Mar 25, 2015 3 min read

The president of Penn State University got an earful the other day from some Republican state lawmakers who are in a snit because two groups of PSU students heard remarks from a onetime violent anti-war activist.

William Ayers – yes, the same Bill Ayers whom Republicans tried to turn into a boogeyman during Barack Obama’s first run for the White House – spoke last week on the Penn State campus at events sponsored by a pair of student organizations.

For those too young to remember, Ayers was a founder of a group called the Weather Underground that, among other things, opposed the Vietnam War and was responsible for several bombings.

Since those long-ago days, Ayers has been a decorated university professor and a nationally known education reform advocate. He was even given the “Citizen of the Year” award by the city of Chicago some years ago.

But old times were not forgotten when PSU President Eric Barron came before the state Senate Appropriations Committee this week.

Republican Sens. John Eichelberger of Blair County, Kim Ward of Hempfield, Randy Vulakovich of Shaler and John Rafferty of Montgomery County all took Barron to task, with Eichelberger and Ward asking him, according to an Associated Press report, how the university could stop such people from speaking on campus.

Vulakovich said having Ayers appear was “an affront to policemen, veterans and the general public.”

And Ward inquired of Barron, “At what point would you step in?”

Barron advised the lawmakers that while he might want to block certain people from appearing at Penn State, he’s unable to do so when those speeches or seminars are sponsored and paid for by student groups.

The U.S. Supreme Court has so ruled.

In this case, Ayers’ appearances were at the behest of an organization of law students and the Curriculum and Instruction Graduate Student Association. These are hardly radical campus groups.

As Barron said, “These are not people who have walked into this.”

We would suggest that lawmakers, especially those on the Appropriations Committee, might have more pressing concerns – like the huge hole in the state budget and how to fill it – than worrying about what sort of remarks students are hearing from an aging ex-Weatherman.

In our view, college is a time when young people should be hearing opinions and gathering expertise from as many corners as possible.

We would hope that they are consuming a wide array of views and information, applying critical-thinking skills and deciding what is true and valuable to them.

Recently, we scratched our heads and wondered why anyone would want to hear a commencement address from convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, but at the same time, we wouldn’t presume to infringe on students’ freedom of expression, or their freedom to hear the speech of others, no matter how distasteful we might find it.

We feel fairly certain that none of the students who listened to Ayers at Penn State will suffer any lasting psychological scars from being exposed to this “dangerous radical,” or that they’ll be hunkered down this weekend in their dorm rooms, stuffing rags into bottles of gasoline and plotting an assault on the president’s mansion.

We’re just as sure that if the Penn State speaker had been from the right fringe instead of the left, we wouldn’t have heard a peep from these politicians.