Right now the most famous college professor in America is Bill Ayers, the former antiwar militant who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Readers looking for insights into Mr. Ayers’s views on terrorism could find some hints in the pages of The Chronicle.
Just before September 11, 2001, The Chronicle Review published a brief excerpt from Mr. Ayers’s book Fugitive Days, about his experiences in the Weathermen, a militant spinoff of Students for a Democratic Society.
He then wrote a letter to the editor in which he said he was “filled with horror and grief for those murdered and harmed” in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “Nothing justifies indiscriminate attacks on human beings,” he added. “My book is in fact a condemnation of terrorism in all its forms — individual, group, and official.”
But Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, challenged Mr. Ayers in a Review article. “What the reader will find” in the book, Mr. Wolfe wrote, “is the story of an unrepentant New Leftist who casually justifies violence and praises a series of violence-prone people.”
Mr. Ayers was also quoted in The New York Times as saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Shortly thereafter, alumni of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University protested his employment and that of his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who was also a leader of the Weathermen and is now director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern’s law school.
Those are not Mr. Ayers’s earliest or most recent appearances in The Chronicle.
In 1993 he was mentioned in passing in a profile of Ms. Dohrn. And this fall he was one of many readers who wrote to protest the mailing of the DVD Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West as an advertising supplement.