This article originally appeared on CampusProgress.org.

In Boulder, Colo., it is hard to mourn the departure of University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill. The city and the school are exhausted by years of scandal, Churchill being only the most recent. Most people are probably happy to see the controversy surrounding the provocative professor finally resolved with his dismissal on grounds of academic misconduct. In a small city with a large university—students comprise roughly a quarter of Boulder’s wintertime population—the university’s problems are the city’s problems, and CU has had plenty of problems recently.

As long as I can remember growing up in Boulder, the university got national publicity less for its Nobel Prizes than for its controversies. An end-of-semester party in 1997 ended in 1,500-person riots and as much as $500,000 in property damage. A Big 12 Football Championship win in 2001 yielded more riots, and tear gas wafted through neighborhoods. Some students’ habit of lugging porch furniture to the street to be burned led to a famously draconian measure: a municipal law against keeping a couch on your porch in the neighborhood near the action.

In recent years, CU controversy has continued to roil Boulder. A few years ago, the football team’s female kicker levied allegations of sexual harassment and rape against fellow players. The debauchery associated with athletic recruitment raised concerns. The university’s six-year program to reduce binge drinking ended in 2003 with CU being named the No. 1 party school by Princeton Review, and in the following two years several students died of alcohol poisoning.

And then, there was Ward Churchill.

The university’s interim chancellor, Philip Destefano, recommended last week that CU fire Churchill after a faculty committee determined he had committed academic misconduct. Churchill is almost alone in disputing the substance of the charges against him, but many question the reasoning behind the investigation itself.

Churchill came under scrutiny a year and a half ago after political furor erupted surrounding an essay he wrote in 2001 in which he described some of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns.” (Adolph Eichmann was a key Nazi bureaucrat who implemented the deaths of millions of Jews during Would War II.) Political controversy ensued. Conservative voices in the media called for Churchill’s dismissal, although he is a tenured professor, and even Colorado Governor Bill Owens said he should get the axe.

The university investigated, and it ultimately found ample grounds for dismissal unrelated to his controversial statements on 9/11—charges that Churchill “misrepresented the effects of federal laws on American Indians and that he wrongly claimed evidence indicated Capt. John Smith exposed Indians to smallpox in the 1600s,” and that he committed plagiarism, according to the Associated Press. In all, the faculty committee report charged Churchill with four counts of falsification, two counts of fabrication, two counts of plagiarism, four counts of “failure to comply with established standards” on citing authors and “serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research.”

Surrounding the Churchill controversy, two separate issues have emerged for intellectual freedom on campus: Are the violations explicated in the faculty committee’s 125-page report legitimate grounds for dismissal (most say yes), and more fundamentally, should the investigation have happened at all? Some have made an analogy to a situation where a police officer enters a home for legitimate reasons and finds evidence of an unrelated crime. As one reader wrote in a letter to the editor in The (Boulder) Daily Camera, another analogy might be “that the officer hears several calls on the police radio that a car has a pro-9/11 sticker and, as a result, the car gets pulled over, and the officer snoops around and finds a package of drugs. The fact that drug possession (like research misconduct at CU) is punishable does not change the constitutional right not to be singled out for a search (or audit of one’s writings) based on free speech.”

Some in the academic community are worried that the Churchill case will set a dangerous precedent for singling out professors with controversial beliefs. But Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the charges can’t be brushed aside. “I don’t think that one can just absolve him of misconduct because the investigation was triggered by his public speech,” Nelson said. He added, “My worry is not that under the present conditions this will set off a series of efforts to get rid of tenured faculty.” But he noted the potential for “encouraging impatience with faculty who are among the loyal opposition.”

David Horowitz, author of The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America whose “academic freedom” campaign paints left-leaning scholars as “dangerous,” told the Chronicle he hopes Churchill’s dismissal will be “the beginning of a national effort by universities to tighten up their academic standards.”

Others have rushed to Churchill’s defense, calling foul over a professor being singled out for investigation for constitutionally protected speech, however distasteful. Indeed, how many of the university’s tenured professors would come up completely clean if put under the intense scrutiny of an image-conscious university? We don’t know, because no one has checked. Churchill was singled out for inflammatory rhetoric, and that practice threatens academic freedom. Nonetheless, the charges against him appear to be legitimate, and academic dishonesty cannot go unpunished.

Progressive advocates of academic freedom should not rally to Churchill’s side. They should oppose the targeting of professors for their beliefs, even vile ones like Churchill’s. But the charges against Churchill justify his termination because fraud and plagiarism, as much as censorship, threaten academic integrity.

For the sake of academic freedom, let’s hope that Churchill falls out of the news, no matter what happens with his pending appeal over the next weeks. As for CU and Boulder, I look forward to a time when I hear more about a student-built space instrument on its way to Pluto than about a provocateur’s media wars or other embarrassing controversies.

Campus Progress has helped found the Free Exchange on Campus Coalition, which is fighting for academic freedom on campuses across the country. The views expressed by Graham Webster in this piece are his own, and are not part of the Coalition’s efforts.