Public Enemy (23 page)

Interestingly, of all the attacks against me from the Right at that moment, the most sensible emanated from Sol Stern, once a liberal but now an apostate claiming to be writing a lengthy biography of me. Stern, a senior fellow with the free-market-loving, conservative Manhattan Institute, pleaded with his soul mates in the blogosphere to get over my dark past and focus on the present, writing on the blog
Eduwonkette
: “Ayers’ treachery is not primarily his actions from decades ago, but his activities with schools and children today, principally his advocacy of progressive education—a Trojan Horse that could destroy our civilization.” Stern actually read what I wrote and wanted to challenge and refute it; most of the others simply pasted a public enemy label over my face and assumed that was all that needed to be said.

I told my colleagues in Colorado that I had accounted for my actions during the US assaults on Viet Nam and the Black Freedom Movement and paid the price. The only crime I was guilty of now was my alienated mind, and I’d be happy to stand up, tell my story, admit my mistakes, and take responsibility—shoulder to shoulder with everyone else, including war criminals, politicians, soldiers, officers, students, scholars, and all the folks attending their education conference. Absent that, they seemed to say that I had some uniquely dreadful behavior to account for, and on that point I politely disagreed.

I also worried that their attempt to cleanse their conference of the likes of me had no obvious end. They would have to cut out the Marxists and the socialists to start, anyone who wrote critically about capitalism and education, of course, then the militants, the noisy antiracists, the pushy feminists, and on and on. That struck me as not only unprincipled, deeply cynical, and cowardly; it was suicidal as well, and with lots of miserable historical precedent.

I told them I was not a public enemy and that I would not be complicit in blacklisting myself, and I ended the letter on a lighter note: so invite me already.

There’s a lot of wicked history worked up in all of this. In another repressive time, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was expelled from the ACLU, an organization she cofounded, because of her membership in the Communist Party. There’s a lot of fight-back, too, along with principled rejection of the thought police: when the Yippies’ Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were hauled before the fearsome House Committee on Un-American Activities, they dressed up like an original American revolutionary and a Vietnamese freedom fighter, refused to bow down and testify inside the chamber, and helped to laugh that nest of reactionaries out of existence. When several universities were cowed into banning the DuBois Clubs—a handful of students in the youth wing of the Communist Party who were attacked by Richard Nixon for intentionally creating a front group that would dupe people into joining since it rhymed with “Boys Clubs”—I joined up, along with hundreds of members of Students for a Democratic Society, and the ban was overcome. And in the arena of progressive education itself, there’s a wonderful story told about its patron saint, John Dewey: when Maxim Gorky visited New York in 1905 and was refused lodging at several hotels because he was traveling with a woman who was not his wife, Professor Dewey and his wife, Evelyn, invited the couple to their home and hosted a reception for Teachers College students “in honor of the non-Mrs. Gorky.”

My letter earned a response from the dean of the School of Education herself, now taking full responsibility and explaining that Colorado was in a difficult spot because of all the publicity around Professor Ward Churchill, and that her primary concern was protecting the university and inoculating it from “the claim that violence should be part of the solution,” and that my stance might “become the banner” for the school.

I thanked her for her letter and explained that I made no such claim on behalf of violence myself, and that she shouldn’t be confused by the media or the mob. Further, if endorsing opposition to violence was the standard and the oath that must be sworn in order to attend the conference or come to the university, she might want to consider some of the other exclusions: both of her US senators, the president and his entire cabinet, ROTC, military recruiters, and on and on. I wondered aloud if all scholars and guests who might attend the gathering were being subjected to the same level of scrutiny and asked to sign the same pledge, and I suggested that if I were really as radioactive as she seemed to imagine, perhaps she should alert my dean and university president, my publishers, and the organizers of dozens of other events I was scheduled to attend and address in the coming months. I told her that she would not be the first, but would be joining a campaign well underway, fueled by Loony Tunes characters like David Horowitz and Sol Stern.

