Posted on 12/02/2004 3:47:38 AM PST by kattracks
Convicted leftist terrorist Susan Rosenberg must be counted among the unlikeliest candidates ever to be awarded a university teaching post. Just four years ago, Rosenberg was serving out the 16th year of a 58-year sentence for the possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives and a stockpile of illicit weapons. Moreover, the onetime member of a leftist terrorist outfit called “The Family” was also a suspect in a 1981 robbery-gone-awry that left three people dead in Nyack, New York.However, next January students at Hamilton College, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York, will know Susan Rosenberg, not as a terrorist, but as a professor. Rosenberg, whose sentence was commuted by Bill Clinton on his last day in office, will be teaching a one-month writing course at Hamilton entitled, “Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity, and Change.” The half-credit class draws on Rosenberg’s time in prison. According to the directors of the Kirkland Project, the campus left-wing “social justice” organization that contrived to bring Rosenberg to Hamilton, the aim of the class is to get students to examine “how the memoirist uses the writing to survive particular circumstances and to change.”
Given her continued belief in revolutionary violence, one could ask if Rosenberg has changed at all. A former student activist in the 1970s, Rosenberg’s radical ties include involvement with several terrorist groups, including the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. It is through her affiliation with a Weather Underground affiliate group known as the “Family” that Rosenberg became a suspect in the October 1981 robbery of a Brink’s armored car carrying $1.6 million in which two policemen and an armed guard were murdered. Though Rosenberg has steadfastly denied any part in the robbery, she was indicted both for plotting the robbery and driving the getaway car. Contrary to the claims of many of Rosenberg’s devotees, prosecutors never retreated from those charges; they only dropped these charges in 1984 after Rosenberg had been sentenced to 58 years in federal prison for the possession of dynamite and a weapons cache. Rosenberg could not be reached for an interview.
Sanitizing Terrorism
What rankles more than a few Hamilton professors is that one would know none of the darker details of Rosenberg’s past by taking Kirkland Project’s directors at their word. In one announcement, notable more for what it did not say, the Kirkland Project touted Rosenberg as “a writer and teacher, but also an activist and AIDS educator. She was incarcerated for years as a result of her political activities with the Black Liberation Army and was released through a grant of executive clemency by President Clinton in January 2001.” While in prison, Rosenberg had indeed worked with AIDS sufferers. But the Kirkland Project was silent on the far more objectionable aspects of Rosenberg’s biography. The Kirkland Project further hailed her as “an award-winning writer, an activist, and a teacher who offers a unique perspective as a writer.” It gave not a hint of Rosenberg’s extensive terrorist rap sheet, her confessed commitment to violent revolutionary struggle, and her less-than-distinguished academic background.
This glaring omission has several Hamilton professors furious. Steve Goldberg, a professor of art history at Hamilton, takes heated issue with what he calls the Kirkland Project’s “laundering” of Rosenberg’s biography. “This is not truth in advertising,” says Goldberg. “She’s being presented as someone who was wrongly imprisoned, and who was a victim, rather than the perpetrator of terrorism. And I find that to be absolutely reprehensible.” History professor Robert Paquette agrees. “In the case of Susan Rosenberg, the Kirkland Project presented a remarkably sanitized version of a convicted terrorist.”
Apologist for “Armed Violence”
It is Susan Rosenberg’s choices, once the subject of newspaper headlines, which lie at the heart of the professors’ objection to this hiring: Far from a model of rehabilitation, many at Hamilton warn, Rosenberg is an unreconstructed extremist who has never disowned her radical faith or her belief in violent extremism.
Upon her arrest in 1984, for instance, a New York Times report quoted an unrepentant Rosenberg, who exclaimed, “We’re caught, but we’re not defeated. Long live the armed struggle!” Rosenberg’s revolutionary fervor had not appreciably mellowed by 1989, when she told an interviewer, “I don’t want you to come away thinking that I’m repudiating revolutionary struggle for the United States because I'm not. I think all kinds of resistance are necessary.”
“I think that the most extreme and difficult forms of violence stem from the system under which we live and I think it’s the system that’s responsible for a multitude of these faces of violence,” Rosenberg has maintained.
Rosenberg’s pardon by President Clinton in December of 2000 occasioned an outpouring of public condemnation. Critics, who included family members of the slain officers, stressed that not only had Rosenberg not fully paid her debt to society, but her long record of extremist cheerleading raised serious questions about whether she was ready to rejoin it.
Paquette has studied the “memoir” writing Rosenberg will be discussing in class. “Yes, she has renounced the use of ‘individual’ violence. Of course, now that she’s in her fifties, she might have some physical difficulty running around with an Uzi submachine gun.” However, Paquette notes, “I have read a good deal of her own writings, and she has openly proclaimed herself to be a communist revolutionary committed – please note – to collective violence.” That has Paquette wondering, “Does the new Susan Rosenberg merely represent a tactical shift in her radical thinking?”
