Billy Ayers Drops Out

One sign of the decay in academia is the deep funk college administrators go through when left-wing professors retire. “For leaders at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the planned retirement from teaching of former Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers will be a great loss,” Duaa Eldeib reported in The Chicago Tribune on August 5, 2010. “Never mind that, in hopes of quelling a political storm two years ago, UIC was compelled to release more than 1,000 files detailing the activities of an education reform group that brought together Ayers and then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.”

“Or that the university was inundated with questions in 2001 after the release of Ayers’ memoir, Fugitive Days, where he wrote about helping with bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and other government sites.”

“He’s been really a very good colleague here,” UIC education Dean Vicki Chou  said. “He has hundreds of students who really cherish that they’ve had the experience of being taught by him.” You can find out what some of them thought about this experience by checking out Ayers’ ratemyprofessors ratings. “Your typical far left nut!” one of the ratings not under review reads. “Hey Bill, if you like communism so much why don’t you go live in China?”

“He’s maybe our best-known faculty member in the world,” Chou said. “(But) over the years, you just roll with it because we know who he really is, and the good far outweighs any negative press.” Like the tome he put together at Columbia on using science as a political weapon?

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.