Editor’s Note: This is the first in an ongoing series of columns by UNL faculty members called Faculty View. Our two current faculty columnists are Dr. Gerard Harbison from the department of Chemistry, whose first column is below, and Dr. Gregory Rutledge from the English department. His first column will run two weeks from today. As always, the Daily Nebraskan Opinion section welcomes all feedback through our Web site, the mail or e-mail at opinion@dailynebraskan.com. We hope you enjoy hearing from our faculty members in the coming months.
Rich kids can work at being rebels, because they don’t need to work at a job. Billy Ayers was a rich kid. He grew up in a house with a maid. Billy atoned for his privileged upbringing by joining Students for a Democratic Society in the ‘60s, part of the “new left.”
SDS was activist, but not violent. They did teach-ins and sit-ins, and Billy duly took part. But SDS was far more than Vietnam protesters. They were internationalist socialists. In the frenzy of the late sixties, they fractured into a crazy quilt of Maoists and Trotskyites, syndicalists and Spartacists, feminists and Black Panthers.
Billy, his to-be wife Bernardine Dohrn and some others split off their own faction, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, which became the Weather Underground. The RYM wanted immediate “armed struggle.” The struggle started with an event in Chicago they called “Days of Rage.”
Days of Rage began with a bombing and continued with riots; there was a rampage through the Loop, several people were badly beaten, and one was paralyzed.
Billy, an enthusiastic street fighter himself, urged other Weathermen to escalate the violence. Dohrn meanwhile publicly rejoiced at the Manson murders.
According to an FBI informant who had infiltrated the Weathermen, Ayers planned – and Dohrn carried out – the bombing murder of Sgt. Brian McDonnell of the San Francisco police. In New York, the Weathermen fire-bombed the house of a judge, a house containing small children. Cathy Wilkerson, who had joined the New York collective, says the violence intoxicated them.
They procured a large quantity of dynamite, and constructed a massive nail bomb, to kill and maim hundreds at a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. But they were amateur revolutionaries, and three of them instead blew themselves up in a townhouse in New York. Wilkerson and another woman lived to tell the tale.
After the explosion, Billy and his wife went underground. In 2003 he was still saying that the townhouse had led them to renounce violence against human beings, but he admits to a campaign of bombings of public buildings, police stations and so on. He was indicted, but the indictment was quashed because of prosecutorial misconduct, and he emerged with Dohrn from the shadows in 1981, in his words, “guilty as sin and free as a bird.” He never did a day of jail time and has never owned up to the worst of his actions.
Billy went back to school, and established a career as a “progressive educator.” With his specious charm, far-left politics, considerable writing ability and rich, well-connected father, he became an influential figure in Chicago education.
By 2001, he was secure enough to let his inner child brag about his exploits: He wrote “Fugitive Days,” a memoir of his life underground. He was portrayed trampling on an American flag on the cover of Chicago magazine, and he told the New York Times he wished he’d planted more bombs. That last interview was one of the few unlucky things that happened in his entire privileged life: it was published on the morning of 9/11/2001.
Realizing that post-9/11 America is much less easily charmed by romantic terrorists than it used to be, Billy began erasing parts of his past. The Weathermen never tried to kill anyone, he now says, forgetting the dynamite-propelled nails that ripped through the bodies of Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton and Ted Gold, nails that were supposed to rip the bodies of young officers and their girlfriends at Fort Dix, and forgetting that he used to preach that the police, “pigs,” whom he referred to as “sweaty, working class barbarians,” should be “iced.”
As the years go by, he denies more and more of his past, but he has never repented it, atoned for his actions, or tried to separate his past from his present.
I only became aware that UNL’s Teachers’ College had invited Billy Ayers to be their keynote speaker at their 100th anniversary celebration when a reporter called me and asked me if a rumor she’d heard was true. It took five minutes of browsing their Web site to confirm it.
She asked for my reaction. I said it was a slap in the face to the decent people of Nebraska, to celebrate the anniversary of THEIR Teachers College in this way. I also said something the newspaper didn’t print: I took personal offense that while I and my colleagues in Chemistry were doing research to find ways to defeat terror, across campus we were fêting a terrorist. I blogged about the visit, and Michelle Malkin, the well-known conservative commentator, linked to my blog. The rest is, as they say, history.
So let’s cut through the clichés and learn what we can from this mess. First of all, it was incomprehensibly foolish to invite Billy Ayers for this particular event. Those responsible claim they never knew about his terrorist past. I find this nigh-incredible. They invited a keynote speaker, and never checked his curriculum vitae, which features a book called “Fugitive Days: a Memoir”? They didn’t Google him?
Second, once the cat was out of the bag, it was simply unrealistic to expect he would be able to deliver a normal academic lecture. There were thousands of Nebraska citizens outraged that UNL used public money to invite an unrepentant terrorist to keynote a major anniversary, so of course there would have been protests, outside the lecture hall and perhaps inside it. The citizens of Nebraska have free speech too! Florida State University, under similar circumstances, corralled the protestors distant from the site of Ayers’ address, preserving the terrorist’s freedom of speech at the cost of their own students’. I hope we did not consider that option.
Third, I don’t buy the “security threat” claim. There was a lot of anger at the invitation; some people expressed themselves in ways that were unfortunate, but nothing I’ve seen posted about Ayers is more threatening than scores of similar rants that appear daily on political blogs like Free Republic or the Daily Kos. A credible threat of violence could have and would have been prosecuted. None was.
The lecture, and the protests, should have gone on. True, the event would not have been what the planners intended, but then, if you don’t do the most basic research beforehand, you can’t reasonably expect to anticipate the consequences of your acts. No doubt UNL would have lost donations and the support of many citizens. I suspect UNL lost some of both in any case. But if mistakes were not occasionally costly, we wouldn’t learn as much from them.
I hope we learn from this mistake, but I doubt we will.
Dr. Gerard Harbison is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reach him at opinion@dailynebraskan.com.