I did get the invitation but no apology, and after all the twisting and turning I felt an obligation to rearrange my schedule in order to attend the conference. It was small and low-key, everyone perfectly polite, with the university-catered lunch drawn from what I could only imagine to be some national food preparation company’s menu suggestion for academic gatherings—no zing, no zest, no fiery little something. The sky did not fall, I left no banners, incited no violence, and there’s not much else to report really.

Soon enough, the groans of the idiot wind gathered force and focus and became a roaring tempest. I was banned in Boston—Boston University, actually, by order of its little dictator, the chancellor—and canceled in Cambridge. Scheduled lectures were shut down in Sacramento as well as in Urbana-Champaign, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and dozens of other places. Penn State University earned some sort of speed record in my mind: I got an e-mail one morning inviting me to give a talk to a student group; I accepted the request before noon; by 2:00 p.m. that same day—shortly after the administration was informed—my invitation was rescinded.

The rationalizations varied. In Boston, the chancellor at BU didn’t want to offend the feelings of the families of police officers killed in the line of duty, an entirely manufactured correlation; in Georgia, the president cited threats to burn down the campus center as the reason I would be banned; and in my sister campus at Urbana-Champaign, the president cited exhaustion from defending me at board meetings and at every Illinois state legislative hearing—all that freedom of speech stuff could really take a toll on a guy!

The US State Department told us repeatedly through press releases and videos that we lived in the freest country on earth, with “hundreds of universities that are the envy of the world.” I wasn’t sure that the party line was false by every measure, nor could I claim that my experiences with universities and freedom were typical in any way whatsoever. But I wouldn’t easily dismiss the view from the bottom of that particular tunnel either—even if it carries with it its own gaps, shadows, and distortions, it casts a unique gloominess on the whole question.

While I was being canceled and blacklisted at home, I had several offers to teach and lecture in England and Germany, Cyprus and Hong Kong—they either didn’t think I was particularly toxic, or they didn’t care. I agreed to deliver a paper at a curriculum and teaching conference at National Taiwan University and stayed for a week, giving talks at Taiwan Open University and Taiwan Normal as well.

Late on my first night in Taipei, a small group of faculty and students hosted me at a lively restaurant the size of a warehouse pulsing with rock music, where the choice was dumplings or more dumplings, meat or vegetable, savory or sweet dumplings—no menus, just a small army of servers circling the room with huge baskets of steaming portions. We stayed too late and I ate too much, but by the time I got to my room, we had mapped out a plan for the week that was a mixture of work and play, and included a couple of meetings with activists and organizers.

It was 3:00 a.m. in Taipei when I was awakened by my cell phone. I was still a little upside-down in time, but I woke by the third round of ringing. The caller introduced herself as a dean from the University of Nebraska, and she said she was so sorry to disturb me and sorrier still to be the bearer of bad news: a talk we’d contracted almost a year ago for an upcoming research forum on campus was about to be canceled due to threats of violence if I appeared. I heard anguish in her voice, and I thought I heard embarrassment as well, but she pressed on with the dirty assignment she’d been given. She asked if I could please understand that the tension on campus was unprecedented, the frenzy of threats and nuttiness unparalleled, and their ability to provide adequate security in light of it all strained. “OK,” I said in a sleepy voice. “And,” she continued, “would you be willing to sign your name to a joint letter endorsing the cancellation?” I was fully awake now. “I can’t do it,” I said, “because I don’t think we should cancel the talk. I’m certain the Nebraska State Police can get me to the podium, and I’ll be fine from there.” This was all a tempest in a teapot.

