The New Criterion

Susan Rosenberg is doing to Hamilton College what the Weather Underground does to Greenwich Village townhouses.

Already, donors have withdrawn pledged gifts to the institution. And last Friday, Rockland Police protested this trusta-terrorist’s appointment to the Kirkland Project (thank you, Hewlett Foundation) at the college’s kick-off fundraiser in New York City. From the Post-Standard:

About 30 Rockland County police officers and friends picketed a Hamilton College fund-raiser in Manhattan Friday night to protest the college’s hiring of a former radical once indicted in the murder of two police officers.

Members of the Rockland County Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association want the college to rescind the hiring of Susan Rosenberg. She served 16 years in prison for possessing more than 600 pounds of explosives, and was indicted in a Brink’s armored car robbery in 1981. Two Nyack police officers - both members of the Rockland County PBA - were killed in an ensuing shootout.

More here.

While Hamilton has argued that Rosenberg is a PEN-award winner who will impart only the skills of reading and writing to her students, nothing in Rosenberg’s past suggests that such instruction would be disinterested. Far from it (and who really believes course descriptions like this one? These folks can’t even correctly spell Frederick Douglass’s FIRST *OR* LAST name).

Rosenberg is an unreconstructed radical who has yet to be broken by incarceration, once Bill Clinton commuted her sentence for weapons possession on his last day in office (this aging radical, clearly, has friends in high places).

Here is an article from Mills College on Rosenberg’s star-turn at that institution, where she was sponsored by the Women’s Leadership Institute (where lesbian Palestinian AIDS activists are available in bulk) and the ’Mills White Anti-Racist Women’:

According to Rosenberg, her most profound fear [in prison] was "the fear of losing my own memory, of losing the memory of who I was," she said.

There you have it. Before her conviction on the weapons/explosive charge, Rosenberg was indicted on nearly a half-dozen other charges, including aiding in the prison break of BLA leader Assata Shakur and in the Brinks murders. Take a look at this bio from Brown University (scroll down) and you get the sense of how malevolent this radical can be: while proclaiming her acquittal from certain charges for "lack of evidence," the radical Rosenberg never hesitates to mention those charges themselves. Through her selective language she both proclaims her radical activities and her ability to escape prosecution for such activities. (More agit-prop here.)

What’s the right thing to do? Notify any Hamilton alum you might know about the Rosenberg appointment. Follow the money trail of the well-endowed Kirkland Project. And aim for the college’s pocketbooks.