The Rise of Kathy Boudin

There are many paths to becoming a Columbia University professor, but Kathy Boudin’s is probably unique. In 1970, she fled naked or nearly naked from an explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse, which she and her Weather Underground friends were using as a bomb factory. Later she was convicted as the get-away driver in a Brinks holdup that killed three. She served 22 years in prison. Now she has been hired as an adjunct professor at Columbia’s school of social work, possibly because Timothy McVeigh was unavailable.

Here is Walter Olson writing on the strange public acceptance of two other bomb-minded Sixties people, Bernardine Dohrn, professor of law at Northwestern, and Bill Ayers, professor emeritus, University of Illinois-Chicago.

Author

  • John Leo

    John Leo is the editor of Minding the Campus, dedicated to chronicling imbalances within higher education and restoring intellectual pluralism to our American universities. His popular column, "On Society," ran in U.S.News & World Report for 17 years.

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