Free Republic

CARBONDALE, Ill. - Questions of academic freedom are simmering at Southern Illinois University after history professors criticized a colleague over his use of an article about black-on-white killings in San Francisco in the 1970s. History professor Jonathan Bean, a self-proclaimed "libertarian conservative," claims he is the victim of public attacks by a history department filled with professors who hold political views opposite his. His colleagues say they fault him for distributing to students what they call a "distorted and inaccurate" historical account of the so-called "Zebra" killings, a series of random street slayings of whites that terrorized San Francisco in...

On April 11, Jonathan Bean, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC), received the college’s “Outstanding Teacher Award.” But just two days later, Bean became the scourge of the campus, abandoned by teaching assistants and vilified as a purveyor of “racist propaganda.” Behind Bean’s sudden fall from admired academic to campus Enemy Number One was a cabal of eight radical academics in the SIUC history department. Bean's offense was to have assigned as optional reading for his history class a 2001 Frontpagemag report titled “Remembering the Zebra Killings” by James Lubinskas. The class topic was “Civil...