I’ve spent significant time reflecting on the firing of University of Illinois professor and adjunct James Kilgore (Kilgore is frequent contributor to CounterPunch). The incident strikes me as symbolic of precisely what is wrong with higher education – the fundamental lack of rights among non-permanent university employees. There are other issues involved as well, no doubt, including the punitive nature of reactionary American cultural values, and the issue of redemption for past crimes and mistakes.
For those not familiar with this case, a brief background is in order. Kilgore was a popular adjunct professor at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in the areas of Global Studies and African Studies. Kilgore’s employment drew significant regional and national attention, due to his controversial background as a former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a leftist revolutionary group that existed during the early to mid-1970s, and was widely condemned for a number of bank robberies and murders. Kilgore later spent more than six years in prison in the 2000s (after being detained in South Africa after 27 years on the run) for his involvement in the SLA’s 1975 bank robbery (in which he was an accomplice). Kilgore was eventually convicted of second-degree murder (associated with the shooting of a bank customer), fraud, and possession of an explosive weapon. While he had served as an hourly-paid instructor at U of I from 2011 to 2014, his background was subject to increased scrutiny after a series of stories appeared spotlighting the professor in a local community newspaper. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/02/the-case-of-james-kilgore-and-the-decline-of-faculty-rights/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
