Memo to the AERA: Breaking up with Bill Ayers isn’t hard to do
Anyone who’s been following politics lately knows that Senator Barack Obama’s relationship with unrepentant bomber and former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers has become a matter of debate in the 2008 campaign.
What’s beyond debate, however, is Ayers’s connection to Arnetha F. Ball of Stanford University; Nancy Beadie of the University of Washington; Mark Berends of Vanderbilt University; Linda L. Cook of Educational Testing Service; David J. Flinders of Indiana University; Steve A. Henry of Topeka Public Schools; Joan L. Herman of the University of California-Los Angeles; Cynthia A. Hudley of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Carol D. Lee of Northwestern University; Richard E. Mayer of the University of California – Santa Barbara; Patricia S. O’Sullivan of the University of California, San Francisco; Robert J. Stahl of Arizona State University; William G. Tierney of the University of Southern California; Linda C. Tillman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Susan B. Twombly of Kansas University.
That’s because these are the members of the Association Council of the American Educational Research Association–a group that Ayers will join next year after his election in March as AERA’s Vice President-Elect of Curriculum Studies. (Hat tip to Sol Stern.)
The Council might consider whether it’s prudent to allow a former terrorist to join its ranks–particularly a man who said as late as 2001 that “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Here’s the good news: the Council has the authority to keep this development from happening. While AERA’s bylaws don’t mention any provision for removing elected officials from their positions, they do grant the Council the right to strip anyone’s association membership, which would have the same effect. The bylaws read: “If continued membership of any person is believed to be contrary to the interests or purposes of the Association, Council may terminate membership based on procedures established by the Council.”
Is there any doubt that the election of a former terrorist to the organization’s governance body is “contrary to the interests” of the Association?
Out of political necessity, Obama is already distancing himself from Ayers, and most likely will do more of that in coming months. When the AERA’s Association Council meets next month, it should do the same.
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May 15th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
I’m a lawyer now involved in k-12 education with a long background in national security.
Putting on my lawyer hat – Ayers was a fugitive from justice, but all charges against him were dropped in light of prosecutorial misconduct.
Putting on my national security hat – to describe him and the Weather Underground as terrorrists is a bit of hyberbole. As a tactic of political struggle, terrorism refers to the indiscriminate use of force against innocents. The Weather Underground targeted government and military facilities – and warned potential victims prior to their actions. Their actions were criminal, but they were not Al Quada, the IRA, Bader-Meinhoff, or the Red Army faction. It devalues the serious nature of terrorism to slap the label on every misguided or even deranged person with a bomb.
Putting on my k-12 hat, the man may have radical views, but presumably members of AERA havent found them to be a bar to his role in an norganization nfocused on research. If AERA is too radical for some, they might form a separate group.
As a citizen of this free society, I also have something to say. To call someone who has never been found guilty of of a violent crime, let alone terrorism – the highly charged word “terrorist,” is to take political debate back to the atmosphere of McCarthyism. “If you don’t agree with me, you must be a Communist – or in this case a terrorist (and I, by implication, must be a patriot).”
I don’t agree with Mr Ayers politics or many of his views, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to protest actions and tactics that can only drag poitical discourse into the mud.
To paraphrase one historic response to Senator McCarthy – “Have you no shame?”
May 15th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
I probably should have added that the group didn’t kill anyone in a bombing but one of their own during the bomb making process. Rather than practice the indiscriminate killing of innocents to create fear among the public at large, they sought to avoid such collateral damage, while damaging symbols of government and military power.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Mr. Millot,
The families of Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins, all of whom were killed in the Greenwich bomb mishap, might disagree with your assertion that just “one of their own” died.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
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October 13th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Shame on you Millot for trying to gloss over the seriousness of this! These people bombed homes of regular people not just government installations. I’m as anti-government as anyone but bomb buildings? This is the lowest one could go.
I do not believe in violence, not then and not now.
SHAME ON YOU.
Obama should be in jail just for this.
October 13th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Ask the Murtaghs!
http://www.nypost.com/seven/10082008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/terror_victims_qs_for_barack_132619.htm
February 10th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
excellent post…