Bill Ayers

Dr. Bill Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also the author of To Teach: The Journey, In Comics, which uses the comic book format to reach out to teachers. Recently, Dr. Ayers took the time to speak to graphicnovelreporter.com about his work.

Dr. Ayers, to many readers, especially to those of us in education, your name and reputation is one of esteemed legend. I am honored just to be interviewing you. Thank you so much for the opportunity! My first question, then, is, If you were asked to introduce yourself to the general graphic novel reader, what would you want them to know?

I’ve been a teacher, a peace activist, a troublemaker, an artist-in-residence, and a work-in-progress for many decades. As a lifelong comics reader and a serious fan of the medium, I feel honored and privileged to be experiencing a rebirth of sorts as coauthor of a comic book.

When did you become aware of/interested in the comic format? As a child? An adult?

I began reading comics early, and like a lot of suburban kids growing up in the soft illusion of 1950s suburbia, I was an instinctive anarchist. Mad magazine was a canonical text that let me know that, while I may be crazy, I’m not alone in the world. My love of comics grows and grows: Crumb, Spiegelman, Satrapi, Sacco, Bechdel, Ware, Barry, Alexander-Tanner…I’m so happy to be alive in the most propulsive and yeasty moment, diving every day into the wide, wide universe of comics.

Why did you want to publish To Teach in comic format?

I was asked to do a third edition of a book I wrote long ago, and I was bored with the thought of it. So rather fliply I told the publisher that I would do it if I could make it a comic book. I thought that would be the end of it, but to my surprise they said okay, and launched me into an excellent adventure.

What do you hope readers of To Teach: The Journey, in Comics will take away from their reading experience?

I hope that people might see that teaching at its best is profoundly intellectual and ethical work, filled with joy and challenge, agony punctuated with moments of ecstasy, and certainly that all the ideas of teaching as clerking are not only reductive and morally repulsive, but they are also aesthetically unappealing and unlovely, entirely unworthy of our deepest humanistic dreams.

As a scholar of comics and their use in educational settings, I am deeply impressed by how well you and your coauthor/artist, Ryan Alexander-Tanner, use both words and images to convey meaning. The words and the images in To Touch are seamless. Can you offer GNR readers some insight on the writing process behind To Teach?

Working with the dazzling Ryan Alexander-Tanner was a joy for me as well as a powerful education. I’m a slow learner and a bad student, but Ryan was patient and nourishing. It took a while for me to really get the fact that we were writing an entirely new book, not an illustrated version of something I had already written, and not a floppy gateway drug into the “real” To Teach. He insisted from the start that the comic would be as nuanced, complex, dense, and profound as any book on teaching. Our writing process included lots of pizza and mind-altering experiences.

As you know, To Teach is aimed at classroom teachers. As a fellow scholar and professor of teacher-education, I wonder what your thoughts are about teachers using comics and graphic novels in K–12 settings?

Of course teachers should use comics across the curriculum, just as they might use film or poetry or painting. I can’t imagine teaching the Middle East without Sacco, the holocaust without Spiegelman, gender without Bechdel.

Dr. Ayers, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with GNR readers (and for giving the comic community a wonderful new addition to its list of accolades!). I have one last question: To Teach creates a much-needed link between the comic community and the education community. What do you hope the two communities can learn from each other?

Teachers need to recognize that teaching has an aesthetic—they might be nudged to strive for beauty and something pleasing and lovely in their work—and that the opposite of aesthetic is anesthetic. Wake up! Get moving! Nourish the imaginative and the weird and the queer! Art urges voyages of discovery and surprise. The comics world might give teaching a chance—at least I hope a zillion artists and marginalized bodies flock into classrooms to lend a hand.

— Katie Monnin

school—

take out the “sh”

and it’s cool

The great Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in the early 1950’s and Poet Laureate of Illinois for many years, asked in her Dedication to Picasso, “Does man love art?” Her answer: “Man visits art but cringes. Art hurts. Art urges voyages.”

