Ward Churchill beats the system

Or something. Freddie hails a Denver jury’s decision that Ward Churchill was wrongly fired from his job at the University of Colorado. I’d like to leave aside the idea that tenure is a “vital institution” for the moment and focus on something he writes in the comments:

Plagiarism, depending on the context, is indeed a fireable offense. But Churchill wasn’t actually fired for plagiarism, and even the University seemed to acknowledge that the idea he was is kind of laughable. He was fired for his opinions, and that’s wrong, and a blow against academic freedom.

I’m curious: what is the context in which a university professor can commit plagiarism and it isn’t a fireable offense? Plagiarism is pretty much the worst thing an academic can do (with the possible exception of simply forging documents/data). Is he trying to differentiate between accidentally leaving out a footnote/citation and copying material unrepentantly?

A secondary query: I don’t think it’s in dispute that Mr. Churchill was protected by tenure to say whatever he wanted, no matter how distasteful. Indeed, the University of Colorado looked into firing him at one point and decided that they couldn’t, if my memory of this whole sordid affair remains intact. But when he drew attention to himself and opened up his writing to extra scrutiny, people realized that he was a total hack in more ways than one; that he was, indeed, a thief of somebody else’s words and ideas. So now the university had cause to fire him.

They only found out about that misconduct, though, because his ideas were unpopular. So is Freddie saying that no one who gets extra scrutiny in the academy because of their unpopular ideas can be fired if said scrutiny is brought about because of their unpopularity?

The facts of the case don’t seem to be in dispute: Churchill plagiarized. He was caught plagiarizing. The university fired him for plagiarizing. Yet he shouldn’t have been fired for plagiarizing because the plagiarizing was only caught because he said something unpopular after 9/11? Is that about right?

(For more on Prof. Churchill, you should read Matt Labash’s (a/k/a “America’s Greatest Treasure”) piece on the guy. It is, like the rest of his oeuvre, good stuff.)