academic freedom. The voice of the university and intellectual community needs to be heard strongly and unequivocally in defense of dissent and critical thinking. And one concrete expression of such a resolve is to oppose the recommended dismissal of Ward Churchill from his position as a senior tenured faculty member.”

The bigger issue, Dylan claimed, is the way CU President Hank Brown was hired (he recently announced his plans to retire in 2008). He said that Brown, a former Republican senator, is a co-founder of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which claimed that American universities are the “weak link” in the country’s defense of terrorism. Brown replaced former CU President Elizabeth Hoffman almost immediately after she stated that Churchill’s case resembled McCarthyism.

“Brown is now in a position to decide whether Churchill will be fired,” Dylan said. “He claims he is an honest broker and (that) he hasn’t made a decision. This is an absolute lie. Brown was brought into the university to get rid of Churchill.”

Ken Mcconnellogue, the associate vice president for university relations, said this claim is false. He said that President Brown was brought to the university to do the job of a president and that the notion he was brought to CU for “this one expressed purpose is ridiculous.

“People are free to express their opinions and if they want to do that through a paid advertisement, that’s their prerogative,” Mcconnellogue said in regard to the letter.

Former CU professional research assistant Ernesto Vigil, who was employed with the Center for Study of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA) from 1989-1990, delivered a notarized document consisting of 30 pages about Churchill to Regent Hall in April 2005. According to Colorado Daily archives, Vigil believed the paper proved that Churchill was not an American Indian and that he committed academic fraud on multiple occasions.

“Ward Churchill is a fake and this has been known for a long time,” Vigil told the Colorado Daily in 2005. “This stuff is not new. These aren’t new revelations.”

According to the article, several professors have doubted some of Churchill’s research on Native American history. Professor Fay G. Cohen of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia reported that Churchill plagiarized an essay she wrote about Indian fishing treaty rights.

CU alumnus and director of the Independence Institute’s Campus Accountability Project, a higher education policy center dedicated to free speech, individual rights and fiscal accountability Jessica Peck Corry authored a report on legal standards for inquiry in the Churchill investigation. In the report, she stated that not only does CU have the legal right to dismiss Professor Churchill, but also the legal responsibility.

“Education is about honoring truth, always and everywhere,” the report states. “Tenure is about keeping your word, a two-way contractual obligation. Hence academic freedom confers no license to lie. By this standard, and nothing less, must all our universities and all their professors be judged.”

She states that in order for the university to withhold its “professional integrity and academic legitimacy,” CU should terminate the Churchill’s position as a tenured professor. Corry acknowledges the professor’s right to the First Amendment, but believes that there are grounds for dismissal due to his actions that concur with the Laws of the Regents provisions for the termination of tenured faculty including “his demonstrable professional incompetence, his neglect of duty, and his flagrant, persistent failure to meet minimum standards of professional integrity.”

“At this point, any defense of Ward Churchill is simply a defense of bad scholarship and bad ethics,” Corry said in an e-mail Wednesday. “While three years have passed since thousands of people across America called for Churchill’s resignation, CU is still trying to fire him at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to taxpayers.”

Many university students and officials continue to stand behind Professor Churchill and believe in the reversal of his dismissal. Throughout the remainder of the week, the Students and Faculty for True Academic Freedom (STAF) will hold numerous local events in support of him.

Contact Rachel Berns about this story at (303) 443-6272, ext. 113, or at editor@coloradodaily.com.

Colorado Daily Online Edition | 2610 Pearl St. Boulder, CO 80302 | 303.443.6272
Copyright © 2007, Colorado Daily and Prairie Mountain Publishing.

Campos: The witch hunt continues
April 3, 2007

THORNTON - Jack Branson sits in the cluttered living room of the modest house he rents from a family member on the ragged edge of this Denver suburb. On the table between us are vials containing eight different medicines.

Branson, a slightly built man who will turn 39 the next day, is seriously ill. For nearly 20 years he’s lived with the HIV virus that causes AIDS; in addition he has hepatitis B, and a slipped disc in his back. Some of the medicines keep him alive, while others, including oxycodone and methadone, help control the chronic pain in which he lives.

Like many people with HIV, Branson finds it difficult to tolerate the drugs that suppress the virus. Indeed, the drugs tend to make him so nauseated that on several occasions he stopped taking them, causing him to develop full-blown AIDS.

And, like many other seriously ill people, Branson discovered that by smoking marijuana he could control the nausea well enough to take his medicine regularly. It was precisely to help people like Branson that the voters of Colorado amended the state’s constitution in 2000, to allow doctors to recommend marijuana for patients they believed would benefit from it.

Six years ago, a doctor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine - an expert on the treatment of AIDS - told Branson he ought to smoke marijuana if that would allow him to take his medicine regularly (each time Branson stopped taking the medicine his body became more resistant to its effects).

The Colorado medical marijuana law doesn’t require a doctor’s recommendation to be in writing, and Branson began to grow a few marijuana plants in his backyard, Eventually he had 14 plants, which, given the relatively short Colorado growing season, was only enough to supply him with enough medical marijuana to get him through two thirds of the year.

In October of 2004, the North Metro Drug Task Force, a local law enforcement consortium that gets considerable funding from the federal government, showed up at Branson’s house. They didn’t have a warrant, but according to Branson they told him they would do serious damage to his house if he forced them to come back with one.

Branson had every reason to believe he had done nothing illegal (he in fact has no criminal record of any kind), and he consented to the warrantless search. He was then charged with felony cultivation of a controlled substance, and possession with intent to distribute.

Branson shows me the approximately 10-foot-by-4-foot plot of earth where he had grown his plants. “This is the east side and this is the west side of the plot,” he tells me. “I labeled the bags in which I kept the marijuana East and West, depending on which side of the plot the plants came from. The drug task force’s theory is that I intended to distribute the stuff on the East and West coasts.”

Branson’s lawyer, Robert Corry, describes himself as a strong Republican (he was the Republican committee counsel for the House Judiciary Committee in Washington in the 1990s.) In other words, he’s hardly a bleeding-heart liberal, yet he’s genuinely outraged by what the government is doing to his client. He estimates that Branson’s trial, which starts tomorrow, will cost the taxpayers of Adams County at least $100,000.

That seems like a steep price to pay for the privilege of persecuting a harmless, desperately ill man, who doesn’t appear to have committed a crime in even the most technical sense, and who might well die in prison if he’s sent there.

Prisons don’t allow medical marijuana use, and Branson says he would consider a prison sentence of more than six months to be the equivalent of capital punishment, since he probably can’t live longer than that without his HIV medicine.

I suppose in our government’s eyes that outcome would just prove once again how dangerous smoking marijuana really is.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

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