Of course: Former Weather Underground radical convicted of felony murder now an adjunct professor at Columbia

I have little sympathy for Ward Churchill but it does feel strange that his sins are grounds for banishment from academia when Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and now Kathy Boudin graduated from the Weathermen — and, in Boudin’s case, prison — to jobs in the ivory tower. Is Churchill’s real problem that he wasn’t militant enough? He talked a good game about how the U.S. had 9/11 coming but he never tried to blow anyone up to make the point. The same could be said of virtually any two-bit campus radical. Why hire him when you could hire someone made famous by their links to a group known for its willingness to kill for the cause?

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Remember all of this the next time Chris Matthews or whoever airs a special tut-tutting Republicans for welcoming tea-party “radicals” into the fold.

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’s status of perp-turned-prof outraged the widow of one of her victims, Brinks guard and dad of three Peter Paige, who was gunned down by her accomplices from the Black Liberation Army on Oct. 20, 1981, in Rockland County.

Boudin acted as a getaway driver in the heist.

“She doesn’t deserve a job at all,” said Josephine Paige, 74, when told of Boudin’s posts. “She doesn’t deserve anything, nothing at all. I think she should be back in an institution.”…

Of the hundreds of students Boudin has taught, Yoshioka said, just three have expressed qualms about her criminal background, and only one “switched out” of a class because of those concerns.

I was just reading the part of Ayers’s Wikipedia bio that describes how he became a radical. Quote: “To stand still was to choose indifference. Indifference was the opposite of moral.” That’s a nice counterpoint to Columbia students shrugging off Boudin’s history. Incidentally, there’s another reason why the Weathermen honor roll may have gotten a little more leeway from liberal intellectuals than, say, Ward Churchill has: To varying degrees, they’re all children of privilege. Ayers’s father went on to become the head of one of Illinois’s biggest utilities; his friendship with the head of a major Chicago law firm later helped Dohrn land a job during her post-Weathermen phase. Boudin grew up in Manhattan, went to Bryn Mawr, and then wrangled a lighter sentence for herself then her accomplices in the Brinks job got thanks to help from one of her father’s law partners. These connections were their conduit back into polite liberal society (polite enough for Ayers to make the acquaintance of a future president) and made them “respectable” enough to employ at places like Columbia. Class warriors that they are, I wonder how much they enjoy the irony.

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Here’s the boss emeritus weighing in on Fox News this afternoon. Click the image to watch.

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