Obama's Academia Nuts

Investor's Business Daily
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 28 April 2008

Education: How exactly do former terrorists get to teach at America's universities? Unfortunately, Obama's friends William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are just a few of the inmates running those asylums. Obama associates William Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, are more than former members of the Weather Underground, terrorists who engaged in bombings of American government buildings during the Vietnam War.

They are academics.

Ayers and the Weather Underground bombed New York City police headquarters in June 1970, the U.S. Capitol Building in March 1971 and the Pentagon in May 1972. His memoirs appeared in the New York Times, oddly enough, on Sept. 11, 2001. In them, he wrote: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

Today Ayers, the man who found "a certain eloquence in bombs," is a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, a "respected figure in liberal education circles" according to Politico.com. His wife is an associate professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law the director of Northwestern University's Children and Family Justice Center. Go figure. The irony of terrorists teaching law and justice and educating our children is mind-boggling, but it does not surprise us since academia had been a hotbed of liberal activism since even before the Vietnam War. The search for truth is obviously no longer a qualification for tenure.

In 2005, Robert Lichter, a communications professor at George Mason University, and fellow political science professors Stanley Rothman of Smith College and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto authored a study that showed that 72 percent of those teaching at American colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative. The disparity is even higher at the so-called elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of the faculty are liberal vs. 13 percent who are conservative.

Religion, which Harvard Law School graduate Obama says small-town America clings to, is not a high priority for many faculty members, with 51 percent saying they rarely or never attend church or synagogue. American academia is clearly dominated by liberal secularists. The most famous nutty professor of recent years was Ward Churchill, who came to public attention for a piece he wrote shortly after 9/11 that said those killed in the World Trade Center were a "technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire," calling them "little Eichmanns."

Churchill, then chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado, titled his essay, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," a tome as off the wall as its title suggests. It echoed the theme embraced by many on the loony left that America invited the 9-11 attacks through a long history of violent domination of other cultures.

In other words, we had it coming. If that sounds familiar, it's what Barack Obama's pastor of two decades, Jeremiah Wright, once shouted from the pulpit. Churchill is only the most prominent campus clown indoctrinating future generations in colleges and universities, including state-funded ones, that are essentially little more than liberal re-education camps.

In March 2003, assistant professor Nicholas DeGenova provoked national outrage when he called on U.S. soldiers in Iraq to "frag" (or murder) their officers and said he wished "for a million Mogadishus," referring to the 1993 ambush in Somalia that left 18 American troops dead and 84 wounded. DeGenova told students at an anti-war teach-in on the Columbia campus that "U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy," and that "the only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military." Barack Obama graduated in 1983 from Columbia University, whence his hard-core fondness for anti-U.S. thugs and opposition to liberating Iraq may have been derived.

He and wife Michelle are both Ivy League graduates. These days it's poisoned ivy.

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