Colorado University professor Ward Churchill may have written and said some outrageous things, but Brian Hecht points out that there are also people in high academic positions who have done outrageous things: Northwestern’s Resident Terrorist.

Although the controversy over University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill’s pro-terrorist ravings has captured national headlines recently, the flirtation between America’s institutions of higher learning and radical, left-wing activism is hardly a new phenomenon. U.S. colleges and universities are rife with Marxist holdouts like Churchill and other relics from the Sixties. And while many, like Churchill, have openly supported America’s terrorist enemies, a dubious few have actually held prominent positions in terrorist groups. One of the most notable examples of this disturbing phenomenon is Bernardine Dohrn, an Associate Professor and the Director of the Children and Family Justice Clinic at the Northwestern University Law School.

Although it is conveniently absent from her biography on Northwestern’s website, Dohrn was one of the leaders of the Weathermen (a.k.a: the Weather Underground), a band of radical students and student-aged activists who emerged from the antiwar group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).The Weatherman won the SDS elections in 1968 and then dissolved SDS, saying, “We’ve smashed the pig.” The Weathermen are responsible for multiple terrorist acts, including the bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, Ft. Dix and office buildings in various U.S. cities. In fact, the group claimed credit for 12 terrorist bombings between 1970 and 1974 alone; and while no innocent civilians were killed:

1. They planned to blow up a social dance atFort Dix. The bomb went off and blew three of the bomb builders up.

2. The police are investigating the bombing murders oftwo policemen attributed to Weatherman.

In other words, if no innocents were killed, it certainly wasn’t for lack of effort on the Weathermen’s part. The group’s lawlessness was hardly limited to setting explosives, as they also helped plan and execute the escape of Harvard professor and LSD advocate Timothy Leary from federal prison in 1970, furnishing him with a fake passport and smuggling him to a Black Panthers training camp in Algeria.

Bernardine Dohrn, tellingly enough, helped set the tone for the Weathermen’s militant agenda.