Education

Ass Clown College of the Week: Minnesota State University Moorhead

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Minnesota State University Moorhead is The Daily Caller’s Ass Clown College of the Week because it has threatened to can a bunch of professors and eliminate entire academic departments in order to cope with a $5 million budget deficit.

The administrative division is, of course, not on the chopping block.

Also, despite its severe budget shortfall, the regional public university managed to find enough money less than a year ago to pay a stipend to “visiting scholar” Bill Ayers.

Among much else, history, physics, English and computer science are currently up for purging at MSUM. In contrast, the administrative division and the all-important rock-climbing wall will remain safe. (RELATED: Cash-strapped colleges gut academics instead of sports, admin or rock-climbing walls)

The president of MSUM, Edna Mora Szymanski, is the sixth-highest compensated public employee in the state of Minnesota’s higher education system. She makes $232,000 per year.

Back in February, school officials at MSUM selected Ayers as the 2013 College of Education and Human Services “visiting scholar.” The school treated the left-wing radical to a three-day vacation while he opined piously on campus on the theme of social justice. (RELATED: Bill Ayers is now a feted ‘visiting scholar’ at Minnesota State University Moorhead)

Ayers, the son of a former CEO of Commonwealth Edison, was a co-founder of the Weather Underground, a communist revolutionary group.

The taxpayer-funded school refused to disclose the amount of the stipend paid to Ayers.

Steve Grineski, a professor in MSUM’s School of Teaching and Learning, said that Ayers’s radical past didn’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 his pet social justice theories with the American education system.

Ayers was involved in Chicago’s “Days of Rage” riot in 1969. Later, he fled prosecution after an accidental Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970 killed three Weather Underground members who were preparing a bomb that prematurely detonated.

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. The ex-revolutionary and his wife, ex-revolutionary Bernadine Dohrn, still live in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where Obama formerly resided.

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