Just when you think that North Carolina’s college campuses can’t get any loonier, Duke University is making the national news this week with its invitation to a terrorist to give a March 3 lecture on campus.
James Taranto writes the daily “Best of the Web” for The Wall Street Journal. Leading off the January 16 edition was an item about Duke’s plans to host Laura Whitehorn as part of its “Teaching Race, Teaching Gender” speaker series for Spring 2003. Who is Laura Whitehorn? Duke’s web site describes her as a “revolutionary anti-imperialist” and former “political prisoner.” Among her credits, according to the university’s official event announcement, are writing for POZ magazine, a monthly that caters to “communities affected by HIV,” and work in “HIV peer education.”
This may be commendable, but it hardly does justice to Laura Whitehorn’s background and to why she spent 14 years in federal prison. You see, she and other colleagues in the “revolutionary anti-imperialism” movement planted a bomb in the U.S. Capitol and conspired to attack other institutions to protest, among other things, the American military action in Grenada back in 1983.
It wouldn’t have taken much effort for Duke leader to turn up what Whitehorn really represents. For example, here is an interview she and two fellow-travelers did a while back that calmly and deliberately discusses her belief that nonviolent criticism of U.S. policy is insufficient and that violence is justified. Describing her political coming-of-age in the 1960s, Whitehorn said that “once I began supporting Third World nations’ right to use armed struggle to win self-determination, it made sense to me that I should be willing to use many forms of struggle to fight, too. Mostly, I think that it’s my vision of what a wonderful thing it would be to live in a just, humane, creative world that motivates me to embrace armed struggle as one part of what it takes to fight for a new society.”
How nice.
What she and her co-conspirators did in 1983 to ”fight for a new society” was to plant bombs in the U.S. Capitol building and the Navy War College in Washington. While they later took pains to point out that no one was hurt in the incidents, they could not have known that ahead of time. Another sympathetic source described Whitehorn as a former member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) ”aligned with the Weathermen faction.” In 1970, she joined the Weatherman Underground Organization, which become a notorious group of domestic terrorists.
By all means, Duke University and other colleges should host debates about just about anything, including panelists who are highly critical of orthodox views, the current administration, the U.S. government in general, Jar Jar Binks, the cancellation of ”Roswell,” super-sized French fries, SUVs, or the return of disco. But surely any serious education institution armed with an elevated view of proper political discourse, a modicum of prudent judgment, or at least a minimal sense of shame, could draw the line at inviting a terrorist to come on campus and spread sympathetic propaganda about ”political prisoners” who blow up government buildings and endanger innocent lives.
Duke has earned yet another dubious distinction.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal