Marathon Pundit: Ex-SLA radical buys George Will's boyhood home from University of Illinois

University of Illinois Student Union

Conservative author, commentator, and columnist George Will grew up in Urbana, Illinois and attended University High School there. His father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who died in 1998, his mother passed away eight years later.

Last year Will sold the modest home where he grew up to the University of Illinois Foundation for $10.

This spring James Kilgore, a convicted murder, longtime fugitive, and onetime member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army bought the Will home from the foundation along with his wife, Teresa Barnes, another left-wing radical.

The SLA is best known for the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.

But Will is okay with the sale. The home changed hands for $119,000.

From the News-Gazette:

"I know nothing about this fellow," George Will said of Kilgore, "except that he has bad political judgment. And then he's probably not the only one in Champaign County who has bad political judgment.

"I certainly don't think the university had any obligation to tell me who's buying my house. The university has been professional and splendid through this."

Thomas Farrell, president of the UI Foundation, said Tuesday that "after an open-market sale process, in February, a sole offer was received on the property from Mr. Kilgore and Ms. Barnes and accepted by UIF."

The proceeds of the sale, Farrell said, will support the UI College of Media and University High School, which George Will attended.

Kilgore is a former adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which is--ugh!--my alma mater. When Kilgore's terrorist past became public, his teaching contract was not renewed, but his fellow leftists are trying to get him re-hired.

At the university's Chicago campus, Obama crony and former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers was a tenured education professor until his retirement.

Will is a devoted baseball fan. MLB transactions are filled with "player to be named later" trades. Viewing a Will-for-Kilgore swap as such, Illinois got robbed.

It's another Lou Brock-for-Ernie Broglio debacle.

Related post:

Ex-Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist on University of Illinois faculty

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