Academia’s hire-a-terrorist movement
It can be hard to get a job if you’ve got a record, but universities are doing their bit—if the ex-con was a terrorist, that is. Professors Dohrn and Ayers are not certainly not anomalies; Kathy Boudin has found a home in academia, too.
Not only is that no surprise whatsoever, but the location of that home is no surprise, either—Columbia University:
Former Weather Underground radical Kathy Boudin – who spent 22 years in prison for an armored-car robbery that killed two cops and a Brinks guard – now holds a prestigious adjunct professorship at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, The Post has learned.
Boudin, 69, this year won another academic laurel – being named the Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School, where last month she gave a lecture on “the politics of parole and re-entry.”
Boudin was hired as an expert on “the issues facing convicts and their families when a person is released from prison.” I doubt she recommends her own solution; Columbia certainly can’t employ all of them.
The university reports that very few of Boudin’s students have “expressed qualms” about her criminal history. After all, this is the Columbia School of Social Work we’re talking about.
And not only is Boudin employed there, but other universities are vying for her hand; she was appointed Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School as well.
Of course, these schools have a right to hire anyone they want. They’ve been hotbeds of leftism for a long, long time, and I wouldn’t expect that to change. But I wonder whether most people are yet aware—and especially most parents who send their children there to be educated—of how pervasive the leftist agenda there (and in so many other universities) actually is.
More:
One Friday, a criminal-justice conference at the school will feature keynote address by Angela Davis, another infamous radical, and later this month Boudin is scheduled to speak at Columbia Law School’s conference on child and family advocacy.
Here’s Boudin’s bio, if you’re not already familiar with it. I have been unable to find anything to indicate what might be called “repentance” on Boudin’s part; neither has John Hinderaker of Powerline. And indeed, there’s absolutely no reason to think she has any regrets about what she did. Boudin comes from a long line of prominent leftists (and especially lawyers), and although the rest of them don’t seem to have been terrorists, in her politics she’s really just been following the family business.
[NOTE: There’s a movement to romanticize terrorists of the 60s, and this film seems to be part of it. I think part of this is due to the increasing leftism of the Obama era.]
I guess she demonstrates that it makes no sense to place leftist murderers in penitentiaries. They are warped beyond any capacity for penitence or redemption.
They must get a big laugh living off of the tax dollars of those they sought to kill.
Here is a list of just SDSers (Students for a Democratic Society — were ‘they’ being literal, figurative, or ironic?) who found there way into ‘academia’. To paraphrase Rev. Wright — goddamn academia.
This is the kind of post that re-confronts us with the kind of hard facts about the kind of existential warfare waged within social groups which induces a kind of cognitive dissonance in conservatives believing that we are all God’s children and that some have merely gone astray.
They, the Conservatives, blubber on uncomprehendingly, asking “How can this be?”, and “how can they do this?” ; trying to reconcile their notion of man as the possessor of a common moral nature and innate conscience, with the “bizarre” evidence of their jolted senses, which indicates that this may not in fact be so …
The conservatives’ own fears, or psychological needs, inhibit them from looking – even for the sake or argument – at the leftist through the deconstructive Darwinian and materialist lens which the leftist applies to all other men.
Conservatives are in some ways like children constantly having the chair pulled out from under them just as they are about to sit down. Never learning, always hoping. “They can’t really be that mean!”
DNW: that’s why people such as David Horowitz, who were once members of the hard and activist left, are so important. They have no illusions whatsoever.
The trouble is, they can sound like lunatics except to those who already understand.
neo-neocon Says:
April 2nd, 2013 at 2:54 pm
DNW: that’s why people such as David Horowitz, who were once members of the hard and activist left, are so important. They have no illusions whatsoever.
The trouble is, they can sound like lunatics except to those who already understand.”
And you, of course. So about that uncle of yours. What’s the upshot?
George Pal Says:
April 2nd, 2013 at 2:18 pm
Let’s not forget to give additional credit where credit is due. Messrs Carter and Clinton, and certain pardons they issued.
I guess shooting up the House was just one of those things.
DMW: I was never an activist or a leftist. So my learning curve was steeper.
