Oct 8, 2008
Posted | 2 comments
Click to skip right to Indoctrinate U’s deleted scene.
Indoctrinate U is a wonderful documentary film about the injection of politics into higher education. If you haven’t seen it, pop over to their site and grab a copy.
All this talk about Ayers The Scholar brought up memories of a scene in I-U that didn’t survive edits - and that scene is about “Terrorist Professors”:
A man named Bill Ayers has been in the news lately as Senator Barack Obama’s connections to the 1960s-era domestic terrorist have become an issue in the presidential campaign. It reminded us of a segment cut from an earlier edit of Indoctrinate U.
In this deleted scene, we told the story of how 1960s campus radicals morphed into today’s academics. Three of those radicals were Ayers, his now-wife Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd. Together, they led the Weather Underground, a group committed to the violent overthrow the U.S. Government.
To bring about their hoped-for communist utopia, the Weathermen bombed dozens of targets around the country including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and military recruiting stations. In executing their various attacks, the Weathermen killed a few of their own and also murdered a security guard while robbing an armored car. They targeted the families of judges, celebrated the Manson murders, and through legal technicalities, most of them avoided jail.
Decades later, they’re still unapologetic. In an interview published on September 11th, 2001, Ayers told The New York Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
What does all of this have to do with higher education? Watch the video to find out.
If you’d rather read than watch, you can peep these other posts:
Oct 8, 2008
Posted | 6 comments
[ Photo: William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, compares tattoos with a developing revolutionary. When asked the location of Ayers' tattoo[s], our young comrade replied, “lemmie [sic] just tell you this, we both wear red underwear.” ]
I could write 100,000 words on this scoundrel - and, more interestingly, the pseudo-scoundrels and partisan hacks who have come out of the woodwork to support him. If I were Ayers and had relatively few defenders before this election, I’d think the current support a bit disingenuous.
But there’s no need for me to write that much. There are plenty of others who have weighed in. At the risk of appearing like I’ve created a Bill Ayers Blog Carnival, browse the following - it’s a roundup of some of what I’ve read over the last 24 hours.
Sherman Dorn points to Matthew Yglesias’s piece on Ayers. Yglesias writes:
“One thing you can say in Ayers’ defense is that it’s perfectly clear from his present-day conduct that he, in fact, realizes that unleashing a podunk domestic terrorism campaign would be a stupid and immoral thing to do. He could be going around setting off bombs. Instead, he’s a professor and a community activist. On the other hand, he seems sufficiently entrenched in egomania and self-righteousness that he can’t bring himself to actually admit that. And until he does admit that he was wrong, he’s hard to defend.”
Dorn says:
“That seems pretty close to Oliver North, if you’re looking for parallels—with North as a former talk-radio blowhard who has never apologized, but he’s just a former talk-radio blowhard who speaks to conservative audiences.”
They aren’t as similar as Dorn would lead you to believe, but to be more accurate, Dorn would have to burden himself with a bit more historical knowledge than he can likely handle.
NPR examines Ayers’ history and puts it in the context of Obama. I understand why they did this - it’s a hot issue - but it’s not that relevant to some of us. Some of us have opposed Ayers and his work since before Obama was on the national scene. The NPR report is deeply wrong about one thing:
“Regardless of his background, it was never a problem for anyone — including Republicans and Chicago’s most powerful business leaders — to work with Ayers on Chicago’s public schools. In fact, Ayers is widely respected in the field of urban education.”
In “The Bomber as School Reformer,” Sol Stern makes a strong case against Ayers - as he has on several occasions. His must-read piece includes this paragraph:
“As I have shown in previous articles in City Journal, Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive. As a leader of this growing “reform” movement, Ayers was recently elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of ed school professors and researchers.”
Scott Johnson at PowerLine sums it up:
“Stern reminds us that Ayers was a revolutionary driven by hatred of the United States when he was planting bombs in the 1970′s and he is a revolutionary driven by hatred of the United States now.”
