By Kian Barry

H. Bruce Franklin serves as the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He has authored or edited nineteen books and hundreds of articles on culture and history over the last several decades. His greatest influence in the world of academia, however, is neither literary nor benign.

Franklin was integral in the rise of the radical left in the late 1960s on campuses across the nation along with David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh. They contributed to the anti-war movement and the Maoist International Movement in the United States. Using communist tactics, they knew that infiltrating the minds of young people through forums like universities was necessary for the execution of their goals. Unlike the aforementioned leaders, however, Franklin has not since denounced these extremist tactics and views. In fact, Horowitz has even helped to expose Franklin as a dangerous “educator” in his book The Professors.

In 1972, Franklin was terminated from his tenured professorship at Stanford University for inciting students to riot in protest of the Vietnam War. His anti-war activities led to the creation of Students for a Democratic Society that would eventually become the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). SLA would later be responsible for the deaths of two school superintendents, a bank robbery, a kidnapping and other tenets of their anarchical agenda. In the words of fellow left radical Stephen Schwartz, “we told our generation that terrorism was not a crime against humanity.”

And now, more than 30 years later, H. Bruce Franklin continues to have free reign on the minds of impressionable Rutgers-Newark students on a daily basis. His extraordinarily dangerous views and tactics indoctrinate students to this day. The man who was too far left and too abrasive for northern California in the early 1970s is apparently right at home at the State University of New Jersey.