School officials at Minnesota State University Moorhead have selected left-wing radical and admitted terrorist Bill Ayers as the 2013 College of Education and Human Services “visiting scholar,” according to Campus Reform.
In an announcement last month, MSUM proclaimed that Ayers’s campus-wide address would be called “Teaching from the Heart: Education for Enlightenment and Freedom.”
Ayers reportedly spent three days on the school’s campus. Social justice was the big theme of his visit.
Steve Grineski, a professor in MSUM’s School of Teaching and Learning, said that Ayers’ radical past doesn’t bother the school’s administration.
“I guess if they had been really concerned, they would have canceled his presentation and not allowed us to do it,” Grineski told Campus Reform.
Grineski added that he and his colleagues chose to celebrate and honor Ayers because of his long history of trying to commingle own social justice principles with the American education system.
While Ayers received a stipend for his appearance at MSUM, the taxpayer-funded school refused to disclose how much it was.
Ayers, the son of a former CEO of Commonwealth Edison, was a co-founder of the Weather Underground, a communist revolutionary group.
He was involved in Chicago’s “Days of Rage” riot in 1969 and fled prosecution after an accidental Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970 killed three Weather Underground members who were preparing a bomb that prematurely detonated.
In a 2001 book, he admitted that he participated in bombings of the New York City Police Department headquarters, the U.S. Capitol Building and the Pentagon in the early 1970s. (RELATED: Inside TheDC’s dinner with former Weather Underground terrorists)
After his days as a federal fugitive ended (because charges were dropped due to illegal FBI snooping), Ayers earned a Ph.D. He eventually became a faculty member in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Ayers also achieved notoriety as a “family friend” to a youngish politician named Barack Obama. Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn still live in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where Obama formerly resided.
In 2010, the year he retired, Ayers was famously and unanimously denied emeritus status after a passionate speech by the University of Illinois system’s board chair Christopher G. Kennedy, who is the son of assassinated U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy.
Christopher Kennedy urged the board to vote against Ayers because Ayers had dedicated his 1974 book “Prairie Fire” to a list of people including his father’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan.
