Culture

NYU Hires Convicted Murder as Scholar-in-Residence

Former domestic terrorist is a professor at Columbia too

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Last week, Rutgers University fired its mercurial basketball coach after he was videotaped "shoving, grabbing and throwing balls at players in practice and using gay slurs," according to ESPN. Under pressure from school administrators, Rutgers' athletic director, who had previously defended the coach's behavior, resigned. It was an appropriate response: violent oafs should be fired from their university jobs for violent, oafish behavior.

On the same day ESPN broadcast the Rutgers tape, The New York Post reportedthat Kathy Boudin, a professor at Columbia University, was named the 2013 Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School. In 1984, Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground, a violent, oafish association of upper-class "revolutionaries," pled guilty to second-degree murder in association with the infamous 1981 Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack, New York. Babbling in the language of anti-racism and anti-imperialism, Boudin assisted in ending the life of three people, including Waverly Brown, the first black police officer on the Nyack police force, and left nine children fatherless. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. In 2003, Boudin was released; by 2008 she had landed a coveted teaching position at an Ivy League university.