The New Criterion

Perhaps you’ve heard by now that Hamilton College in Clinton, NY has added a former terrorist to its faculty. Susan Rosenberg, a member of the Weather Underground convicted for participation in a Brinks truck robbery in 1981, will teach a course called "Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity and Change." Then again, perhaps you hadn’t heard--Hamilton is doing all it can to keep this news under wraps. But Roger Kimball reveals the whole story in today’s WSJ:

It is by no means clear that Susan Rosenberg is "an exemplar of rehabilitation." In an interview on Pacifica radio soon after she was released, she tentatively renounced individual violence. But nowhere in her evasive circumlocutions did she renounce collective violence, what she described in 1993 as "the necessity for armed self-defense" in the pursuit of "revolutionary anti-imperialist resistance." She still denies having taken part in the Brinks job and likes to call herself "a former U.S. political prisoner."

And what is Ms. Rosenberg going to teach students? In a statement, Hamilton administrators described her as "an award-winning writer, an activist and a teacher who offers a unique perspective as a writer." In fact, her "writings" consist of political doggerel and radical exhortation, while her awards are PEN commendations for prison writing. Here is a representative passage from her poem "To Mumia Abu-Jamal," the convicted cop killer now on death row: "Their message so clear / Do not be Black / Do not be radical / Do not be a political prisoner / There is still time to / SHAKE IT LOOSE."

Roger writes, "Steven Goldberg, a professor of art history, noted that ’there are nine children today who will never see their father . . . three women who are widowed’ because of the crimes with which Ms. Rosenberg is associated." Time was when this fact would be a source of great regret and shame. Now it’s fodder for a course packet. May I offer a perspective that is, I think, probably not unique among sensible readers of this news? Hamilton, there is still time to shake Ms. Rosenberg loose--and honor and good taste demand that you do it.

(n.b., for more on Hamilton College and Ms. Rosenberg, see this month’s Notes & Comments.)