It’s a question the Kirkland Project’s director, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, resolutely refuses to answer. Rabinowitz, a feminist author and professor of comparative literature at Hamilton and a longtime champion of Rosenberg, is principally responsible for bringing her to Hamilton. Although Rabinowitz refused several requests for an interview, she has in the past praised Rosenberg as “an exemplar of rehabilitation.” As she told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Her story is about how you can make something productive out of something that was really awful.”
Ranbinowitz’s romanticized version of Rosenberg’s resumé persuades few at Hamilton. Although few are willing to challenge Rabinowitz publicly (“I’ve never seen a faculty so spineless,” quips professor Steven Goldberg), many note that Rosenberg continues to maintain her innocence, casting herself as the victim of an unjust American system, which she views as the real source of violence. Rabinowitz has no trouble giving this woman an academic forum in which to spread her views.
Neither does Stephen Orvis, an associate professor of government at Hamilton and one of Rosenberg’s few campus defenders who consented to be interviewed. Acknowledging that he is not familiar with all the details of Rosenberg’s radical past, Orvis nevertheless contends that the issue is freedom of speech. “I see no reason why she should be denied [the teaching position] because of violent acts she may or may not have committed,” says Orvis. “There are some who believe in violence, and I have no problem with the airing of those views.” (Emphasis added.) He states, “The college should be open to all points of view.” Orvis, who describes himself as a “radical civil libertarian,” reasons that denying Rosenberg a post at Hamilton College because of her violent past “is like saying you shouldn’t vote for [George W.] Bush because he had a drinking problem.”
More surprising, perhaps, is that the leadership of Hamilton College seems to share Orvis’s assessment. Reached for comment, Hamilton communications director Mike Debraggio offered a prepared statement. The statement acknowledged that college administrators had embraced without question Kirkland Project’s whitewashed account of Rosenberg’s biography, allowing that “the College may need to vet non-standard appointments more carefully in the future.” But it also carried the following caveat: “It is not, however, certain that further vetting of the appointment in question would have yielded a different outcome.”
Ian Mandel, a sophomore at Hamilton, has personal reasons to oppose Rosenberg’s appointment. Although he was born several years after the Nyack robbery in which Rosenberg was indicted, Mandel, a Nyack native, grew up with the names Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady etched into his mind. They were the two Nyack police officers killed in the 1981 robbery. “Everyday of my life until I left for Hamilton, I drove by the memorial to officers Brown and O’Grady located about one mile from my house,” he remembers. Mandel explains that Nyack’s tight-knit community was profoundly shaped by the murders of the two officers. “To this day it is a tough subject for many to speak about,” he confides.
It is a measure of the anger and disgust he feels about Rosenberg’s hiring that Mandel, a member of the Hamilton College Democrats, agrees to speak about it. Like many Nyack residents, Mandel has thoroughly researched the robbery. He has concluded that Rosenberg was indeed involved. “To me, and I’d assume to most members of the Nyack community and of the larger law-enforcement community, that makes Susan Rosenberg a cop-killer,” he says. Haunted by Rosenberg’s grim legacy at Nyack, Mandel is determined not to let it follow him to Hamilton. “I think that bringing Susan Rosenberg to teach a class at Hamilton is a disgrace and a black-eye to the college,” he says.
Nor does everyone in the faculty applaud Rosenberg’s swift trajectory from lockdown to lectern. Hamilton has a broadly left-leaning campus, but the notion that campus diversity ought to extend to convicted terrorists has provoked fierce opposition. Dispensing with political differences, professors and students on both sides of the political aisle have allied in a fight to deny Rosenberg a place on the faculty, hold the college’s hiring practices to account, and reclaim the respectability of their institution.
Several Hamilton professors charge that Rosenberg – who earned a Masters degree in writing via correspondence from Ohio’s far-left Antioch College, and whose teaching experience is limited to a stint as adjunct professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice – owes her slated post not to any eminent academic qualifications, but to her credentials as a leftist extremist. In bringing Rosenberg to Hamilton, they charge, the college imperils its expressed commitment to academic standards and tramples the line between scholarship and activism. “By approving of the appointment, both faculty committees and the administration have abdicated their proper responsibility to act as guardians of the educational mission of the institution,” says Robert Paquette.
“I disagree with the administration’s presenting this as a matter of free speech, which it is not,” says James Bradfield, a professor of economics at Hamilton. “It is a matter of standards.” As Bradfield sees it, Rosenberg’s backers have “inappropriately conflated” academic freedom with freedom of speech. “Freedom to speak at the college, and freedom to offer a course for academic credit while enjoying the status accorded a member of the faculty, are separate issues. I would not object if some of my colleagues invited Susan Rosenberg to speak gratis,” Bradfield says. “But I think that we can make better use of scarce resources than to pay someone like Susan Rosenberg to visit us.” Moreover, says Bradfield, “Even if Susan Rosenberg possessed the intellect or had achieved the scholarly or artistic preeminence of people such as Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman, Lionel Trilling, or Leonard Bernstein, I would argue that her character, as manifestly demonstrated by the choices that she made as an adult over a sustained period of years, would preclude her appointment to the faculty of Hamilton College.”
