How 1960s Radicals Ended Up Teaching Your Kids
Last week NYU Law announced that former Weather Underground member and convicted murderer Kathy Boudin would be a scholar-in-residence. She’s the latest in a series of former left-wing radicals with cozy university appointments. Michael Moynihan on how left-wing criminals ended up lecturing America’s college students.
Last
week, Rutgers University fired its mercurial basketball coach after he
was videotaped “shoving, grabbing and throwing balls at players in
practice and using gay slurs,” according to ESPN.
Under pressure from school administrators, Rutgers’ athletic director,
who had previously defended the coach’s behavior, resigned. It was an
appropriate response: violent oafs should be fired from their university
jobs for violent, oafish behavior.
On the same day ESPN broadcast the Rutgers tape, The New York Post reported
that Kathy Boudin, a professor at Columbia University, was named the
2013 Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School. In 1984, Boudin, a
member of the Weather Underground, a violent, oafish association of
upper-class “revolutionaries,” pled guilty to second-degree murder in
association with the infamous 1981 Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack,
New York. Babbling in the language of anti-racism and anti-imperialism,
Boudin assisted in ending the life of three people, including Waverly
Brown, the first black police officer on the Nyack police force, and
left nine children fatherless. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in
prison. In 2003, Boudin was released; by 2008 she had landed a coveted
teaching position at an Ivy League university.
Indeed, Boudin’s Columbia University biography
doesn’t mention her violent past, describing her simply as “an educator
and counselor with experience in program development since 1964,
working within communities with limited resources to solve social
problems.” Neither does an official NYU press release
announcing her new gig, instead explaining that Boudin “has been
dedicated to community involvement in social change since the 1960’s.”
Well, that’s one way of putting it. (Boudin didn’t respond to an interview request.)
Kick
a student on the basketball court and you’ll lose your university job.
Spend two decades in prison on radical chic murder rap and you’ll get
one.
Let’s
be clear: Private colleges can hire whomever they like, though one
suspects that a Pinochet loyalist, a propagandist for Franco, or a
far-right bomber—where academic jobs are scarce—wouldn’t make the
shortlist of candidates at Columbia or NYU. In fact, there is a rather
ignoble tradition within academia of welcoming those with fringe views
and violent backgrounds, provided their politics were “misguided” in the
appropriate direction.
Here's a quick look at Kathy Boudin and other 60s radicals turned professors.
The
most famous Weather Underground bombers-cum-professors are, of course,
Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (also a former Sheinberg
Scholar-in-Residence at NYU, which must consider bomb-making skills when
making its selection), whose infantile politics and tenure on the FBI’s
Most Wanted List never dented the confidence of the University of
Illinois or Northwestern University.
Ayers
and Dohrn have long maintained that their bombing campaigns never
deliberately targeted people, a claim that elides a rather important
event: the famous 1970 explosion at a Weather bomb factory in New York
City that killed three people, all of whom were constructing nail-packed
pipe bombs for deployment at an army dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey. The
goal was to blind, maim, and kill. Boudin was present, but escaped the
explosion and evaded capture. She insisted during her 2003 parole
hearing, against logic and and all available evidence, that she was
unaware the house was being used to construct bombs.
In a fair-minded piece for LA Weekly, journalist Peter Jamison reported
that investigators also believed an unsolved 1970 bombing of a San
Francisco police station, which killed one officer and blinded another,
could be tied back to Ayers and Dohrn. According to Jamison, “two
credible eyewitnesses—both former left-wing radicals tied to the
Weathermen—gave detailed statements to investigators in the 1970s
alleging that Dohrn and Howard Machtinger, another member of the group,
were personally involved in organizing the deadly attack.”
Ayers,
Dohrn, and Machtiger spent most of the 1970s “underground,” attempting
to avoid prosecution on a variety of charges (including a foiled attempt
to bomb the Detroit Police Officers Association Building) and Jamison
says that the three “were all targets of a secret federal grand jury
investigation in 2003” into the police station bombing. It might not
surprise you that, before retiring, Machtinger was a professor at North
Carolina Central University and Teaching Fellows Director at University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s School of Education. According to
Jamison, Ayers, Dohrn, and Machtiger all refused repeated requests to
comment on the case.
Or
take former Black Panther party grandee Ericka Huggins, who is now a
professor of women’s studies at California State University, a professor
of sociology at Laney and Berkeley City College, and, according to one official biography, a “human rights activist.” In 2011, students at the University of Kentucky could receive extra credit
for attending a lecture by Huggins, described as a “political prisoner
and human rights activist.” It does not seem to bother these
universities that in 1970 Huggins was brought to trial on charges of
“aiding and abetting” the murder of Alex Rackley, a fellow Panther they
wrongly believed to be a police informant. She was acquitted.
But
a few salient facts aren’t disputed: After days of “interrogation,”
Rackley was brutally tortured—beaten mercilessly, boiling water poured
on his naked body—and left to marinate in his own blood, urine, and
feces. As a warning to other “traitors,” one torture session was
audiotaped. In the scratchy recording recovered by police, Huggins can
be heard recalling when she “began to realize how phony [Rackley] was
and that he was either an extreme fool or a pig, so we began to ask
questions with a little force and the answers came out after a few
buckets of hot water.” During the session, Rackley was tied to his chair
with a gun pointed at him. As he shifted nervously, Huggins snapped,
“Sit down motherfucker. Keep still.” (A copy of the tape was recently
discovered in a Connecticut house and can be listened to here).
After 16 years in prison, her sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton and, not long after, the self-identified “human rights activist” took a position teaching at John Jay College.
In their book Murder in the Model City, authors Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae describe
a broken Rackley being led out of the house two days after the taped
session, to be driven to his execution site in a nearby marsh: “From her
perch by the kitchen counter, Ericka Huggins, the highest-ranking
female Panther in town, watched [Panthers George] Sams and Warren
[Kimbro] walk Rackley out the door. Sam brandished the .45 automatic as
he held Rackley’s arms, which were tied together with ropes.” Warren
Kimbro shot Alex Rackley in the head. He later confessed to the murder
and was sentenced to life in prison, but only served four years. By
1975, he was an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State University.
After
years on the run, having been indicted for her involvement in the
Brinks robbery and murder in Nyack, Weather Underground member Susan
Rosenberg was caught in 1985 moving “740 pounds of dynamite and weapons,
including a submachine gun,” according to The New York Times,
from her car into a storage locker. After 16 years in prison, her
sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton and, not long after, the
self-identified “human rights activist” took a position teaching at
John Jay College. After her contract wasn’t renewed, she found a perch
at Hamilton College, though furious opposition by some faculty members
forced the administration to withdraw the offer. But no hard feelings
from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Interdisciplinary Studies
Program, which in 2011 invited students “to a celebration of Susan Rosenberg” upon the release of her memoir.
Former
Weather Underground member Eleanor Raskin, who fled after being
indicted for bomb making in the 1970s, is an associate professor at
Albany Law School. In 1981, Raskin and her husband were arrested in
connection with an explosives cache uncovered two years earlier by New
Jersey police (her husband was placed on probation; the charges against
Raskin were dropped). After years in hiding, Mark Rudd, a Weather leader
who also fled indictment and went “underground,” turned himself in 1977
and was sentenced to two years’ probation. He later taught at Central
New Mexico Community College.
And on it goes. Perhaps you detect a pattern developing here?
They might have been violent charlatans, but they were violent charlatans in search of a better society.
They might resist providing a full and proper accounting of their
crimes, but most will concede that their tactics might have been
misguided and offer qualified repentance, but insist that their instincts were correct.
So
go ahead and commit a crime, “expropriate” a bank. Just make sure you
leave an incoherent manifesto at the scene, claiming that you’re
shooting your guns and filling your pockets with loot for the people. When caught, you won’t be a convicted murderer, but a “political prisoner.” And when released, you can be a college professor.
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