“You don’t know how bad it’s become,” she said. “The governor, both US senators, the regents . . . all of them are coming down on us.” It was true. I quickly learned that Senator Ben Nelson, a Democrat, had called for the cancellation of my speech, and Governor Dave Heineman, a Republican, had sent a public letter to the regents and the president of the university telling them to immediately rescind my invitation because it was an embarrassment to have “a well-known radical who should never have been invited to the University of Nebraska” on the campus. I wondered if all radicals or only well-known radicals were embarrassing and unwelcome.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, “and I don’t want you to suffer at all—but I don’t want your students or my students, or anyone else, to conclude that the mob can set the limits on speech or on academic freedom. The faculty had the right to invite me, the students had a right to speak with me, and none of us should accept being bullied by some tin-pot politician. I won’t sign on to a letter like that, and I don’t think you should either. Let the administration do its own weasel work,” I said. “I mean, what can they do to you?”

Before I left Taipei, I spent an inspiring day with a multiethnic group of young activists who were organizing undocumented workers, mostly Filipinos, for decent wages and fair treatment, as well as for cultural survival and full recognition of their basic human rights. That evening a couple of dozen workers, children and families in tow, gathered at a community center in a working-class neighborhood to enjoy a red-hot potluck of
ilocos empanada
,
adobo
, chicken
inasal
,
suman
, and
halo-halo
. Folk singers performed in Tagalog, while young people in traditional dress delighted the group. I was surprised when, near the end of the party, the principal singer invited me to perform with him in English. “I invite Professor Ayers to the stage,” he began, “to join me in a song I’m sure he knows.” He explained to the gathering that twenty years earlier he had left the Philippines as a teenager to live with an aunt in Kentucky, where he became an undocumented agricultural worker. Each morning as the van carried the workers to the fields or orchards he would work on his English by memorizing pop music playing on the radio. “My favorite song from those years,” he continued, “was a perfect memory of my home in the Philippines.” As he strummed his guitar with tears in his eyes the two of us harmonized on John Denver’s “Country Roads,” and I got tears in my eyes too, marveling at the unlikely but very real globalized world we now inhabited: an undocumented Filipino worker and an outlawed Chicago professor in a community center in Taiwan, singing a classic piece of American kitsch the worker had memorized as a young man in Kentucky and loved because it reminded him of his faraway home in the Philippines.

The Nebraska talk was canceled, their lawyers had jumped in, and the official story—which would be recycled at every blacklisting to come—cited “safety reasons.” The Office of [Fairy-Tales and] University Communications went into high gear spinning their fraudulent story:
The University’s threat assessment group monitored e-mails and other information UNL received regarding Ayers’ scheduled November 15 visit, and identified safety concerns which resulted in the university canceling the event
.

I later learned that the Gilbert M. and Martha H. Hitchcock Foundation in Omaha, which had donated millions in the past, told the university that it would halt all contributions unless the faculty rescinded my invitation. Several other donors indicated that there would be a financial cost if I were allowed to speak. State auditor Mike Foley sent the university a long request for information on my trip, its planning, and how it was being funded. Governor Heineman was reportedly pleased that the university had reconsidered, and he sent a letter to the faculty telling them that there are plenty of other respected educators the university could invite to speak. I wrote an op-ed for an Omaha paper, and I argued that academic freedom was indeed dead the moment the governor, billionaires, or anyone else thought—and then demonstrated—that they could dictate the terms of what is read or said or discussed on a university campus.

Cancellations and abandonment continued apace, and the tempest leapt completely out of the teapot: officials at the University of Wyoming, citing “security threats” and “controversy,” canceled two talks I’d been asked to give there, one a public lecture entitled “Trudge Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action,” and the other, a talk to faculty and graduate students called “Teaching and Research in the Public Interest: Solidarity and Identity.” One week before I was to travel to Laramie, I was told I had been “disinvited.”

A campaign to rescind the invitation had been initiated on right-wing blogs months earlier, accelerating quickly to a wider space where a demonizing storyline dominated all discussion and a wave of hateful messages and death threats hit the University, joined soon enough by a few political leaders and wealthy donors instructing officials in ominous tones to cancel my visit to the campus, or else. This was becoming drearily familiar to me.