Nonetheless, Hamilton College has concluded that a curriculum vitae as a convicted felon with a history of dalliances with terrorism and a long record of support for militant tactics is not grounds for Susan Rosenberg’s disqualification from a teaching post. “If the administration cannot see the contradiction between this hire and the clearly stated mission of the college to foster scholarship and ‘academic excellence,’ then God help us all,” says Robert Paquette. “Perhaps if Hitler were alive, he could get a job here, too, so that he could offer us his ‘unique perspective’ on German history as ‘a writer and an activist.’” That the college should toe the left-wing line on Rosenberg comes as no surprise to Professor Steve Goldberg. “If this were a terrorist on the Right, a Terry Nichols or someone of his ilk, they would of course never allow it. If it’s a terrorist on the Left, then it’s excusable,” says Goldberg. “Then everything is excusable.”
Everything, including turning college-aged students over to the influence of a professed believer in revolutionary violence who likely cost two police officers their lives – and paying her to teach her radical faith.
This person should not be influencing young minds at an American college. There is a place for lots of different opinions on a campus, but American children should be taught to use the resources of a democracy to advocate for their diverse views, violence.
This is turning our colleges into the kind of institutions mosques have become.
correct to read "not violence."
Coffee hasn't kicked in.
I understand the same college has hired Susan Atkins to give a symposium on the "Atkins Diet."
The Clinton legacy?
It's all around us. Can't you smell that smell?
More Clinton pardon "legacy"
Bill Ayers was a central figure in the Weather Underground. He lived underground for 10 years, which he writes about in his memoir Fugitive Days. Ayers is currently a school reform activist and a professor of education at the University of Chicago at Illinois.
Kathleen Cleaver is best known as the former communications secretary of the Black Panther Party. She is a writer and senior lecturer at Emory University Law School.
Bernardine Dohrn was part of the leadership of the Weather Underground and considered the figurehead of the organisation. She spent the 1970s living underground and was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. Today, Dohrn runs a juvenile justice program at Northwestern University.
Brian Flanagan was a member of the Weather Underground. He is currently a bar-owner in New York City.
David Gilbert was a member of the Weather Underground. When the organisation was dismantled, he joined the Black Liberation Army and plunged deeper into revolutionary violence. Gilbert is currently serving a life sentence at Attica Correctional Facility for his role in a hold-up gone awry.
Todd Gitlin was president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963. He has written extensively on the Weather Underground and the 1960s counterculture. He is a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University.
Naomi Jaffe was a member of the Weather Underground. She currently lives in Albany, New York and is executive director of a foundation that supports women's activism.
Mark Rudd was famous for his role in the 1968 Columbia protests. As part of the Weather Underground's leadership, he lived underground for several years during the 1970s. He now teaches at a junior college in New Mexico.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/weather-interviewees.shtml
Oh Good Grief ... What in the hell are these people thinking hiring her?
They are being elite and stylish. In their own minds that is
So only one of them is still in jail today.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Most of them were children of privilege - Susan Rosenberg was the daughter of a dentist and grew up on the Upper West Side - and many of them were from families with leftist connections from the 1930's or a track record of leftist activity. Once they got over their youthful burst of homicidal activity, they were welcomed back into the upper middle class leftist, academic environments from which many of them came.
You can't pardon traitors and seditonists when they've been executed. Hopefully we'll remember that in the future. This also makes it difficult for them to influence the minds of our children.
To all the pointy-headed liberals at Hamilton,
Getting one's sentence commuted does not mean that the actions that brought the person to jail did not take place. (Indeed, this commutation was only granted because the White House was occupied by a (hopefully) once- in-a-century scoundrel). Consequently, Hamilton is giving faculty status to a person who has aided and abetted murderers, arsonists and other assorted felons knowingly and without a scrap of remorse. It's no wonder that Orwell said that there are some ideas so stupid that only the intelligentsia would believe them.
Brian Flanagan has a REAL job? Where did he go wrong?
Radical Chic bump
Good news on this topic:
Terrorist capitulates, faculty sponsors regret
Leftwing terrorist and accomplice to murder Susan Rosenberg has announced that she will not be lecturing at Hamilton University this spring. This is a result of the outcry from members of the Hamilton community -- both liberals and conservatives -- at the invitation extended to this relic of the Sixties by red diaper babies on the Hamilton faculty. ...
http://frontpagemag.com/blog/index.asp
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