Of his professorship in the Poli Sci Departmaent at Williams College:
"As a young assistant professor, I was only one of three registered Republicans on the faculty. While I was there, I was friendly with two of the socialist professors who shaped the early intellectual life of Barack Obama while he was at Occidental College in Los Angeles - Professors Roger Boesche and Carlos Egan. I had known both Boesche and Egan when they were political science professors at Occidental College, my undergraduate institution.
Boesche and Egan were taught the young Obama at Oxy...I wonder if they are still alive?
Carlos Egan, one of Obama's profs moved, along with Boesche to Williams College in Williamstown, MA. While there, a young Williams student, Salim Safir Gafsi, got himself and 3 others killed while making a bomb near Washington, DC. Gafsi was a National Merit Scholar and a student of Japanese and classical Arabic:
Gafsi's wealthy father donated the Gafsi Library, apparently part of the Multicultural Center at Williams,and whenCarlos Egan died the following year (1989), they named thed the book collection of the Gafsi Library after Egan (the "Carlos Gafsi Book Collection" housed in the "Gafsi Library" of the "Multicultural Center" of Williams College:
In December 1988, Williams freshman Samir Gafsi died fooling around with pipe bombs:
"AP890102-0100 AP-NR-01-02-89 1644EST r a AM-GarageExplosion 01-02 0377 AM-Garage Explosion,0387 Police: Bomb That Killed Four May Have Been Prank BETHESDA, Md."
" (AP) Four teen-agers who died in an accidental pipe-bomb explosion apparently were building the powerful device for fun, not for political or criminal reasons, according to reports published Monday. “They were all bright kids. … Everything points to kids looking at this as a challenge, like something they saw on TV and said, `Hey, I can do that,”’ an unidentified police official told The (Baltimore) Sun. Another police source, also unidentified, told The Washington Post the youths may have been planning a prank, “like blowing up a flagpole or something.” Dov Fischman, 18, and Samir Gafsi, 17, honor students who graduated last year from Bethesda’s Walt Whitman High School, were killed instantly Saturday when the bomb detonated, apparently as they were assembling it, police said. Two other youths, Bruno Perrone, 18, a freshman studying chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, and Gustavo Machado, 15, a sophomore at Walt Whitman, died later at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda. Diego Soromenho-Ramos, a Walt Whitman classmate of the older youths, said his friends were fascinated with chemistry. “They were probably going to go to some field and see how big a hole they could make,” he said. “They were peaceful people. They would never try to hurt anybody.” The explosion occurred about 3:10 a.m. in a garage attached to a brick home rented by Machado’s parents. Because Gafsi and Fischman were killed instantly, investigators believe they were standing over the pipe bomb when it exploded, Montgomery County Police spokesman Harry E. Geehreng said. Laboratory tests on metal and debris collected at the site by agents from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms weren’t expected to yield any results until later this week, investigators said. Gafsi, a National Merit Scholar, was a freshman at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., where his studies included Japanese and classical Arabic. Fischman, a first-year honors program student at the University of Maryland, planned to major in chemistry and math. He had won prizes for his work in both subjects in high school, his family said. According to Gafsi’s father, Salem Gafsi, Fischman’s interests also included explosives, “but in the positive sense. He’s a gifted kid.”