Interview with Bill Ayers (in Revolution - Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party)

Bill Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, returned from summer vacation to find a letter from colleagues he’d worked with for decades. They told him about a conference on progressive education they were planning for the spring, and at the same time informed him that he would not be welcome to it!

Professor Ayers is the author of Teaching Toward Freedom and many other books, anthologies, and essays on progressive education that have appeared in many journals, including Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, Rethinking Schools, Nation, and Cambridge Journal of Education. Ayers is also the author of the book Fugitive Days, about his experiences as one of the founders of the ‘60s-’70s group the Weather Underground.

Revolution correspondent Reggie Dylan recently spoke with Bill Ayers about his colleagues’ letter and its larger implications.

Reggie Dylan: Tell us about how you learned that you had been “disinvited” to a conference by your colleagues, and about your initial response.

Bill Ayers: I returned from summer vacation and I had a letter on my desk. The people who wrote the letter were an administrator at a university, a dean, and then a couple of people I knew pretty well, actually. I think I was stunned to get it because what it said in effect was we’re having an important progressive education conference, we count you as one of the important progressive educators in our era. Therefore we feel we owe you an explanation of why you’re not invited. And my first read, I kind of laughed and put it aside. But then as I thought about it I thought… There’s not a single sign of the times, there are many, many signs of the times, and some of them are quite hopeful, some of them are quite exciting, but here’s one of the dismal signs of the times. These guys aren’t just progressive, they’re socialists, and they think of themselves as activists. And yet they feel that in order to have a meeting that will be legitimate, they have to make a decision who to exclude, and they excluded me. And I decided it wasn’t an issue about me in particular. It wasn’t an issue about my personal feelings. And I certainly didn’t feel hurt. But I did feel increasingly agitated about the thinking that went into it. I don’t have it in front of me, but here’s what I remember about being first very, very agitated about.

They said in the body of the letter: we want to position progressive education not as radical, but as familiar and good. Now that just steamed up my ears because if you’re saying you’re a progressive educator… That’s one of the things that’s actually annoyed me for about 40 years of being a progressive educator: the separation of the concept of progressive education from the concept of politics and political change. You can’t separate them…and this is a contradiction, incidentally, that goes all the way back to the beginning of progressive education and really the beginning of the conversations about the relationship between school and society. But John Dewey was one of the brilliant, brilliant writers about what democratic education would look like and was himself an independent socialist. But he never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you’re trying to build in a classroom. This contradiction is something progressive educators should address, not dodge. So this is what got me going. That’s a short version.

Reggie Dylan: In your letter you say you see great harm for progressive education itself in what’s represented in the approach they’re taking.

Bill Ayers: There’s two things. The first thing is they take the teeth out of the critique. They say we’re presenting progressive education as something nice and familiar. Then you’re not critiquing standardized testing, you’re not critiquing sorting kids, you’re not critiquing the privatization of the public space, you’re not critiquing the attack on teachers and the undoing of the trade union movement. So to me, you’re just saying, I’m giving you progressive education-lite. I don’t see the point in that. That’s one problem

The second problem is not addressing the fact that schools serve society in subtle and overt ways. So every school in every society is a microcosm of, or represents in some sense, that society… Here’s a great example. Sometimes its hard for people to see this inside our own country because these things are so familiar. But go outside our country. If you went to apartheid South Africa and you went into the schools, you would see a white school with 15 kids per class, high-tech, highly educated teachers, peaceful campuses. And you go to the township and you see a classroom of 85 kids, no equipment and no rooms—and that would speak volumes. You could see, even if you knew nothing about apartheid, you would see apartheid represented in the school. One school is preparing kids to run society in the future; one school is preparing kids for the mines and the mills and the prisons.

