Ayers et al « The Quick and the Ed

Ayers et al

I’m sure there’s a sensible way for scholars of education to talk about Bill Ayers’ decades of work in the field and make the case that it has value and that he’s a generally nice guy. But this isn’t it. As near as I can tell they’re arguing that “unrepentant terrorist” is unfair because really it should be “unrepentant former terrorist,” in that the terrorism happened a long time ago, and really it wasn’t so much that he “bombed the Pentagon” as that he “participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans.” I’m not sure who should be more insulted: people who care about the clear meaning of words, or the hundreds of thousands of Americans who participated in the civil rights and antiwar movements? There are some ostensibly smart signatories to the statement; I find things like this to be baffling.

Update: The statement also says “The current attacks appear as part of a pattern of “exposés” and assaults designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue.” That’s a remarkably self-obsessed view. 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.

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One Response to “Ayers et al”

Matthew K. Tabor says:

October 7, 2008 at 4:19 pm

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.