Weird But True

CUNY shuts down an obscene center

City College of New York officials insist their decision to shutter a lefty hangout was unrelated to last month’s harassment of faculty member David Petraeus.

Not that there would be anything wrong if it were. The good news is that the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Student and Community Center is no longer. Its presence had been a blot on CUNY’s integrity for nearly a quarter of a century.

The most galling part was its name, which honored two murderous fugitives who now live in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Guillermo Morales was the chief bombmaker for the Puerto Rican nationalist group FALN, whose most notable attack was in 1975 at Fraunces Tavern. Among the four killed there was Frank Connor — himself a CCNY alum. As his son, Joseph, put it: “My father certainly deserved better than to have his killer honored at the college he attended.”

Assata Shakur is better known as Joanne Chesimard, a Black Panther who executed New Jersey trooper Werner Foerster in cold blood on the NJ Turnpike in 1973. Like Morales, she escaped custody and made her way to Cuba.

The center was opened as a sop to students in 1989 after they protested a tuition hike. So however long it was in coming, every New Yorker should applaud a decision that has now put an office for career and professional development in place of a center named for two terrorists.