MORE ON WARD CHURCHILL. Jim at Blogs for Industry takes a cut at specifying the trade-off between diversity and research excellence. He draws the line at research misconduct.

A university may benefit from faculty with views as extreme as Churchill's, and may sometimes want to hire outside of the normal disciplinary trade unions. But even if the expectations for the nature of scholarly activity should be customized for such a hire, the basic expectations for all faculty, traditional or not, has to include that they may not commit deliberate fraud. Fools we can tolerate, along with the self-deluded, because the remedy for poor reasoning is more reasoning, and we don't trust ourselves or our political masters to be able to separate the goofballs from the Galileos...but we must draw the line at charlatans.

PoliBlog concurs.

If a scholar is found guilty of “falsification, fabrication, plagiarism” and so forth by a panel of peers, then it seems to me that depending on the volume of the offense, that dismissal is the only appropriate punishment.

I suspect that the man will find a way to make up for the lost revenue, however.

He offers a clear statement of Colorado's responsibilities to maintain integrity while encouraging free inquiry.

I never thought that Churchill should have been disciplined for having far-out theories. I have argued that he wasn’t qualified for the post he held and argued that he had the academic freedom to write what he wrote. However, I have no tolerance for plagiarism and academic dishonesty.

Exactly.