But yes, the uncle gave me a hint of what leftist fanaticism sounded like. He was much older; died in his (and the twentieth century’s) 80s, about a year before the Soviet Union fell.
My mother used to say his timing was certainly good in that he never had to deal with that event. However, I am relatively certain that, had he been around for it, he would have rationalized it by taking the long view that the setback was only temporary.
And perhaps he would have been right about that.
neo-neocon Says:
April 2nd, 2013 at 3:14 pm
Ok. I don’t know how deeply you conversed with him. You said that you weren’t interested particularly in politics at the time. And, maybe, what you recollect were table-side diatribes rather than conversations.
But assuming that you had some interaction with him, some dialog, could you outline, on the basis of his own statements something of his own metaphysical views (I don’t mean this as a euphemism for “supernatural” but rather his view of the ultimate nature of reality)?
Do you have any sense of him having what they called back in school, a developed “philosophical anthropology”, i.e., definite views on the nature of man and his relation to reality in general?
You know, it might be that a certain amount of leftism, as well as liberalism, is emotion driven. Possibly conservatism too. But apart from my sheer inability to take any interest in or muster any respect for that kind of motivation, I’m pretty much convinced that there is a thought process, a decision principle, an opting for what is considered as believable [ in the Southern sense of “belief” as granting that “I can allow as how … X might well be the case]”, behind most ideological postures.
What, did your uncle think was “the case”?
DNW: I never engaged him in any deep discussions, and most of the time I heard him discuss politics it was arguments between adults at the dinner table. I was a witness, not a participant, for the most part.
He was born in pre-Soviet Russia and came here as a very young child. His father, I believe (whom I did not know; he died long before I was born) was a leftist, as far as I know. So it was in part a kind of allegiance to the father he lost when very young. He had heard stories of how bad it had been in Russia beforehand, I would imagine, and he himself traveled a lot and saw the “new” Russia from the standpoint of a tourist, and it seemed better. He blocked out and/or rationalized news to the contrary.
I don’t know whether he had a coherent philosophy, but he was most definitely not a religious man. It is my impression that leftism meant to him an idealistic way of ending prejudice, making people more equal, that sort of idealistic notion, and he was determined to avoid seeing that it didn’t really do all those things he wanted it to be doing, or that it represented a tyranny or a going against human nature. I think (and here I’m really just guessing, as I am at most of this) that he thought we could mold human nature as we wished.
That’s my reading on it, at any rate.
Ok. Thanks.
terrorists and despots are technically professional social engineers… what did you think the programs towards getting a degree for what you already know professionally were all about? heck, they send despots children here to be educated to take up jobs in the family business, so how do you expect a college to recruit professionals in the field to teach?
(many of these come from the list of columbia school alumni)
Whittaker Chambers–Admitted Soviet spy in the Ware Group, famously testified against Alger Hiss
Morris Cohen–Soviet spy, subject of Hugh Whitemore’s drama for stage and TV “Pack of Lies”; instrumental in relaying atomic bomb secrets to the Kremlin in the 1940s, eventually settling in Moscow where for decades he helped train Soviet agents against the West
Victor Perlo–Soviet spy involved in Harold Ware spy ring and Perlo group as shown in Venona list of suspected subversives
Bernard Redmont–(M.S. 1939) Soviet spy
William Remington–(M.A. 1940) convicted Soviet spy killed in prison
Harry Dexter White–Soviet spy helped establish World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; later revealed to have been involved with the Silvermaster and Ware groups of communist spies while he was a senior U.S. Treasury department official in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Columbia_University_alumni
and these…
Redhead Group
Paul Massing, scientist at Columbia University’s Institute of Social Research. Defected.
Rosenberg ring
William Perl, active in Young Communist League at CCNY, then met Al Sarant at Columbia University; served 5 years for perjury
Ware group
Enos Wicher, professor at Columbia University who also worked at Columbia’s Division of War Research; stepfather of Barnard College recruiter and State Department spy Flora Wovschin
[this was the Whittaker Chambers group]
Sorge ring
Flora Wovschin, NKVD operative in U.S. State Department, comrade of Marion Davis Berdecio and Judith Coplon from their days at Columbia University
and thats not all
Morris Cohen
He was born in New York. His father was from an area near Kiev in present-day Ukraine, and his mother was born in Vilnius in present-day Lithuania. Cohen received an athletic scholarship as an outstanding rugby union player to attend Columbia University.
