Terrorist Professors

How Campuses Normalized Violent Left-wing Radicals

Last week, a speaker was assassinated on a college quad. Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during an outdoor event at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. Prosecutors have charged a 22-year-old with aggravated murder and say they will seek the death penalty. Charging documents describe political motivation. Classes have resumed under a heavy mood. That is where we are one week later.

The Immediate Aftermath: Celebrations Amid Grief

In the days since, another layer of rot surfaced. Students, faculty, and other public-school employees celebrated a political murder. Texas State University expelled a student after a video showed him re-enacting the shooting at a campus memorial. A similar expulsion followed at Texas Tech.

Meanwhile, professors faced swift backlash: an Arkansas law professor was suspended for social media posts celebrating the killing, Clemson University suspended two professors and fired an employee for mocking Kirk's death online, and several California teachers were placed on leave after allegedly cheering the assassination.

Nationwide, educators from K-12 teachers to university faculty have been fired or disciplined for similar posts glorifying the violence. If you draw a public paycheck, you are accountable to the public. Cheering an assassination disqualifies you from positions of civic trust. Words are not violence. Celebrating violence is an endorsement of violence.

I have written for years about the university monoculture and its tendency to label speech it dislikes as harmful while excusing hard-edged activism. This week sharpened the question that has been building for a long time. How did we reach a place where speech is treated like violence, while actual violence is rationalized by the very institutions that claim to steward our civic life?

The Hiring Hall of Infamy: Radical Leftists in the Ivory Tower

If a university is a culture factory, then faculty hiring is the assembly line. For decades, administrators have signaled that violent left-wing radicalism is not disqualifying for classroom authority. The message has been heard by students, junior scholars, and the broader culture.

• Bernardine Dohrn — Northwestern Law

  A former Weather Underground leader, Dohrn pleaded guilty to misdemeanor aggravated battery and bail-jumping, then later served seven months for civil contempt after refusing a grand jury request. She was then welcomed as a clinical associate professor and founding director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center from the early 1990s until 2013. That is institutional legitimacy, not a guest talk.

• Bill Ayers — University of Illinois at Chicago

  Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground. Charges tied to bombings were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct, not because the bombings never happened. He rose to Distinguished Professor of Education at UIC and became a major figure in schools of education.

• Kathy Boudin — Columbia University

  Boudin took part in the 1981 Brink’s robbery that left three people dead. After serving more than two decades, she joined Columbia’s School of Social Work and co-founded its Center for Justice. The institution framed this as rehabilitation. Victims’ families heard something else. Prestige as absolution.

• Susan Rosenberg — John Jay College / Hamilton College

  Convicted on explosives and weapons charges and later commuted, Rosenberg taught as an adjunct at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Hamilton College invited her to teach a for-credit seminar before she withdrew amid backlash. The invitation tells you what gatekeepers were ready to normalize.

• Eldridge Cleaver — UC Berkeley

  A Black Panther leader with felony convictions was approved to lecture in Social Analysis in 1968, igniting a major campus fight over “academic freedom.” The template of provocation as pedagogy has been part of campus identity ever since.

• Féilim Ó hAdhmaill — University College Cork

  Convicted in 1994 of conspiring to cause explosions in England and later released under the Good Friday Agreement, Ó hAdhmaill went on to lecture in social policy at UCC. Again, radical biography is treated as a credential rather than a red flag.

Notice what is missing from this list… right-wing equivalents who committed comparable political violence and were then welcomed into core teaching roles. The asymmetry is obvious.

From “speech is harm” to “violence is a resume line”

When administrators redefine the words they dislike as harmful, they create a moral loophole for actual violence. It becomes narratively negotiable. It becomes the lived experience of liberation. The hiring record above did not cause a gunman to pull a trigger in Orem. But it taught generations of students and faculty which kinds of law-breaking are glorious, which kinds are tolerated, and which viewpoints are treated as existential threats. That cultural matters on campus. The behavior we saw this week did not appear from nowhere. It was learned… and it was taught.

The Climate Parallel

This mirrors the rhetoric we hear constantly around climate change, framed as an "existential threat" that justifies extreme measures. In academia and activism, fossil fuels are demonized as causing irreversible harm, with CEOs and skeptics portrayed as enablers of planetary destruction… language that dehumanizes and could incite violence.

We've already seen threats and sabotage against pipelines and energy infrastructure, often celebrated in certain circles.

How long before that escalates to targeting fossil fuel CEOs or folks like me… critics who question the alarmism and push for rational debate? If political disagreement on campuses can lead to assassination, imagine the risks when the stakes are billed as humanity's survival.

What should change now?

Draw bright lines for violent political crimes. Public universities should categorically bar hiring anyone into classroom authority who was convicted of violent political crimes like bombings, armed robberies, or terrorist conspiracies. Advisory talks at arm’s length can be debated. Classroom authority over students should be off the table.

No celebrating violence for public employees. If you are a taxpayer-funded educator and you cheer a political assassination, you are out. That is not criminalizing speech. It is enforcing fitness for duty in a civic role. Recent discipline shows universities can act when they choose to.

Radical transparency. Post violent-felony histories on department pages the way you post conflict-of-interest disclosures. If a past is integral to a “teaching perspective,” then own it and let parents and taxpayers decide.

Institutional neutrality. Universities should stop issuing official statements on political issues as an institution. Embracing the Kalven-style neutrality (from the University of Chicago's Kalven Report) that many schools pretend to value would eliminate the performative pressures that encourage rewarding "radical" behaviors and hires.

Final word

Charlie Kirk's assassination isn't just a tragedy… it's a warning siren for a system that's long prioritized ideological indulgence over moral clarity. If we don't dismantle this rot now, starting with who we entrust to shape young minds, the next target won't be a conservative speaker; it could be anyone deemed an "existential threat" by the campus echo chamber. Taxpayers, parents, and lawmakers: demand accountability, enforce boundaries, and reclaim academia before the body count rises.