November 16, 2001

Former Radicals, Now Professors, Draw Ire of Alumni at 2 Universities

By JOHN L. PULLEY

Since the attacks of September 11, at least 75 alumni of Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Chicago have protested the employment of two faculty members who once belonged to the Weather Underground, a radical group that bombed government buildings in the 1970s.

At the center of the firestorm are Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers, former self-styled revolutionaries who traded the iconoclasm of their youths for marriage and more conventional lives. Ms. Dohrn, who