University of Colorado Regents are poised to adopt rules this morning that will sharply reduce the time it takes to fire a tenured professor.

The new rules come as ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill continues to appeal his pending dismissal for violations that included plagiarism and fabricating facts in his scholarly work. He remains on leave but is drawing his $96,000 a year salary nine months after he was recommended for dismissal.

The appeals process would be reduced to 100 days, although regents themselves would have no deadline to decide on the final appeal.

The current process has no set time limit, university attorney Charles Sweet said.

Regents voiced support for the rule change during a study session Wednesday. Regent Steve Bosley of Boulder said the plan could be a model for other universities.

"We all know there is a misconception out there that tenure is an appointment for life, no matter what you do, and that's not true," Regent Michael Carrigan of Denver said.

The plan has faculty backing. Two-thirds of the faculty supported the changes in a vote.

The faculty called for the review of tenure two years ago amid concerns that administrators had bent the rules to give tenure to Churchill.

Churchill came under national scrutiny in 2005 after an essay came to light in which he compared victims in the World Trade center to bureaucrats in Nazi Germany.

The attention brought complaints from scholars in the U.S. and Canada, who said Churchill had taken their work or fabricated facts in his published essays.

In one of the more bizarre instances, he published his own essays under the names of an ex-wife and his ex-wife's professor. Then he cited those essays in his footnotes in other works.

He was recommended for dismissal in June 2006, after a faculty investigative committee confirmed the violations.

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