Grant Crowell finds it ironic that Ward Churchill was at the University of Hawaii holding forth on free speech Tuesday, because he believes Churchill tried to limit his own when he was a student there.

Crowell authored a cartoon while a student at UH-Manoa in 1994 taking a shot at Haunani-Kay Trask, a professor at the Center for Hawaiian Studies who helped arrange Churchill's return visit there this week.

The 1994 cartoon, which ran in the school paper Ka Leo O Hawaii, triggered charges from some in the university community that Crowell's work was racist.

Crowell's cartoon was a reaction to a poem by Trask, Racist White Woman, which appeared in her book Light in the Crevice Never Seen.

That poem carried lines about avenging the downtrodden by assaulting the "smug and wealthy" with punctured eyes, a knife to the heart, a fist in the mouth.

The furor around Crowell's cartoon coincided with a planned 1994 visit by Churchill - also at Trask's invitation.

Churchill, according to Crowell, ended up joining the chorus in lashing out at Crowell at a 1994 public forum where some demanded Crowell be expelled from the school, dropped from the paper's staff and forced into racial sensitivity training. None of those things happened.

News accounts in the school paper of that forum quote Churchill as saying the paper's editorial board "should be ashamed of themselves" for allowing Crowell to express his "racist" editorial cartoon and an accompanying column.

In an interview Tuesday from his home in Carpentersville, Ill., Crowell said Churchill went even further, that day.

"He used the name of an unnamed Nazi cartoonist, who was convicted during the Nuremberg Trials, executed dismembered, and cremated," said Crowell, who attended the 1994 rally where he was assailed.

Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher's Der Sturmer was known for anti-Semitic cartoons, but it was Streicher, not the cartoonist, Phillippe Rupprecht, who was convicted and hanged at the 1946 war crime tribunal.

"Churchill was saying, 'I'm not saying this should happen to Grant - but if it did, it could be a good thing,' " Crowell alleged.

Crowell, who attended CU in 1989-90, and graduated from Hawaii in 1994, is now CEO of an online solutions marketing firm. He said Tuesday he was surprised, more than 10 years after his experience with Churchill, to hear Churchill and his supporters complain that current scrutiny of Churchill's infamous Sept. 11 essay and other writings constitute a witch hunt.

"The point that I'm making is that I am a living example of the fact that Ward Churchill has no interest in freedom of speech when it does not suit his own political agenda, or the agenda of the people who are in the forefront of supporting him right now. And to me, that's a sad thing," said Crowell, who was bounced from the paper's staff in 1991 for helping to create an anonymous flier critical of another columnist at the paper.

"I am very much in favor of Ward Churchill having the same right of free speech I wanted for myself. But Ward Churchill, himself, is a complete hypocrite," Crowell said.

Churchill could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. But Trask, the subject of Crowell's 1994 cartoon, dismissed Crowell as a publicity-seeking egomaniac.

While she recalled the 1994 episode, she said she doubted Churchill would. And, Trask did not at first recall that Churchill even spoke out against Crowell, during his 1994 Hawaii visit.

But when a quote attributed to Churchill during that visit, concerning Crowell, was read to her, Trask confirmed its accuracy.

"Ward was speaking out against racist occurrences on our campus, which included the student paper on which Grant was a cartoonist," Trask said. "He (Crowell) was just one instance, of a whole string of racist editorials and cartoons in the paper. And that's all that it was."

brennanc@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2742