Higher Ed Rejects Bully Coaches, Embraces Terrorists

Rutgers University in New Jersey is cleansing itself of an intolerable stain. After being presented with a video of the head basketball coach physically and verbally abusing his players last fall, the school’s athletic director fined and suspended the coach, then placed him on probation.

That wasn’t nearly enough. The coach’s behavior made him an unfit public representative of higher education. Once ESPN got its hands on the video, the network made punishing the school a crusade.  This precipitated a cascade of events that led to the coach’s firing, the resignation of his top assistant, the dismissal of the athletic director and the forced resignation of the school’s general counsel. It’s not certain that the Rutgers University president will keep his job.

If instead of punching, kicking, shoving and demeaning his players, had the coach simply murdered someone, he would have been better off. If recent events are any guide, he probably would find himself at a professional advantage had he greased a couple of cops.

Just a few miles north of the Rutgers University campus, the Columbia University School of Social Work saw fit to hire triple murderer Kathy Boudin as a an adjunct professor. She was also honored as the Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at New York University’s Law School.

Boudin’s credentials for these prestigious posts include 22 years in prison for a botched $1.6 million dollar armored car heist that left two policemen and a Brinks guard dead.

At the time, Kathy Boudin was a member of that era’s most notorious gang of domestic terrorists, the Weather Underground, otherwise known as the Weathermen. During that robbery she was helping out another gang of terrorists, the Black Liberation Army.

If the name Weather Underground sounds familiar, it should. Two of our president’s closest friends were also members of the Weather Underground, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, both of whom also became college professors.

William Ayers’ rap sheet includes bombing the New York City Police Department Headquarters in 1970. He bombed the US Capital building the next year. And the year after that, he reached the pinnacle of his terrorist career when he detonated a bomb at the Pentagon.

Ayers escaped prison when the FBI’s case against him was thrown out over a technicality.

After his bombing days were behind him, he went back to college. At Columbia University (naturally), he was awarded a Master’s and a Doctoral degree in elementary education.

His wife and fellow former terrorist is currently an Associate Professor at the Northwestern University School of Law.

The two raised Kathy Boudin’s child while she served her prison sentence.

What better choices for molding young minds than terrorists?

Before her triple murder, Boudin and her fellow Weathermen Cathy Wilkerson, Ted Gold, Terry Robbins and Ayers’ girlfriend at the time, Diana Oughton, were building a nail bomb that exploded prematurely in their Greenwich Village apartment. Gold, Robbins and Oughton were killed in the blast. Wilkerson and Boudin escaped.

The bomb was big enough to inflict hundreds of casualties.

When the police cast their dragnet looking for the perpetrators of the Brinks armored car robbery, they caught two other Weathermen, Jeffrey Jones and Eleanor Raskin. The two had been fugitives since police found bomb making materials in their New Jersey apartment two years earlier.

Was it just coincidence that these two just happened to be in the neighborhood when the Brinks robbery went down? I’m not a big believer in such coincidences. In any event, the police did not have enough evidence to charge the two with complicity.

Nevertheless, even without a murder conviction to her credit, Raskin’s Weather  Underground affiliation helped her earn a spot on the Albany Law School faculty.

The mythology that has grown up around the Weathermen holds that they were idealist, if overly enthusiastic, anti-war activists whose hearts were basically good. This ignores the fact that the FBI managed to insinuate a mole into the Weathermen’s inner circle and learned that their post-revolution goals included installing a communist dictatorship and murdering 25 million Americans.

That’s how many unrecoverable capitalists they estimated would require elimination to solidify their communist control. And if you find the thought of 25 million murders inconceivable, remember that 20th century communist dictators murdered more than 100 million of their own citizens. They’d barely earn their bones with 25 million.

What does it say about us when we hold basketball coaches to higher moral standards than our law and education professors?