Accused Russian spy Cynthia Murphy used her cover as a Columbia University MBA student to try to turn her capitalist classmates into comrades, federal officials say. The shocking charges against Murphy, 35 — who received her master’s of business administration from Columbia in May — are laid out in the federal criminal complaint unsealed after she and her husband Richard were busted earlier this week
Lidiya Guryev had attended school in the United States receiving two undergraduate degrees from New York University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
and if that wasnt enough…
As the growing influence of National Socialism became ever more threatening, its founders decided to prepare to move the Institute out of the country. Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Institute left Germany for Geneva, before moving to New York City in 1935, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. Its journal Zeitschrift fé¼r Sozialforschung was accordingly renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. It was at this moment that much of its important work began to emerge, having gained a favorable reception within American and English academia. Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock eventually resettled in West Germany in the early 1950s, although Marcuse, Lowenthal, Kirchheimer and others chose to remain in the United States.
AND
2012 Regional Marxism Conferences
New York City Regional Marxism Conference
Columbia University, Lerner Hall, 10:30 a.m.-9 p.m.
http://socialistworker.org/marxism-conferences-2012
and another thing that connects stuff is their harrimen center and their classes in russian in the summer…
maybe it has something to do with
Rockefeller Foundation
Columbia University – Establishment of the Russia Institute
current trustees:
John W. Rowe, 2007-, professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health; former Chairman and CEO of Aetna Inc.
lots of stuff happens there…
oh… speaking of that.
if neo got this far, then she might appreciate this..
given so many in ballet are from those countries
Notebooks of a Future Soviet Ballerina, 1930-31
Some of the best one-line counters to the 1960s far left radicals can be found in Prairie Fire, the 1974 work which includes Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn among its co-authors. Use what they say against them.
The book advocates Dictatorship of the Proletariat. You know, just like the USSR and the Peoples Republic of China had. Think of the tens of millions of corpses produced by those regimes. Of course, Prairie Fire doesn’t mention anything about those deaths.
Prairie Fire is dedicated to a whole slew of “political prisoners.” including Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kenndy. Dedicating a book to the assassin of Robert Kennedy? How does that grab you?
This is not what deranged right wingers say about the 1960s far left radicals. This is what the far left radicals say.
Consider some defenses that will be made in response to finding out about such derangement.
1) Those were the errors of youth. Billy Boy and Bernie were in their thirties when the book was published.
2) This radicalism was in response to the Vietnam War. By 1974, the Paris Peace Treaty had been signed and the US was on its way out of Vietnam.
As Neo points out, these clowns have little regret. Bill Ayers has gone to Venezuela in support of Hugo Chavez’s thugocracy. Chesa Boudin, whom Ayers and Dohrn had raised from infancy when this parents were in prison, worked in Miraflores, the Venezuelan presidential palace. Being one of terrorist royalty has its advantages. That’s Che as in Che Guevara, SA as in South America.
RE: the increasing Leftism (is that a word) of the Obama era; you are aware, are you not, that the Left hates Obama, and Obama takes every opportunity to, as they say, “punch hippies”. This is the kind of thing that makes center-lefties like me love the guy.
“This is the kind of thing that makes center-lefties like me love the guy.”
Boy are you easy. Almost as easy as David Brooks. This is why the word “facepalm” was invented.
Academia is thick with radicals. It is the air that is breathed, the “way things just are.” It is hard to imagine them being any other way, since there are so many radicals – and not just famous or infamous ones such as Boudin, but small time radicals or carriers of the torch for “social justice”, which is really far left politics. It does gall me that people like Boudin are honored by being a part of our most storied institutions. I am certain her far left ideas are being promulgated to students as gospel. Angela Davis is another one, and so many people I know worship her. These people have been involved in murders — and the lives they helped to end are not honored or seen as valuable, or to be mourned. She was a pilgrim to the Soviet Union, according to her bio… and I would imagine she has no regrets.
“I doubt she recommends her own solution; Columbia certainly can’t employ all of them.”
No doubt, she advocates that WE hire them.