Where do young people learn that it’s okay to kill over political differences? Look no further than what they’re taught in school.
There, college professors routinely assign books by leaders of radical groups that murdered people to advance their political goals. These blood-drenched terrorists are presented as positive role models, and their violence is romanticized as advancing justice.
Take, for example, how frequently the works of Angela Davis are assigned in college courses. According to Open Syllabus, books by Davis appear over 2,000 times in syllabi collected from U.S. universities.
Davis rose to infamy as a leader of the Black Panther revolutionary movement when she bought the guns used in a 1970 takeover of a California courthouse. That takeover led to the death of a judge and serious injury to a district attorney and a member of the jury.
After being indicted, Davis went underground, and the FBI placed her on their 10 Most Wanted list. While Davis was eventually caught, tried, and acquitted on the claim that she did not know what the guns were going to be used for, she never shrank from her role as leader of a revolutionary movement—and she never expressed remorse for those that her movement killed.
Despite Davis’ sordid past, she is lionized in college courses.
Her book, “Women, Race and Class,” is required reading in the sociology senior seminar at Texas A&M University. Meanwhile, an interdisciplinary course on prisons at Clemson University requires just two books: Davis’ “Are Prisons Obsolete?” and the jailhouse letters of one of the prisoners the 1970 courthouse takeover attempted to free.
College courses also celebrate William Ayers, whose books appear in more than 700 syllabi collected by Open Syllabus. Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground and author of its 1974 manifesto, which declared: “We are a guerrilla organization… The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.”
The Weather Underground was responsible for 25 bombings and two of its members were convicted for the murder of two policemen during an attempted robbery of an armored car. Ayers, like Davis, was acquitted at trial but afterwards famously quipped, “Guilty as sin, free as a bird.”
None of this stops courses at places like the University of Texas at Austin and Iowa State University from featuring Ayers’ works.
Nor have all of the terrorists feted in college courses been acquitted.
Assata Shakur, whose autobiography appears in almost 500 syllabi in US universities, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a New Jersey state trooper. Shakur, born Joanne Chesimard, was part of the Black Liberation Army and was wanted for several felonies when New Jersey police pulled over her car.
According to the FBI, “Chesimard and her accomplices opened fire on the troopers. One trooper was wounded and the other was shot and killed execution-style at point-blank range.” Shakur later escaped from prison and has since lived as a fugitive in Cuba, where she wrote her memoir.
Despite Shakur’s status as a fugitive and convicted murderer, her book is widely assigned and celebrated on college campuses.
A course on “African American Justice Movements in the U.S.” at the University of Florida features Shakur’s book, apparently in the belief that murdering police is just part of the struggle for justice.
Shakur’s autobiography is also assigned in a course on “Punishment and Corrections” at George Mason University. You might hope that her book is assigned to discuss how to prevent future prison escapes like Shakur’s, but the other assignments make clear that the course makes the opposite argument.
In all, there are thousands of college courses that praise books by notorious murderers like Che Guevara, Leila Khaled, and Winnie Mandela. If these books were assigned so that they be critiqued and understood as evil, that could be part of a valuable education. But instead, these villains are romanticized and presented as heroes in the vast majority of courses—having the exact opposite moral effect.
Leftist radicals used to sing protest songs about how they “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.” Now, they don’t just teach political violence, they rationalize and excuse it.
After years of pro-terrorist propaganda in college courses, it should come as no surprise that our young people feel less compunction about committing murderous acts of political violence themselves.
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