American Thinker adds:
“In fact, Ayers looks at schools as nurseries to create a new cadre of children filled with an ideology that is anti-free enterprise and anti-American. To this end he has long been engaged in efforts to change the curriculum of our graduate schools of education so as to train teachers to spread his message and ideology to young children (think of the Pied Piper, clad in revolutionary red). Why should we be concerned? Barack Obama has a goal to “overhaul” our graduate schools of education.”
Dr. Camplin - one of the few education bloggers who is truly capable of taking an interdisciplinary approach - tells us why Ayers matters:
“Of course, Bill Ayers is now a Distinguished Professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As a professor of education, he has pushed for teaching for social justice (which is code for promoting a communist world view), urban educational reform (which has amounted to pushing schools to teach social justice — his organization, of which Obama was chairman, never put up a dime for math, science, reading, writing, or anything else associated with education, but did push for teaching social justice), and helping children in trouble with the law (mostly by pushing to eliminate any sort of punishment or responsibility for their crimes). Ayers primarily sees his role as teaching teachers to be advocates for the communist world view.”
Over at HotAir, John Murtagh, a name few know, weighs in as well - and he’s got reason to:
““When I was 9 years-old the Weather Underground, the terrorist group founded by Barack Obama’s friend William Ayers, firebombed my house… Barack Obama may have been a child when William Ayers was plotting attacks against U.S. targets — but I was one of those targets. Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family.”
Going to the Mat points to the Investors Business Daily editorial that speculates whether Ayers could be the next Secretary of Education:
“Ayers told the great humanitarian [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez: “Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions large and small. La educacion es revolucion.” It is that form of socialist revolution that Ayers, and Obama, have worked to bring to America.
Ayers, now a tenured Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.”
Columbia’s BWog discusses the Ayers Loyalty Oath and its implications at CU.
Mike Klonsky touts his heroic pass on an invitation to appear on Bill O’Reilly’s show. A note to producer Dana Cash: If you quote from SmallTalk, be sure to have [sic] ready for liberal copy’n'paste duty.
Stefan Beck of The New Criterion has a theory - and a good one - about why Ayers is getting a lot of attention at the moment.
Hube at the Colossus looks at the Obama/Ayers relationship sensibly and succinctly.
P.U.M.A. points out that a man who went to Columbia and Harvard Law, then lived in Chicago for a spell, went decades without knowing a thing about Ayers. That’s weird - we knew about it by 11th grade here in Cooperstown. [hat tip: Solomonia and LGF]
Education Sector’s Kevin Carey comments on “Ayers et al”:
“The current attacks appear a whole lot more like part of a pattern of one candidate saying stuff about another candidate in order to win an election.”
I responded to that entry with this comment:
“Kevin,
You’d do well to point out that some of us were aware of Ayers and thought of him as a scoundrel long before Barack Obama was a blip on radar outside Illinois.
My opinion of Bill Ayers and his current/former work doesn’t have a thing to do with this campaign, and I’m not alone.”
The sooner everyone realizes this, the better - and if Ayers thinks he’s off the hook after November 4th, he’s wrong.
Oct 7, 2008
Posted | 13 comments
For a brief history of Bill Ayers and public education, check out “Revisiting AERA, Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground and Public Education.” It’s a 3,500-word crash course in Ayers, AERA, the Weather Underground and why it all matters for public education.
About a thousand academics have signed the petition over at SupportBillAyers.org.
Name and institution are required when signing. Oddly enough, the cabal behind this site has decided to stay in the shadows. Who’s behind the site? The domain registration information is currently inaccessible.
Is it connected to AERA? I’ll be shocked if it isn’t.
Michael Tomasky of the UK’s Guardian excerpted from the Ayers Loyalty Oath and reacted:
“America’s educators, or 633 of them as I write, have signed a petition in support of Bill Ayers. Read the whole thing here.