Exactly. Art, which often begins in pain and horror, when it’s good ends in the imaginable; art embraces the entire territory of possibility. Art stands next to the world as such, the given or the received world, waving a colorful flag gesturing toward a world that should be, or a world that could be but is not yet. So if we believe that the world is perfect and in need of no improvement, or that the world is none of our business, or that we are at the end of history and that this is as good as it gets and that no repair is possible, then we must banish the arts, cuff and gag the artists—remember, they urge voyages. If, on the other hand, we see ourselves as works-in-progress, catapulting through a vibrant history-in-the-making, and if we feel a responsibility to engage and participate, then the arts are our strongest ally. It depends.

Perhaps that’s what Ferlinghetti was thinking when he published a slim volume with the provocative title Poetry as Insurgent Art, or what Picasso had in mind when he said, “Art is not chaste. Those ill-prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste it is not art.” Add to that Einstein’s famous observation that “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Wow! The poet meets the most famous painter and the most renowned scientist of the century, and think about it: they are on the move and on the make, propulsive, dynamic, unsettled and alive—of course.

Haki Madhubuti, Gwendolyn Brooks’ publisher as well as her artistic son, claims that art is a “prodigious and primary energy source,” and then turns to the connection of art to education: “Children’s active participation …is what makes them whole, significantly human, secure in their own skin…” His poem then becomes a chant, each line ending with the words “with art” or “through art.” Every teacher or student, parent or community member can play along and add on:

Magnify your children’s mind with art,

jumpstart their questions…

keep their young minds running, jumping and excited…

Keep them off drugs, respecting themselves and others, away from war…with art!

Your turn.

William Ayers’s new book To Teach: The Journey, In Comics is part autobiography, part education reform tract, and entirely enjoyable to read. I don’t know another edu-book that blends these three elements so well. To Teach updates Ayers’s 1993 book of the same title– except this time around he’s featured in comic panels whose only facial features are dark hair, opaque glasses, and a mustache. It’s profoundly charming.

Ayers leads us on a tour of a teaching life that skips between overflowing love for his craft and pupils and extraordinary systemic frustrations. The first stop: debunking popular myths about teaching. Ayers fights myths that teachers are savior super-genuises that lead classes full of students who are all above average. It’s a fitting opening note for a book that seeks aggressively to confront distortions and impediments to quality classroom environments. Ayers writes, “Myths tower above the world of teaching like giant, fire-breathing dragons. Somehow teachers need to slay these creatures in order to move from myth to reality. And the realities can be harsh. I can think of a million reasons not to teach just off the top of my head…”

That list, which includes pay so low it’s a “national disgrace,” rings much truer. I know quite a few on-the-ground educators who would agree with the Ayers’s succinct sentence: “Teachers often work in difficult situations under impossible circumstances, with too many kids, too little time, stingy resources, and heartless bureaucrats peering through the door.”

And yet… teaching can be an extraordinary, fulfilling job. Ayers told SMITH Magazine: “What we’re trying to do with the book is present the possibility of entering into that contradiction and being successful in your own mind and in your own way with the children, in terms of offering alternatives to the soul-crushing reality of both teaching and schooling as it’s practiced.”

To Teach succeeds.

The author steers us chapter by chapter to different struggles teachers face. He presses teachers to re-think their learning environments– his students’ domain looks more like a learning lounge than a traditionally anonymous classroom. He rejects labeling students “at risk” and insists on the vital importance of getting to know students in a holistic way that celebrates their many good qualities and gives them opportunities to shine. He rails against standardized curricula and shows how unstructured classroom time can allow for priceless discoveries, like when he facilitated an impromptu mission to jury-rig a ramp so his kindergarten class turtle could climb a level of stairs. The kinds of epiphanies his students experienced while working on the ramp for Bingo the Turtle are invaluable, and would never occur at all unless classrooms are liberate from rigidly-structured, “teacher-proof” curricula.

