• Academic department whose faculty members are ideologically radical

The Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado (UC) drew wide public attention in the winter of 2005, as a result of a polemic written by its Director, Professor of Indian Studies Ward Churchill. Titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” the essay (which was later expanded into a book) made the case that the victims of the September 11 attacks, far from being innocents, deserved their deaths. When the essay was discovered and brought to light by a student at Hamilton College (where Churchill was scheduled to be a guest speaker), it ignited a firestorm of controversy, bringing condemnation from politicians, pundits and citizens alike. In a small concession to the critics, Churchill resigned from his position as head of the Ethnic Studies Department, taking a cut in his $115,000 annual salary. For his denunciation of the 9/11 victims, however, he refused to tender any apology.

Churchill is but one of numerous radical figures employed by CU's Department of Ethnic Studies. Another is his wife, Associate Professor Natsu Taylor Saito, who on numerous occasions has condemned early American settlers for having carried out "genocidal policies" against American Indians. A member attorney of the Lawyers' Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, Saito has relentlessly attacked the Patriot Act, not on grounds that it excessively impinges on American democratic norms, but rather based on her belief that those norms are not worth safeguarding. Saito crystallized this perspective in a February 25, 2004 speech denouncing the Patriot Act, in which she asked, "[I]s this the kind of democracy we want to be defending?" Saito's answer was a definitive no. Asserting that the Patriot Act was born of the bigotry of American lawmakers, Saito explained: "Now, we see anyone who can be associated with brown-skinned terrorists by virtue of religion or national origin being treated as terrorists themselves. … And this new 'threat' is used, in turn, to justify the invasion of Iraq, where a country of brown-skinned Others has been declared a threat to national security … and the U.S. is in the process of dispossessing these people of their land and natural resources." Moreover, Saito claimed that the U.S.-led war on terror was being fought primarily for the benefit of "a few large corporations and their stockholders."

Saito has also brought her legal expertise to bear as a Board Member of Leonard Peltier’s legal defense committee. A convicted murderer serving out a lifetime sentence in a Kansas penitentiary, Peltier has become a favorite cause of leftist activists, including Ward Churchill, who maintain that he is a "political prisoner" jailed on account of his Indian American heritage.

Elisa Facio, who holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California at Berkley, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chicana/Chicano Studies, a sub-section of CU's Department of Ethnic Studies. Facio is primarily concerned with what she calls "Chicana scholarship," a leftist-feminist shorthand for the theory, of which Facio is a committed exponent, that Chicana women are habitually oppressed within American society. As Facio explains in her faculty biography, "Chicana scholarship reveals our struggles as Chicanas in the United States, and expresses in a society which attempts to render us invisible." Facio freely allows that this brand of scholarship does not draw on a sound body of academic study, but is instead informed by the radical ethos of 1960s-era radical counterculture: "Rooted in the political climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, our scholarship, like other currents of dissent is a Chicana critique of cultural, political, and economic conditions in the United States."

Facio is a foe of free trade and has long railed against free-trade legislation like NAFTA in her opinion articles. She is also an avid supporter of Cuba's Stalinist regime, and is an active member in the National Network on Cuba, a pro-Castro organization which maintains that "[n]early all of the U.S. government's charges against Cuba's human rights record are simply untrue." Facio once led a delegation of 100 activists culled from far-left student groups (like the Venceremos Brigade) to Havana for a convention called the International Woman's Conference.

Also specializing in "Chicano/Chicana" studies is Arturo Aldama, hired by CU in the summer of 2003. According to a CU press release, Aldama's classes included "an introduction to Chicano studies and a seminar on film and cultural studies, focusing on gender and violence on the U.S.-Mexico border." In the spring of 2004, Aldama taught a new class which was presented as "a creative writing workshop on the ethnic spoken word, featuring the work of Puerto Rican, African American and other poets focusing on social change."

Aldama was also one of the most vocal defenders of Ward Churchill. "He's impeccable on his sources and known for his empirical and archival-based methodologies," Aldama told the Denver Post. "Whether you agree with it [Churchill's work] or not, it's always been praised for academic rigor. He has 400 footnotes per chapter." Aldama offered no comment on the observation, made by Churchill's critics, that his footnotes suffered from the same faults as the texts into which he conscripted them.

Writing in April 2003 in the leftist online magazine Bad Subjects, Aldama published an attack on the U.S.-led military campaign in Iraq. He began by condemning what he viewed as the “corporate-driven media” for its efforts “to manipulate and coerce its body politic into becoming docile entertainment consumers of U.S. military hegemony.” "Spin doctors," Aldama theorized, "are paid to continue the jingoism that has marked Bush's pseudo-populist presidency, especially post-9/11, to mitigate/justify/applaud/deny the violence of shrapnel-ripped skulls and buildings, groundwater poisoned for decades, the trauma of a bomb's noise and the anxiety of impending death that scar children's psyches as I write, death by friendly fire, the bombing of open markets and hospitals, and the use of scatter bombs."

A similar line was taken by Adrian Gaskins, a Professor of American Studies in the CU Department of Ethnic Studies. In a March 2003 "Books Not Bombs" event organized by CU faculty, Gaskins participated in a panel called "Race and War," for which he presented his views on "U.S. Colonialism."

William King, who heads the Afro-American Studies division of the CU Ethnic Studies Department, is the Editor of the Department's in-house periodical, the Journal of Ethnic Studies. Advancing the idea that truth and knowledge are social constructions rather than objective realities, King explains: "I stress the idea that knowledge, like truth, especially that presented in school, is also a social product assembled in accordance with the criteria of construction we learned in scholar school."

The classes offered through the CU Department of Ethnic Studies reflect, without exception, the leftist politics of the professors. For instance, a class called "Chicana Feminisms and Knowledges" uses an "analysis of feminism and feminismo" to "challeng[e] orthodoxy, whatever its intellectual root or cultural origin." "Internal colonialism," and "institutional racism," meanwhile, are the subjects of a class called "Chicanos in the U.S. Social System." And a course titled "Exploring a Non-Western Culture" is explicitly designed “to instill an appreciation of non-Western cultural diversity in material adaptations, social patterns, ideas and values, and aesthetic achievements, thus recognizing a range of cultural solutions to common human problems."

Ward Churchill’s replacement as Chair of the UC Ethnic Studies Department was Associate Professor Emma Perez. When news of Churchill's extremist views came to national attention, Perez emerged as one of his earliest—and most passionate—defenders. Writing in Counterpunch in February 2005, Perez advanced her view that the critical opposition to Churchill evidenced a neo-conservative putsch aimed at taking over the University of Colorado: "We've done some preliminary research and analysis and it's become clear exactly what's at stake and what we're up against. CU-Boulder has been made the national frontline of the neocon battle for dominance in academe. … This is much, much bigger than an individual attack on Ward. What we're looking at is a carefully developed, pre-existing national strategy that has been searching for exactly the right breakthrough 'test case.'" Perez also hinted that criticism of Churchill was motivated by racism, asserting that "[t]here are faculty who have problems with his being American Indian."

Further evidence of the Department of Ethnic Studies' radical agenda comes from Todd Gleason, currently the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado, of which the Department of Ethnic Studies is a part. In 2003, Gleason wrote a letter to Churchill, informing the professor that his salary had been raised (to $92,000) and lauding his work as vital to the mission of the Department. “We are pleased to recognize your outstanding contribution to scholarship and teaching in the area of Native American studies,” Gleason wrote. “Retaining you as a valued member of our faculty is a high priority for both the department (of ethnic studies) and the college (of arts and sciences)."