Some of it is unobjectionable. It seeks to establish his bona fides as a credible education pedagog. And there’s general rhetoric about academic freedom. Fine, fine, fine. Then they get to this:
The current characterizations of Professor Ayers—”unrepentant terrorist,” “lunatic leftist”—are unrecognizable to those who know or work with him. It’s true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Participated passionately? He tried to set bombs. Martin Luther King participated passionately in the struggle for justice. The Freedom Riders. But the Weather Underground?
This is why I’m liberal and not a leftist (there is a difference, right-wingers, and please don’t ask me to explain it; go read some books). But I understand that, very broadly construed, this does emanate from “my side.” I don’t think this document will have any impact on the presidential race, but I just want to go on record as saying I would never sign something with a sentence like that in it.”
Same here, Michael. And, yes, some of us further right than you do have a pretty solid understanding of classical liberalism [as well as understanding that advising people to "read some books" is a rotten thing to say].
The sentences excerpted by Tomasky are bad, but the second paragraph of the statement is worse.
Here’s the Ayers Loyalty Oath in full. Are you going to sign it? Have any of your colleagues?
——————-
EDUCATOR STATEMENT
We write to support our colleague Professor William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is currently under determined and sustained political attack. Ayers is a nationally known scholar, member of the Faculty Senate at UIC, Vice President-elect of the American Educational Research Association, and sought after as a speaker and visiting scholar by other universities because of his exemplary scholarship, teaching, and service. Throughout the 20 years that he has been a valued faculty member at UIC, he has taught, advised, mentored, and supported hundreds of undergraduate, Masters and Ph.D. students. He has pushed them to take seriously their responsibilities as educators in a democracy – to promote critical inquiry, dialogue, and debate; to encourage questioning and independent thinking; to value the full humanity of every person and to work for access and equity. Helping educators develop the capacity and ethical commitment to these responsibilities is at the core of what we do, and as a teacher he has always embraced debate and multiple perspectives.
All citizens, but particularly teachers and scholars, are called upon to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. Without critical dialogue and dissent we would likely be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings to this day. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding— the possibility of change— depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows should be celebrated and nourished rather than crushed. Teachers have a heavy responsibility, a moral obligation, to organize classrooms as sites of open discussion, free of coercion or intimidation. By all accounts Professor Ayers meets this standard. His classes are fully enrolled, and students welcome the exchange of views that he encourages.
The current characterizations of Professor Ayers—“unrepentant terrorist,” “lunatic leftist”—are unrecognizable to those who know or work with him. It’s true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans. His participation in political activity 40 years ago is history; what is most relevant now is his continued engagement in progressive causes, and his exemplary contribution—including publishing 16 books— to the field of education. The current attacks appear as part of a pattern of “exposés” and assaults designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue. Like crusades against high school and elementary teachers, and faculty at UCLA, Columbia, DePaul, and the University of Colorado, the attacks on and the character assassination of Ayers threaten the university as a space of open inquiry and debate, and threaten schools as places of compassion, imagination, curiosity, and free thought. They serve as warnings that anyone who voices perspectives and advances questions that challenge orthodoxy and political power may become a target, and this, then, casts a chill over free speech and inquiry and the spirit of democracy.
We, the undersigned, stand on the side of education as an enterprise devoted to human inquiry, enlightenment, and liberation. We oppose the demonization of Professor William Ayers.
——————-
“We oppose the demonization of Professor William Ayers.”
I don’t.
Oct 6, 2008
Posted | 8 comments
I‘m really too busy to write this, but I couldn’t let this one go. At the heart of this discussion is how journalism, especially re: education, is lacking.
The issue is a Florida teacher who wrote on the whiteboard a racially-insensitive interpretation of Sen. Obama’s mantra of “Change”:
“A Marianna middle-school teacher has been suspended for 10 days without pay after he wrote a racially charged interpretation of a commonly used phrase in the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama.
While some parents and community activists were outraged by the actions of Greg Howard, Jackson County NAACP officials want to gather more facts before the group considers taking action. But some parents feel Howard should be fired.