At every turn, there are villains. Several times, Ayers’s class is visited by self-important bureaucrats designed as buffoonish, literally caricatured characters– the female curriculum cop has no nose and a bob approximately twice the mass of her head. The bureaucrats are quick to label an exuberant student as ADD and come across as lobotomized minions pushing “research-based support and coaching in the areas of planning, technique, and assessment.” They never show any interest in kids.

Despite the crushing tide of standardization and distorted expectations placed on teachers, Ayers is optimistic that thoughtful, liberating teaching is possible. His book is peppered with examples of other teachers getting outside the box. Some encounter hand-wringing discouragement; all persevere in the profession.

First-time graphic novel artist (and teacher) Ryan Alexander-Tanner gives life to Ayers’s vision with sharp black-and-white drawings that provide engaging context for Ayers’s assertions. (In one panel, the author is standing on a wooden box labeled “SOAP.”)

To Teach: The Journey, In Comics is a must for educators and highly encouraged for all. As Jonathan Kozol offers in his foreword, “Here’s what I have to say about this largely autobiographical delight: “Super-good! Lots of mischief! Lots of grit and guts and fun! Zap! Bam! Gadzooks! Hooray!”

Dan Brown is a teacher and the author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle.

Interview: Bill Ayers & Ryan Alexander-Tanner, authors of To Teach: The Journey, in Comics

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

By Todd Blackmore

“In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn’t can you do everything; the question is, can you do anything?”

Bill Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner collaborated on the new nonfiction graphic novel, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics, a plea for smaller classes, better resources for teachers, and standards that push students without punishing them.

You may have heard of Ayers, for all the wrong reasons, so let’s get it out of the way: When Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists” throughout Campaign 2008, she was referring to Bill Ayers. There are countless news articles and Wikipedia entries devoted to Ayers, his radical history as a member of the Weather Underground in the 1970s, and how, decades later, he and Barack Obama met and served on some of the same boards as active community members in Hyde Park, Chicago.

You probably haven’t heard of Ayers’ collaborator, Ryan Alexander-Tanner, a 27-year-old Xeric Foundation Award-winning cartoonist from Portland, Oregon. Alexander-Tanner lived in Hyde Park with Ayers in 2008 at the height of the campaign hysteria, working on a project totally unrelated to all the stories airing about Ayers on the evening news, in an area of Ayers’ expertise that most media outlets ignored.

For over 30 years, Ayers has been a teacher and an advocate for public education. In 1993, he wrote a book about his experiences, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher—part practical guide to teaching, part meditation on the reciprocity of successful teacher-student relationships.

When Columbia University’s Teachers College Press approached Ayers to update To Teach for a third edition, he said that he would only do the book again if he could do it as a comic. Before long, Alexander-Tanner was moving into Ayers’ house and the two were collaborating. The result is To Teach: The Journey, in Comics, just published by Teachers College Press.

At coffee with Ayers and Alexander-Tanner, I talked about adapting prose to panels, collaborative relationships, and what to do when faced with the seemingly inevitable question, “What do I do?”
Click on the images below for an excerpt from, To Teach.

What did you learn from making this book?
BA: I had to learn from Ryan that six pages of text from me could actually result in just two panels. I wrote all these elaborate descriptions of everything and thought every word counted and it turned out that it didn’t. And the way I learned that from him is really what we’re saying with the book.

Do you think that your collaboration making the book was a living example of the fluid, reciprocal student-teacher relationship?
BA: I think the relationship that we built—that’s the heart and soul of teaching. It’s relationships. The idea that teaching is somehow the delivery of the goods is such a misunderstanding of what actually goes on.

RA: This kind of sounds like my “party line,” but it’s true: The best thing about Bill is that he gave me total freedom and the worst thing about Bill is that he gave me total freedom. He really thought that I could just translate this book. And if the original had been a story—if I’d been working on his memoir, Fugitive Days, then I could have adapted it using whatever reference materials were available. But To Teach wasn’t a story or even a bunch of scenes, it was a bunch of ideas. And you can’t just illustrate someone’s ideas without taking a lot of liberties. I didn’t feel like it was my place to tell Bill or anyone else what Bill’s ideas were. So I needed this intense, back-and-forth, ongoing conversation to work out these big ideas. Bill wasn’t so precious about his stuff—there wasn’t a conflict of ownership—and that was inspiring. It freed me up to generate ideas, that constant back-and-forth dialogue.

