If your theory is that the bomb-planting Weathermen got off lightly from being punished, and were later able to get into high positions because of their high socioeconomic status, there'd be a number of significant exceptions.

Susan Rosenberg was convicted of possession of automatic weapons and explosives, and got sentenced to 58 years. Pardoned by Bill Clinton as he left office, she briefly got jobs as adjunct teacher ( not tenured faculty) at John Jay College and then Hamilton College, but after protests was forced out of them. David Gilbert- father of Chesa Boudin- got life without parole for felony murder- he was the getaway driver- and served 40 years before Andrew Cuomo granted him a parole hearing- and he was released just last year. Mark Rudd dropped from the Weather Underground after the Greenwich Village apartment explosion that killed three of them, and so was not involved in the later bomb-planting. He also was not a degreed professor- just taught math at a NM community college until he retired. The same can be said of Bernadine Dohrn, who was briefly hired as an adjunct at Northwestern. Kathleen Cleaver did become a law professor, but though she and her husband Eldridge Cleaver were a constant target of police investigations and raids, she herself was never charged with a crime. Bill Ayers and Brian Flanagan indeed seem to have benefitted from the disallowing of evidence from the illegal COINTELPRO, but rather than a high-status profession Flanagan seems to have worked as a pro-billiards player and carpenter before winning enough money on Jeopardy to open a bar.

This is just a quick dive into the most famous examples, of course, and it's not definitive. If you can assemble a lot more cases, and get an opinion from an actual legal scholar on the sentences, etc. you might find your thesis holds up. SDS came out of mostly the prestigious schools like Columbia, and certainly anyone who was a student at a prestigious school was likely to come from a family able to pay for it and so be higher class. And they'd have the academic performance to be accepted there, so more likely to be academic later. People of means could also be expected to get a much better deal in the US justice system. For example, Angela Davis, who later did have an academic career, did face really serious charges related to murder. But Davis received huge donations for her trial as a result of the cause celebre of the suspicious death of George Jackson, got excellent legal representation, and was declared innocent by the jury.