Ayers — “Rebel With a (New) Cause”

The paragraphs which follow were extracted from an article which arrived in the RBO inbox a few days ago. At the time, they were set aside for some future use. Now — in light of the most recent revelation by Barack Obama that he believed unrepentant domestic terrorist and Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers had been rehabilitated — is that time.

David Ruenzel wrote March 23, 2004, in his Education Week article “Rebel With a (New) Cause” about unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers:

But Ayers’s intensity isn’t just “a style”; it’s something, rather, that has propelled him to the front lines of battles that have been waged all across America. At the age of 21, he was a teacher and then director of an Ann Arbor, Mich., experimental preschool that was “multicultural” years before the word had currency. During the mid-60’s, he was a traveling salesman for Students for a Democratic Society, building chapters on college campuses throughout the Midwest. By April 1970, having six months earlier rampaged through the streets of Chicago during the “Days of Rage,” he was a Weathermen fugitive, advocating armed struggle against the U.S. government. And now, as a college professor, he is bringing to the teaching of teachers the passion, radicalism, and advocacy for change that have marked all of his adult life.

Ruenzel writes of the young Bill Ayers:

Bill Ayers may not be a hero, but it is hard to conceive of him or his life as ordinary. A child of privilege, he was raised in Glen Ellyn, an affluent suburb of Chicago. His father, Tom Ayers, was the chairman of Commonwealth Edison and a key figure in the open-housing agreement that real-estate owners and city leaders negotiated in 1966 with Martin Luther King Jr. The middle of five children, Ayers seemed destined for success. A good student and outstanding athlete–he still has a fullback’s powerful shoulders–Ayers also possessed an unstudied charm that caused people to take notice. “My parents would never show favoritism,” says John Ayers, Bill’s youngest brother. “But everyone knew he was the real star in this family. He’s one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever known. I used to joke with my Dad [during Bill's Weathermen years] about how he’s risen to the top of his field. But it’s true.”

After graduation from the elite Lake Forest Academy, he attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, returning home summers to work at the Leo Burnett advertising agency. There, the legendary Leo Burnett found himself charmed by Bill. “Burnett called up my Dad and said his son would make one of the great ad men,” John Ayers says. “Bill’s a born salesman. People follow him because he has the force of ideas, articulates his vision, and throws himself into issues with abandon. Some people wonder how he can be so nice, so jazzed up. But he’s totally genuine–one of the sweetest guys who ever walked the earth.”

During Ayers’s high school years, about the only hints of his later radicalism were a fascination with the Beat writer Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and a vague disenchantment with the conventionalities of suburban life. But something happened to him while at Ann Arbor in the mid-60’s. That something, says Ayers, was the Vietnam War and the civil-rights movement. The former outraged him; the latter suffused him with a hopefulness that remains with him.

Writing about Ayers’s teaching style, Ruenzel writes:

Ayers’s classes are a movable feast. He takes his students into schools, into the streets, for research. It is also not uncommon for him to invite them into his Hyde Park home, where authors and educators gather in what resembles a 19th-century salon. “This must be the way it was centuries ago at the feet of Socrates and Plato,” one student says. “Great minds getting together to talk.”

On Ayers’s “charisma”, Ruenzel says:

There is something about the admiration, even adoration, some people express for Ayers that borders on the excessive. Charisma has a way of winning people over even when they shouldn’t be won over, as some say happened during Ayers’s most zealous years of activism. Furthermore, he speaks so well, with such apparent effortlessness, that the listener sometimes wonders if he has, as one acquaintance puts it, “a script running through his head”–a script that he, like a gifted politician, infuses with a tone of urgency. Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine that, in a very different time and set of circumstances, Ayers may have become, say, a respected senator.

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