BA: I would say that collaboration like this is a living example of writing into the contradictions. Not trying to run away from them all the time, but embracing them and letting them drive the project forward. If we hadn’t had the conversation, if we’d just illustrated the existing book as a set of ideas, it would have just been dead. It had to have that tension between ideas and narrative, between Ryan’s experiences and mine, between young and old, between teacher-student and student-teacher, and that’s what the final book came to embody.

RA: When we were working on the pitch our publisher sent me Marx for Beginners and I think they were very much thinking of this [project] like an illustrated textbook, with just these supplemental illustrations. One thing I didn’t like about Marx for Beginners was the notion that maybe it was for beginners because it was a comic. It was important to me that this new visual representation of To Teach was as challenging and had as much depth as the original text. I didn’t want to do the “easy” version, I just wanted to do an alternate version. It’s like turning a book into a movie—it’s a different medium.

You’ve acknowledged that the format of To Teach was influenced by Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. How do you feel about being compared to McCloud?
RA: It’s funny, people are very careful about mentioning Understanding Comics to me, like I’m going to get mad or something, but that’s a great book to be compared to. We both read it and were inspired by it. Another book that we read that had as much influence on To Teach was Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass—maybe my favorite graphic novel ever. That’s another example of taking these large, difficult concepts and translating them into visual ideas. Going back to Understanding Comics: that’s a great book and I’m glad that we have comics on comics, and McCloud does that very well. To truly treat comics as a medium, why not use the same things that are effective in comics on comics to make comics on teaching?

Along with The Wire and Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, is the comics version of To Teach part of a new wave of progressive education reform media?
BA: What comes to my mind, when we point to this book or point to The Wire and other things, is that the discussion on education is a profoundly conflicted discussion and we’re entering that conflict with an approach to teaching that we take to be humanistic and deeply rooted in notions of justice, fairness, decency, honesty, and authenticity. The Wire is by far, in my view, the best critique of No Child Left Behind that’s yet been written and yet the show never mentions No Child Left Behind. That’s the power of art, the power of story. If I were to outline where we are in that fight, I take a lot of hope from seeing, on the ground, people resisting the worst aspects of narrowing the curriculum, narrowing education, thinking of it like a product, like a box of bolts that you buy at the store. It’s not that. Education is a right, it’s a journey, it’s a process, and it’s something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.

What does it mean “to teach” in this kind of dysfunctional, narrowly standardized system?
BA: When you go into a college of education you’ve got aspirations of making a difference in people’s lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education. Then you go working in schools, especially in places like New York City and Chicago that I’m most familiar with, and you find these huge aspirations are beaten out of you in a very systematic way—and still people persevere. What we’re trying to do with the book is present the possibility of entering into that contradiction and being successful in your own mind and in your own way with the children, in terms of offering alternatives to the soul-crushing reality of both teaching and schooling as it’s practiced.

It’s astonishing, looking at Newark, where they’ve cut out everything that doesn’t have to do with test prep for a very narrow standardized test that will punish you. And they keep cutting away so the next thing that’s cut is recess, and yet Newark has the highest childhood obesity rate in the state. So they’ve done away with recess so that these kids can learn the skills to take a test—the most narrow kinds of skills—and that’s the catastrophe waiting to happen. That’s the education you have to overcome, rather than an education that speeds your development and participation in this society.

RA: In a lot of ways I feel like a casualty of the education system. School for me was about getting away with doing as little as possible. When I think of high school, I don’t even think of school. I think of working at the comic book store. I had a job and a girlfriend, and that’s what I remember. Everything else was just going through the motions. I didn’t take the SATs or think that I was going to college. I think at that point in your life, you’re processing a lot of personal shit, so it’s a strange time to be learning Spanish III. I’d say the system failed me, but in the end I made a comic book about it.