Well, that’s true of all societies, and it’s as true of ours as any other. Go to the schools in the inner city. Go to the schools in the privileged suburbs and see what you see. To separate progressive education from the savage inequalities of our schools, from the drill and kill, from the sort and punish, it’s like a fantasy world. You’re not changing anything if you don’t address the social inequities out there. And right now, one of the cruelest places we see this is the question of preparing kids for prison, for unemployment, and for war. We see this in big schools, we see this in big urban schools. Where does the military recruit? They don’t recruit in New Trier [upper middle class school in the Chicago suburbs]. They don’t recruit at Andover and Exeter [elite private schools]. They’re not allowed in there. They recruit in DuSable high school and Lawndale high school [mainly Black and poor schools in Chicago]. And that’s unfair.

Reggie Dylan: You are on the David Horowitz list. (Horowitz is a highly placed operative in the service of the Bush regime carrying out an orchestrated attack on dissent and critical thinking in the universities. Bill Ayers is one of the faculty viciously attacked in Horowitz’s book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.) Maybe we can step back a bit and talk about the bigger attack on dissent and critical thinking that’s going on in academia in general. What you’re describing is a whole front of this which is really important to be brought into it—what’s going on in the elementary and secondary level. But there has been this whole attack going on in the universities which…

Bill Ayers: I agree with you, it’s not just elementary and high school. And I have a very strong take on it these days. I actually was listening to Berlusconi the other day in Italy. The right-wing bastard that used to run Italy. And Berlusconi said people criticize us because we have so much power. But the truth is we don’t have the schools, and we don’t have the economy. And that’s very much what’s true in America. You know, if you look at a place like Chicago or if you look anywhere around the country, the right wing—it’s not just conservatives, it’s probably the most reactionary cabal of ideologues I’ve ever seen, operating with a very, very clear ideological purpose—control all three branches of the federal government, control many state governments, control the media—the kind of bought priesthood of the media that does nothing but bow down to them and kowtow to them. And yet, if you hear them talk, they’re whining about how little power they have, how marginal they are, how under attack they are. And on the one hand, you could say, oh that’s just demagoguery, those guys are bullshitting. But the truth is they see something that they know that we maybe don’t know so well, and that is their power is tenuous and short-lived. I think the reason we’re going to see the bombing of Iran is because they know that they have a little window here to do all the bad things that they’ve wanted to do, or in their view, to set the conditions for all the things that they would like to struggle for over the next decade. And they are going at their agenda with a fierce single-mindedness. And whether they are thrown out of power, the one public space that still irritates the crap out of them is education. And it is one of the public spaces that’s left to fight about.

So what do we see? We see a whole frontal attack on the very idea of public education. It’s an attack on the idea that there should be a free common public education for all. And we see it in all kinds of subtle and in not-so-subtle forms. Subtle forms like zero tolerance. What’s the point of the zero tolerance in a democracy? In a democratic school system, classroom justice is flexible. But not in an authoritarian society. In an authoritarian society classroom justice is authoritarian. Zero tolerance, right? So there’s that kind of attack. And the obsession with a single-minded standard of standardization. And again, I’m a big fan of standards. But I’m against standardization which I take to be fundamentally anti-democratic. And I’m for standards set by people working in classrooms with one another. And then we see the metaphorical market being held up as the ideal of what the public schools should become. So we see charters and we see vouchers. But behind it all is the idea that it’s a market, that there are consumers and that there are producers, etc.

As far as higher education is concerned, it’s like, anybody who works in higher education like me—and we hear it said this is a bastion of liberal thought and this is where the radicals hang out—we’re like completely stunned. We have no idea what they’re talking about. I mean its true I’m here, but its also true there’s a whole bunch of right-wing colleagues up and down the hallway who promote the status quo and believe in it and so on. And that’s true across the academy. So why are they on the attack? Because it is true people with a critical view can find a place and things to do —and not only things to do, but a public forum from which to have these debates. That’s unacceptable to these hard right-wingers, unacceptable. And so that’s why we’re seeing, in my mind why we’re seeing a wholesale attack on education generally.

On the level of K-12, we’re seeing the attack on the public space. And on the level of higher education, that attack on the public space is an attack on the idea that intellectual freedom has a place. And I think that’s huge, very, very important.

