BOULDER, Colo. — Ward L. Churchill has been angry for years, shaking a clenched fist at American power from the streets of Denver and the lecterns of academia.
He has compared his country to Nazi Germany and urged the hanging of "war criminals" like Henry Kissinger, President Clinton and Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State whom he called "that malignant toad."
Most of all, he has been a firm believer in karma: What America sows, it shall surely reap. "Payback," he said. "Can be a real mother."
For years, the radical views of the gray-haired professor in the dark glasses were heard mostly by his students at the University of Colorado at Boulder and his fellow travelers on the far left.
That all changed two weeks ago, when a paper surfaced that Churchill had written comparing victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to Nazis.
Now he's fighting for his academic life. Churchill has resigned as chairman of the ethnic studies department, but remains a professor. The university board of regents is investigating whether he should be fired, the governor wants him dismissed, the state Legislature has condemned him. And Indian groups are calling him a fraud, saying he's not a Native American, as he has said.
The controversy flared when Churchill, 57, was invited to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., on Native American prison issues. Before the lecture, a paper he wrote after the Sept. 11 attacks, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," was unearthed by Hamilton academics.
In it, Churchill argued that America deserved what happened Sept. 11 and had gotten off "very, very cheap."
Using occasionally crude language, he ridiculed Americans in general and spoke in admiring terms of the Al Qaeda hijackers.
If anything, he wrote, the "combat teams" were too patient and restrained in their attacks.
Churchill called the Pentagon a legitimate target and said: "As for the World Trade Center.... Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? ... True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break."
The guilt of those who died at ground zero, he wrote, was having toiled in the "very heart of America's global financial empire." For that, Churchill called them "little Eichmanns," after Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann.
Hamilton College canceled the speech. On Thursday, University of Colorado regents publicly apologized to all Americans for Churchill's comments, while the state Senate passed a resolution denouncing the statements as "evil and inflammatory."
