Predictably, the
scheduled appearance on March 19 of Bill Ayers on a Dickinson School of Law
panel at Pennsylvania State University has brought calls for revocation of the
invitation because of his past as a founder of the terrorist group Weatherman
and involvement in bombings. This is what Pennsylvania State Senate President
Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati is asking university president Eric Barron to do. A dozen
students from the law school also wrote to Keith Elkin, assistant dean for academic
and student affairs, claiming “the law school does not benefit from giving an
admitted domestic terrorist, who has shown no remorse for his actions . . . a
platform.”
Others take an
absolutist free speech stance, arguing that no matter what his past Ayers has a
right to speak and that students should be allowed to hear his views. This is
the position of Jordan Harris, former College Republicans
chairman, who compares opposition to Ayers’ visit to the protests against other
speakers, such as former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and
columnist Ann Coulter. (Harris, however, misrepresents opposition to a
commencement speech by Michelle Obama, which unlike opposition to others was
based on the fact that seating would be limited.)
Penn State
journalism professor Russell Frank weighs in, castigating Scarnati for
butting into academic business, about not understanding that Ayers will not be
advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government, but instead will be
participating in a panel on the “school-to-prison pipeline” at the law school
on Thursday and in a workshop on “teaching toward democracy” at the Pasquerilla
Spiritual Center on Friday.
“These happen to be
Ayers’ areas of expertise,” Frank huffs. Ayers is a “retired professor of
education at the University of Illinois and, by most accounts, a well-regarded
scholar”–not the “wild-eyed radical” Scarnati believes him to be.
Frank also corrects
Scarnati in his charge that the university is paying Ayers: payment is coming
from student activity fees.
That may be true, but
as Philadelphia columnist Dom Giordano points out, all students are
required to pay these fees, and taxpayers pay for the buildings and security.
I agree with the
law school students, Scarnati, and Giordana that Ayers does not deserve any
publicly supported forum. What these critics fail to recognize, however, is
that Ayers, after getting off on an FBI technicality, never stopped trying to
overthrow the U.S. government. After emerging from his fugitive status, he got
a cushy academic job where he could do his dirty work.
The fact that he
rose to become a professor of education is an indictment of academe, not a
validation of Ayers’ credentials. I listened to him at the Association of Teacher Educators conference. I’ve
slogged through his books on education and found them nonsensical, a pastiche
of progressive theories and radical Marxism, as I chronicled in my book Bill
Ayers: Teaching Revolution.
As in his
“wild-eyed” bombing days, Ayers has no respect for the American system of law.
The “school-to-prison pipeline” theory, the idea that unjust schools are
producing criminals, is a thinly disguised method for overturning our system of
law by introducing racial preferences and taking away personal responsibility.
Radicals are continuing to promote revolution in the schools, except now not
literally running through school corridors or talking to students on street
corners as they did in the 1960s, but working within the system, on centers on
campuses, with the help of foundations. George Soros’s Open
Society Foundation supports Pennsylvania’s Education Law Center
whose staff attorney, Nancy Potter, will be joining Ayers and Harold Jordan, of
the ACLU, on the panel.
Bill Ayers, in his
many writings, claims that schools are already like prisons because they
require students to adhere to schedules and minimal dress codes. In Ayers’
utopia, there would be no discipline, and there would be no teaching (like
other progressive educators he believes students simply discover what they need
to know). That all three panelists take such a radical approach and are
appearing in a publicly funded institution is what should be upsetting Scarnati
and others.
Had education not
been transformed, Bill Ayers would have been laughed right off campus. But his
generation succeeded in institutionalizing activism, transforming the classroom
from a place of serious scholarship into a recruiting ground for radicals.
The mentor to
Ayers’ generation, communist history professor Howard Zinn, said “real learning
takes place outside the classroom.” What he meant was that real learning takes
place in subversive protests. Zinn radicalized students at Spelman College from
1956 to 1963, until he was fired for “insubordination” by the college’s first
black president. Zinn’s Marxist version of American history is now being taught
in our schools through the use of his books and spin-off curricula. And so are
Bill Ayers’ ideas. His nonsensical books are used widely in colleges of
education.
Both the College
Republican who takes a free speech position and the concerned legislator should
look at the root of the problem. They should look at any college website and
see all the various nonacademic social justice initiatives, staffed and housed
in elegantly appointed quarters. They will find that as at the
“school-to-prison” event, there is no “exchange of ideas,” as college president
Eric Barron told faculty members there would be.
The panel make-up and the purpose of the sponsoring center provide evidence.
Barron also said
that universities should encourage expression of all ideas, even unpopular
ones. What is unpopular on campuses these days is the American system of
law-and-order. Why is no one addressing how the school-to-prison philosophy
violates the constitutional view of law, how it is turning our schools into
dangerous places? Or how it encourages a life of crime, as it did for Trayvon Martin?
Scarnati and the
law students would do well to look to the recent example of North Carolina,
where the Board of Governors recently recommended closing down the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at UNC,
as well as two other similar centers of political indoctrination. They are now
examining 13 other such centers.
Close down these
centers and leave the “guilty as hell, free as a bird” old radical to
the soapbox on the corner, which is the only stage Ayers deserves to have.
Mary Grabar is a
resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western
Civilization in Clinton, New York. Her writing can be found at www.marygrabar.com.
Subscribe to dispatches here.
No comments:
Post a Comment