kitchen table math, the sequel: Bill Ayers is not a “professor of English”

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Bill Ayers is not a “professor of English”

In fact, he is a tenured Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

I haven’t heard if Obama has corrected himself on this. However, this is what I'm interested in:

The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.

[...]


Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

[…]

Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

Sol Stern in the City Journal

Maybe the media should be questioning Obama and McCain about their views on Ayers in this influential position. Some readers might believe doing so would be a demonstration of “gotcha” politics, but I really would like to hear their answers.

6 comments:

Catherine Johnson said...

I didn't know he was "Distinguished."

Catherine Johnson said...

oh my gosh!

I just read the article.

Good lord.

So now he's vice president for curriculum.

I'm having one heck of a sauve qui peut moment.

Anonymous said...

The distinguished professor's lovely wife is also famous for celebrating the Manson murders:

At a 1969 "War Council" in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn gave her most memorable and notorious speech to her followers. Holding her fingers in what became the Weatherman "fork salute," she said of the bloody murders recently committed by the Manson Family in which the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and a Folgers Coffee heiress and several other inhabitants of a Benedict Canyon mansion were brutally stabbed to death: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!" The "War Council" ended with a formal declaration of war against "AmeriKKKa," always spelled with three K's to signify the United States' allegedly ineradicable white racism.

Anonymous said...

powerlineblog.com has audio of Ayers and Dohrn, both then and in 2007. Their words make it clear that their choices are all elements of their political strategy, which have not changed in 40 years.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/04/020362.php

Catherine Johnson said...

He has a blog!

Catherine Johnson said...

Where is Paulo Freire when we need him?