As Free Exchange on Campus points out, the University of Colorado’s Chancellor is planning on raising $9 million for an endowment to fund a “Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy” in an effort to bolster the campus’s intellectual diversity. [Campus Progress is part of the Free Exchange on Campus Coalition].

 As argued by Free Exchange:

Again, there's nothing wrong with seeking job candidates who either specialize in conservatism as a substantive area of study or who bring a conservative perspective to their field.  However, rather than setting up a token conservative job opening - especially one that privileges political leanings over scholarship - CU should consider working with its faculty and academic departments to create positions for these specialties within the traditional university structure.

Churchill, an author and University of Colorado professor, got in some serious trouble a few years ago when he called victims of September 11th “little Eichmanns.” Many called for him to be fired from his position at the University of Colorado, and the conservative “academic freedom” movement used him as an example of everything they thought was wrong with academia. He was given the pink slip yesterday because a review of his academic work seems to show falsification and plagiarism.

Our friends at Free Exchange on Campus just put up a blog post about the controversy that sums it up nicely:

ACTA [*] and others claim that Ward Churchill is just one of many dangerous academics, and a sign that academics are so out of line that the only thing to be done is to start imposing academic diversity in the classroom and limiting the number of tenured faculty positions created to let these overly-politicized professors run amok. […]

But contrary to popular belief, he's not the norm, and using him as a rallying point to make academia an even more difficult field to work and learn in than it already is won't help form the independent critical thinkers and good citizens they want to be made at the university.

The picture they paint of various "Ward Churchills" is bleak, but it's not the picture of academics I have had painted for me, and it's certainly not the picture that inspired me to go for grad school.