Posted on 12/02/2014 9:32:36 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
The semi-prestigious University of Illinois system is rapidly becoming famous for its bizarro penchant for hiring terrorists as professors.
Last month, the statewide board of trustees cleared the way for the flagship campus in Urbana-Champaign to rehire 1970s-era Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist James Kilgore, a convicted murderer who participated in a 1975 bank robbery during which bank customer Myrna Opsahl was shot and killed.
The 42-year-old mother of four bled to death on the bank floor.
Now, Chicago businessman Richard Hill has notified officials at the University of Illinois at Chicago that he will rescind a pledge to donate $6.5 million to the UIC bioengineering department, the Chicago Tribune reports.
Hill, the retired CEO of Novellus Systems, has already given $2 million. However, he has vowed to withhold every last dime of the remaining $4.5 million if school officials allow Kilgore to teach courses in Urbana-Champaign.
“I no longer wish to be associated with University of Illinois,” the retired CEO wrote in a letter to school officials. “The Academy at the University of Illinois has clearly lost its moral compass.”
“I will not contribute neither time nor money to such a morally debased enterprise,” he also said, according to the Tribune. “If they stand up and police their own organization to assure they are of the highest standards, I will stand with them till my dying days.”
Kilgore, 66, and his Symbionese Liberation Army comrades robbed the bank — and another one — to finance guerrilla warfare in support of a communist revolution. They also famously kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.
The terrorist spent six years in prison for his role in the robbery
and the murder of Opsahl — but only after a nearly three-decade life on the lam spent largely in South Africa under the alias John Pape.
After serving his time, Kilgore moved in with his wife, Teresa Barnes, who had found a job as a history professor at the University of Illinois. He quickly found things to be mad about in the local community, including his vigorous protest of a proposed $20 million jail.
After the local press printed an expose about Kilgore’s radical, murderous youth, University of Illinois officials initially defended him, calling him “rehabilitated” and “a good example.”
The backlash proved too much, however. Kilgore, a mere adjunct, was not given any courses to teach this academic year.
Later, though, a group called “Friends of James Kilgore” convinced school officials and the trustees to reconsider the use of taxpayer money and student tuition to pay the violent felon. (RELATED: University Of Illinois Mulls Re-Hiring Terrorist Convicted Of Murder)
Kilgore has said he now rejects the “politics of small-group violence” — which presumably means he has no further plans to murder innocent mothers in the service of totalitarian politics.
“I love teaching and the whole educational process,” he has told Insider Higher Ed.
In a 19-page report, a University of Illinois committee praised Kilgore highly.
The hiring — and potential rehiring — of Kilgore marks the second time that the three-school University of Illinois system has employed a radical terrorist.
The University of Illinois at Chicago was the well-known professional home of unrepentant, spectacularly incompetent Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers from 1987 until his retirement in 2010.
Ayers was spotted last month luxuriating at the glitzy Hilton Tucson El Conquistador Golf & Tennis Resort as he attended — and spoke at — a four-day conference of radical, far-left academics. (PHOTOS: Terrorist Mars Confab Of Radical Professors At Swanky Resort)
The self-proclaimed Communist revolutionary — and wealthy son of a former CEO of Commonwealth Edison — was a Weather Underground member in 1970 when three of his bungling colleagues died in a Greenwich Village townhouse explosion trying to make a nail bomb. Investigators believed the bomb was going to be used at a dance for noncommissioned officers and their dates on an army base in Fort Dix, N.J.
This summer, the University of Illinois’s board of trustees also voted 8-1 to revoke a job offer previously extended to world-class Israel hater Steven Salaita after he was an obnoxious, obscenity-hurling, black-belt jerk on Twitter. (RELATED: College Refuses Reinstatement Of Anti-Israel Prof)
Thank you, Mr. Hill, for speaking up at this outrage and using your money to back your words.
Audit in 3,2,1.....?
I’m glad he is doing what he says. I wish more of these business leader types would say no to the bizzarro antics of academia and government.
Hiring or re-hiring of a terrorist for a university is madness. I sometimes wonder if liberalism is a mental illness.
It is great he took a stand, and I salute him. But people need to either admit that communism controls education or admit they are ignorant of history. Until people stop funding these places entirely, the left has an open ticket to indoctrinate. And it should not take such an in your face affront as hiring open criminals/terrorists like this POS or Ayres to move people to action.The crap they turn out daily is more than justification.
Hmmm, should they stick to their Marxist, US-hating agenda or take the money? But if I were the donor, I would put a condition of the donation that prohibits the future hire of such scum under threat of repayment of the funds.
Just withdraw the money, period.
Only terminally ignorant parents send their children to such a morally polluted institution. They will have to give an account to God for contributing to the loss of their souls.
SLA were close comrades of Obama’s Weather Underground pals. Also the Black Panthers and the murderous Black Liberation Army. That’s “Black Liberation”, as in Obama’s and Wright’s Black Liberation Theology.
Wealthy men could co-elesce and build the pipeline, or erect a modern steel mill or any number of "or's"
God bless you, Mr Hill
Rest your weary brain. Liberalism is a mental illness and it would seem no cure.
But then the university would hire the scumbag anyway and he would go about polluting the minds of the students there. No, it is better to donate the money but keep strings on it.
Indeed. If only Bill Gates, and/or some of the others, would use their millions to finance good.
I know during MY 60's daze, we were SO frikkin' idealistic.
Bill Gates has spent millions trying to get anti-Second Amendment laws passed. Bill Gates works with Bloomberg. They just got the Washington state ant-gun measure passed.
Yup too bad he doesn’t use his money for good things.
I can envision a person who had been a terrorist, repented, turned their life around and now is an excellent role model for young people
But that would involve active rejection of their former ideology, not just self-serving claims that they reject violent tactics.
I think of the apostle Paul, who had been the terrorist Saul. Or the slaver John Newton, who repented and wrote the hymn Amazing Grace. And many, many others.
As far as I know there is no indication that Kilgore has expressed remorse for depriving the innocent mother of who knows how many years of her life.
Quite right.
I don’t care for the Old Soviets or the ChiComs but at least the two had one thing right. This guy should not be breathing.
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