Reggie Dylan: And there’s a connection. Because you have kids coming to college now who have been fed a very narrow understanding of reality, including rooted in fundamentalist religion, rooted in the notion of evolution being a theory and not a fact. And they come to the university and they get challenged with ideas they’ve never heard before. They’re being encouraged to question things in a way they never have before. And to overturn that seems to be the goal of what Horowitz is doing. And you know we were talking about this, Ward Churchill has become a concentration point of that.

Bill Ayers: Well, Ward Churchill is a great example because what I think people, leftists are continually doing with the Ward Churchill case is missing this larger context you and I are talking about and instead kind of parsing, “Well, what did he say and do I agree with it.” What the hell do I care? First of all, there was a thorough study done by a university committee that never should have been set up, and they found a few, a tiny, a handful of instances where he might have borrowed a phrase, but nothing like Doris Kearns-Goodwin [a widely published historian who was found to have plagiarized extensively in one of her books] did, nothing like, you know, the big academics at Harvard have done, like Dershowitz [who has been accused of plagiarism]. And yet somehow he’s held to the standard. And then people on the left again feel like they have to say, well this is part of what Ward says I don’t agree with. What has that got to do with it? He’s being pilloried for his politics, for being a leftist, for being a critic of U.S. imperialism as it relates to Native Americans. How can we as socialists or as communists or as leftists, how can we leave him in the cold and say, well I’m a good leftist because I don’t talk the way Ward talks. I find that appalling. And I would hope that when they come to get Ward, we all link arms and don’t allow it.

Reggie Dylan: And there’s a connection between them going after Ward Churchill and Horowitz’ book, The Professors, which has a hundred professors in it, and the point you make at the end of your letter of, where does this end? You said the attempt to cleanse has no end.

Bill Ayers: It’s not only cowardly, it’s cynical. But it’s suicidal. And by cynical what I mean is that you don’t trust people and so you kind of try to parse out your own little place to have your career as a lefty. And that just makes me sad when it doesn’t make me sick. You have to believe that if you speak the truth, if you speak up and speak the truth as you understand it, and you’re willing to listen and be in dialogue with people, that people can get it. So the cowardliness of not speaking out—we see this in the Democratic Party all the time. Why won’t they speak out against the war? They know better, some of them. But they won’t. And partly because they’re bought into the same system. But even those who know better won’t do it, and the reason is they don’t trust people. And we as revolutionaries have to say that at the end of the day, people will be smart enough, good enough, strong enough to stand up. But why should they do it if we don’t have the courage to do it? And the letter I got was a cowardly letter. Its cynical, it’s cowardly, and it’s slippery.

"This is a guy [Bill Ayers] who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis."

Source: ABC News - Transcript: Obama and Clinton Debate, April 16, 2008
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/DemocraticDebate/Story?id=4670271&page=2

________________________________________________________

[Obama] is named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge founded by Bill Ayers
(article typo has Ayers instead of Obama)

In late 1993, Bill Ayers, now an associate professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus, organized a team to put together a grant proposal to secure nearly $50 million from the Annenberg Challenge. The money was to be used by Ayers and co. to bolster the radical Local School Councils reform project that Ayers and Obama had championed back in 1988 through the ABCs.

The grant application was successful and in early 1995 Barack Obama was named chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Ayers was named co-chair of the Challenge’s operative and strategic body, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative. Ayers and Obama work together for the next five years on raising an additional $60 million in matching money from local foundations and corporations and using the money to intervene in the governance of the Chicago public schools.

The Challenge through a multi-million dollar Leadership Development Initiative intervened in the School Council elections in the middle of what was known as the Chicago School Wars. At the same time Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was pushing, successfully, to gut the power of the Councils.

