BC students move Ayers event: Professor's lecture to be held off campus

The Boston Globe reports:

A day after Boston College administrators canceled a lecture scheduled for tomorrow by William Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and former member of the Weather Underground Organization, student organizers behind the event were making plans to hold the talk off campus instead.

Students said they will hold the lecture, "The State of Democracy in America," at an off-campus location tomorrow, said Melissa Roberts, vice president of College Democrats of Boston College, which is cohosting the event with several other student groups. It will be open only to BC students, faculty, and staff.

Ayers emerged as a controversial figure during the 2008 presidential election, when he was linked to then-candidate Barack Obama. The group was responsible for bombings at the Capitol and Pentagon in the 1970s and considered by some to have been involved in the killing of Walter A. Schroeder, a Boston police officer who was shot in 1970 by political radical William Gilday during a bank robbery in Brighton.

In a telephone interview from his Chicago home yesterday, Ayers said he had not been officially informed the university had canceled the event and still planned to travel to Boston College for the lecture.

"It's kind of a shameful thing to the administration because one can certainly understand why in Saudi Arabia or Serbia or China why speakers would be canceled for a variety of reasons," he said. "But in the US, in a democracy, that doesn't make sense."

Comrade Bill Ayers talking about shameful.