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Academia Embraces Terrorists Daniel FlynnThis is the second article in a series on bias within higher education. Read Part I: Deep Blue Campuses
With the Kerry/Bush campaign donation split running 32-1 at Harvard and 22-1 Penn, statistical evidence couples with anecdotal evidence to suggest that top schools shut out conservative voices. But shouldn’t conservatives be concerned not only with what isn’t being taught but also with what is? Story Continues Below
Hamilton College has hired Susan Rosenberg, an advocate of the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, to teach a one-month writing course on the Clinton, New York, campus starting in January 2005. Rosenberg received a master’s degree through correspondence courses while in prison, but the qualifications that won her the job seem to be her credentials as a member of a left-wing terrorist group.
In 1984, a federal court in New York sentenced Rosenberg to 58 years in prison for possessing nearly 700 pounds of explosives and a cache of weapons. Although many suspected Rosenberg of playing a supporting role in the murder of two Nyack, New York, police officers, authorities stopped pursuing charges against her on that case after she received a lengthy sentence for the separate explosives charge. But that lengthy sentence was never fulfilled; Bill Clinton pardoned Rosenberg on his last day as president. Now Rosenberg will teach “Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity, and Change” at one of the most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the nation.
When hunting for a job, it’s generally not a good idea to highlight “convicted terrorist” on your resume. Employer exceptions to this rule include al-Qaida and certain American universities. Susan Rosenberg is just the latest in a long line of academic hires made not in spite but because of the criminal past of the applicant.
The tolerance extended to radical terrorists is not extended to mainstream conservatives. This semester, Ann Coulter dodged pie-wielding leftists at the University of Arizona and Michelle Malkin spoke at Berkeley over a mob attempting to drown out her words. Contrast this abuse with the fawning treatment schools have afforded convicted murderers, bombers and accused accomplices of terrorists.
One cost of a professoriat politically alienated from the surrounding nation is a lionization on campus of those who express their alienation in the most extreme manner. In this way, killers, bombers and terrorists are transformed from criminals into victims, from villains into heroes.
America is at war, and its top universities aid those who would wage war on America. What would have happened, for example, in World War II-era America if a top school invited an accused Nazi sympathizer to deliver a guest lecture? Today, guest lecturers and faculty who praise America are likely to face greater campus hostility than those who reflexively blame America.
There is something hilariously self-refuting about violent revolutionaries who preach the evils of intolerant America getting bankrolled by leading American schools. But to make the point that America isn’t the intolerant incubator of hatred they make it out to be, wouldn’t it be enough for us just to let these jailbird intellectuals speak freely without the imprimatur of leading academic institutions, the subsidy of unwitting alumni, or the command of impressionable students?
Read Part III: Academic Snobs Ban the Military Read Part IV: Political Bias Corrodes Free Speech on Campus Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum, 2004), and editor of www.flynnfiles.com.
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