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/08/12/the-obama-ayers-top-ten-highlights-of-the-20-year-obama-ayers-connection/

________________________________________________________

"The Small Schools Workshop was founded in 1991 at the University of Illinois at Chicago to provide support for teachers who were trying to create new smaller learning environments. Its director is Michael Klonsky, a former professor of education at UIC."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Schools_Workshop

________________________________________________________

Some background on Bill Ayers' SDS comrade, Michael Klonsky
(Chicago Annenberg Challenge-related)

"One of Bill Ayers’ and Bernardine Dohrn’s comrades in the late 60s Students for a Democratic Society was Mike Klonsky. When Dohrn and Ayers moved in one direction toward the violent tactics of the Weather Underground, Klonsky, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, dropped the pro-Russian communist politics of his parents and became a committed Maoist. As leader of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) in 1977 [not to be confused with Communist Party USA. CPML no longer exists, CPUSA formed decades earlier and is still around-ETL], he travelled to Beijing and was toasted by the senior Beijing leadership.

When the crazy left of the 70s died in the 80s, Klonsky went to graduate school in education in Florida and then moved to Chicago.

While driving a cab there he [Michael Klonsky] was recruited by his old friend Bill Ayers to head up a new project called the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. It’s offices were in the Department of Education building at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus where Ayers taught.

In 1995 the newly formed Chicago Annenberg Challenge headed by Ayers and Obama gave the Workshop a grant of $175,000.

The Annenberg Challenge also had its office space in the same building as Ayers Department and the Workshop, rent free courtesy of the University.

In 2008 Klonsky ran a blog on the official Obama campaign website on education policy and “social justice” teaching. When discussion of the Klonsky blog emerged in the blogosphere, it was promptly shut down by the campaign and all of the posts made by Klonsky were removed from the site."

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/08/12/the-obama-ayers-top-ten-highlights-of-the-20-year-obama-ayers-connection/

________________________________________________________

In 1977, the October League was reorganized as the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) [again, not Communist Party USA (CPUSA) -ETL] and former SDS activist Michael Klonsky became party chairman. Also in 1977, Klonsky traveled to China and the CPML was recognized by the Chinese Communist Party as its official sister party in America.

(snip)

In January 1981, Michael Klonsky resigned as party chairman, and the CPML disbanded that same year.

The previous Red Encyclopedia description of the CPML was incorrectly combined with that of the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist).

http://reds.linefeed.org/past.html

________________________________________________________

From Investor's Business Daily (IBD), August 27, 2008:

"Ayers, now a tenured distinguished professor of education at UIC, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.

One of Ayer's descriptions for a course called 'Improving Learning Environments' says prospective K-12 teachers need to 'be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and ... be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation.

The Annenberg papers are quite extensive — 132 boxes containing 947 file folders with 70 linear feet of material. They undoubtedly contain more surprises regarding Obama's relationship with Ayers, one of many relationships Obama has sought to hide.'..."

Article: Annenberg Papers: Putting On Ayers?
http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=304729375940845

________________________________________________________

From Sept 11, 2001, New York Times article/interview with Obama associate and friend, William/Bill Ayers.
Article title: "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen"

"Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as:

'Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

New York Times, September 11, 2001:
"No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen"
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

________________________________________________________

Bill Ayers TODAY (April 6, 2008), from his own red communist star-headed website, begging to debate communism vs capitalism with Sean Hannity and STILL calling for revolution!

"Imperialism. I’m against it, and if Sean Hannity and others were honest, this is the ground they would fight me on. Capitalism played its role historically and is exhausted as a force for progress: built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and a world revolution—a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity and love, cooperation and the common good —must win.

We begin by releasing our most hopeful dreams and our most radical imaginations: a better world is both possible and necessary.

Source: Bill Ayers' own website:
http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/page/2/

________________________________________________________

Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA [Maoist]
Revolution #63, October 1, 2006

Interview with Bill Ayers:
"On Progressive Education, Critical Thinking and the Cowardice of Some in Dangerous Times"
http://rwor.org/a/063/ayers-en.html

________________________________________________________

Much more on the ObamaRat-commie connections at my FR Home/About page. Everything there is linked directly to its source. I've now added within-page links and a 'clickable' table of contents which makes it easy to hop around to the various sections:
http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl

They [the Weather Underground] are a Soviet communist front group. The black liberation churches were started in South America by Soviet kgb agents to overthrow Banana Republic dictators and gain a communist foothold in this hemisphere.

Correcto mundo!...

From David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
"FBI files from 1976, recently made public under the Freedom of Information Act, confirm the connections between Weatherman, Havana, and Moscow. Weatherman leaders like Mark Rudd traveled illegally to Havana in 1968 to engage in terrorist training. There, camps set up by Soviet KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine were educating Westerners both in Marxist philosophy and urban warfare."
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808

___________________________________________________

"Their founding document [the Weather Underground's] called for the establishment of a "white fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other "anti-colonial" movements[1] to achieve "the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism."..."-Berger, Dan (2006). Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. AK Press, 95.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_Underground#cite_ref-Berger_0-0

Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Paperback) by Dan Berger
http://www.amazon.com/Outlaws-America-Underground-Politics-Solidarity/dp/1904859410

___________________________________________________

From the New York Times, August 24, 2003

"they [the Weather Underground] employed revolutionary jargon, advocated armed struggle and black liberation and began bombing buildings, taking responsibility for at least 20 attacks. Estimates of their number ranged at times from several dozen to several hundred."

Article: Quieter Lives for 60's Militants, but Intensity of Beliefs Hasn't Faded
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E4DE1539F937A1575BC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

___________________________________________________

Weather Underground Organization linked to North Vietnamese and Cuban governments, KGB (my title)
[420 pages in all on pdf]

Source: FBI, via Freedom of Information Act

In 1976, the FBI's Chicago Field Office prepared a summary which described the activities of the Weather Underground Organization, also known as Weathermen. This organization described itself as a revolutionary organization of communist men and women. The FBI's analysis of its motivations, beliefs, and international travels are outlined in this summary.

[some excerpts from the 1976 report linking the organization to foreign governments...]

From the moment in October, 1967, when Radio Hanoi announced the formation of the South Vietnamese Peoples Committee for Solidarity with American People (by the National Liberation Front (NLF), the political arm of the Viet Cong) with the objective of establishing relations with "progressive organizations and individuals in the United States," a political front was enjoined in behalf of the national interests of the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam (DRV) (and the NLF), the purpose of which was to intensify the anti-war sentiment in the United States.

From the initial meeting between the Vietnamese and leading anti-war activists held in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in November, 1967, to the July, 1969, meeting with leading Weatherpeople held in Havana, Cuba, the influence of Vietnamese representatives on the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leadership became sharply pronounced. At the same time, the example of the Cuban revolution became the guide for the emerging American student revolutionary. With an increasing number of trips to Havana where the youthful revolutionary could learn at first hand how to create revolution, the influence of Cuba on the developing WUO [Weather Underground Organization] was enormous.

The WUO obtained their revolutionary methodology from the Cubans and Vietnamese and, importantly, put into practice what they had learned from them. The Weathermen, of course, did not just happen to come about during the June, 1969, SDS National Convention. They fully admit their radical heritage began during experiences gained in SDS and as shown herein their international contacts with representatives of the DRV and NLF which began in 1967 increased their anti-imperialist consciousness so that by 1969 they had solidified their revolutionary commitment to include the maximum optimum of armed struggle. So, when Huynh Van Ba, representative of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam (PRG), instructed the WUO to "look for the person who fights hardest against the cops...Don't look for the one who says the best thing. Look for the one who fights," the campus base was forgotten and the WUO began to recruit the greasers and assorted oddments who had displayed their hatred of authority in direct combat with police.
http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/weather.htm

___________________________________________________

From American Thinker, September 16, 2008
Article: Obama's Foul Weather Friends
By Scott Swett and Roger Canfield

"As a gesture of solidarity, the Vietnamese who Dohrn met in Budapest presented her with a ring made from an American aircraft shot down over North Vietnam. Bill Ayers would receive a similar ring while meeting with Vietnamese communists in Toronto. He later recalled being so moved by the gesture that he 'left the room to cry.' He said, 'I realized...America was an evil... and that I was... living inside the belly of the beast...' "
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/obamas_foul_weather_friends.html

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.