Larry Moore, deputy superintendent for the Jackson County School District, said school officials determined Howard wrote an acronym with an explanation on a dry-erase board in his class Sept. 26 at Marianna Middle School.
It said, “C.H.A.N.G.E. — Come Help A (N-word) Get Elected.”"
Several bloggers were quick to deride Howard. Joanne Jacobs said:
“It’s hard to imagine worse judgment than using a deeply offensive word to express political views in the classroom. What was Howard thinking?”
Mr. Russo at This Week in Education called him an “idiot teacher.”
Hube calls it “Unbelievable.” He also points out that the left routinely says equally-hateful, or at least equally-distasteful, things and gets away with it - but that’s another issue.
RightWingProf calls it “reprehensible.”
As I wrote on Joanne’s site, there may be more to this story than Tallahassee.com reported.
About 3 weeks ago I was doing a little writing and my pocket buzzed. It was a cell phone text message from an unknown NYC [212] number that said, “Obama’s CHANGE: Come Help A Nigga Get Elected!” It’s a quip that’s been making rounds electronically for some weeks now.
I wrote the following comment:
“I don’t know if anyone is aware of this, but that interpretation of “CHANGE” is, and has been for many weeks, making its rounds via cell phone text messages. I received the text a few weeks ago from a NYC-based number that I’d never seen before.
“What was Howard thinking?”
I don’t know, and I’m not about to guess. I do recognize that there’s a possibility Howard was about to introduce the translation in terms of political communication/memes and thought he’d do it provocatively.
Poor judgment and outright racism/hate aren’t the same things. The article Joanne cited doesn’t provide a bit of context about the incident. Did anyone else notice that the article mentioned nothing but Howard having written the phrase on the board?
Save the vitriol until more facts are in. You might be right anyway, but it’s better to be sure your reaction is justified. Good Lord, even the NAACP is holding off until they know more.”
Things the Tallahassee.com article didn’t bother to mention:
- What subject did Howard teach?
- What was the context of the incident? Were they discussing political communication or the effects of indirect, informal political processes?
- Who brought the issue to administration and why?
I haven’t found that middle school students are appropriately knowledgeable to discuss the finer points of the political process - especially contentious, difficult things like this meme - but it’s worth knowing Howard’s intent. The article never delved into this and the blogs didn’t, either.
Like it or not, this is a message that’s getting around. It’s reality. Fruitful academic discussion includes questions like, “Why is this funny to some people?” and “To whom is this quip directed?” and “What are the risks/payoffs of these informal processes?” The meta question of “So what?” also applies.
These are questions that education journalists and bloggers of all sorts failed to ask.
I recognize that there’s a possibility that Howard was injecting this meme into class discussion. Some teachers like to be provocative; others don’t. If I had to guess, Howard failed to select something appropriate for his audience, was trying to be provocative and blew the delivery/lead-in. He failed miserably.
Think about every group we know - friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc. - and ask yourself this question: Which is more common, someone using spectacularly bad judgment or someone being an overt racist in public?
If you live in the same country I do, you’ll have seen far more of the former than the latter. Howard may be a raving racist, but it’s more likely that he’s just a moron.
The newspaper portrayed the CHANGE phrase as Howard’s interpretation, Howard’s joke, Howard The Racist. The bloggers grabbed that baton, ran like hell and never looked back. No one bothered to connect the incident to anything actually happening outside Howard’s classroom. Perhaps Howard has his fingers on the political pulse [however ugly it may be] in a way that the journalists don’t.
If you’d like to argue that the phrase has no place in a middle school classroom, or that it has no academic relevance in a class about anything other than political communication, go ahead. That’s a discussion worth having - and it’s a different topic than whether Howard is a hate-monger.
I may be wrong, but as for Howard, I’d like to get all the facts before bringing down the gavel. Remember, folks: intellectual honesty comes before the castigation.
UPDATE: Right on the Left Coast is, as usual, completely sensible.