Discussions about improving education usually end with overwhelming questions of, “But where do we start?”
BA: The problem is overwhelming, and part of the problem is that the reactionaries who are in the driver’s seat—the privateers and so on—have simple sound bites. You say, “How do we deal with our problems?” And they say, “Charter schools,” or “Fire the teachers.”

RA: “Let’s return this country to what makes it great!”

BA: Exactly. And those kind of things sound great, but they don’t really say much. What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities. One of the great crimes of the Bloomberg/Klein administration [in New York City] is that they’ve removed themselves from communities, as if communities have nothing to say about what their needs and aspirations are for themselves and for their children. It’s the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools. We illustrate that here with the story of the Little Village Lawndale High School.

BA: In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn’t can you do everything; the question is, can you do anything? One of the things that you can do is come into a world like the world of teaching prepared to make a difference in kids’ lives, prepared to change yourself, and prepared to link up with others who can possibly change the world, and that’s what this book invites you to do.

RA: When I come up with a “What do I do?” question, I ask someone like Bill. And sometimes he asks me what to do. That might be terrifying if we all start asking each other what to do, but it’s also hopeful. You don’t sit and have lunch with Bill or read a book and have the answers. There’s no simple answer to any huge, sweeping question, but the act of investigation is a step in the right direction.

Class is almost over. What are your Six-Word-Memoirs?
RA: Oh! Oh! It’s all so amazing!
BA: Hatched; still making my twisty way.

May 17, 2010

New Yorker

Nicholas Lemann’s otherwise excellent review of the current scholarship on terrorism becomes muddled when he attempts to answer the most basic and straightforward question: What is terrorism, anyway (Books, April 26th)? The expert consensus, according to Lemann, includes a few common traits: terrorists have political or ideological objectives, and they intend to spread fear and panic as they intimidate an audience larger than their immediate victims. Good enough, but he then veers off track: terrorists are non-state actors, he claims, which exempts Russia’s brutality in Chechnya, Iraq’s crushing of the Kurds, Sherman’s march to the sea, and countless other horrors and atrocities throughout history designed to cause terror for a political goal. Terrorists, he continues, target ordinary citizens, or, when they kill soldiers, their attacks don’t take place on the field of battle. That’s a convenient tautology: if any conventional government decides to pound a village to dust, it’s a field of battle; if a villager kills a soldier in the exact same spot before the invasion commences, that’s terrorism. Terrorism, according to Webster’s, is “a mode of governing, or of opposing a government, by intimidation.” This definition has the virtue of consistency and fairness; it focuses on the use of coercive violence, whether committed by a religious cult, a political sect, a group of zealots, or the state itself.

William Ayers

Chicago, Ill.

Related Links

Nicholas Lemann’s “Terrorism Studies”

To Teach: The Journey, in Comics by William Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner (Teachers College Press, $15.95 trade paper, 9780807750629/080775062X, May 1, 2010)

The eight chapter titles of To Teach, including “Seeing the Student,” “Creating an Environment for Learning” and “Liberating the Curriculum,” are by no means misleading–they promise a serious assessment of trends in contemporary education, which William Ayers delivers with passion and authority. But the buttoned-up chapter titles don’t really prepare us for the fact that the text (mostly dialogue balloons) and artful cartooning within each chapter are anything but dry and abstract. Using arresting visuals and snappy design for this graphic memoir, Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner succeed in setting the principles from the bland chapter titles spinning with wit and animate concepts you might have worried would be dull. The result is education at its best: you learn and have fun, too.

Alexander-Tanner’s style is especially well-suited to illustrating the contrasts between his own and Ayers’ senses of humor. Alongside Ayers’s discussion of designing the right kind of creative environment, Tanner slips in a visual of his own workspace (in which he also lives): mothers will wring their hands and weep at the chaos and filth that he regards as heaven. And when Ayers proclaims a key point in bold type (“Labelling students has become an epidemic in our schools… [and] suppresses possibility”), Tanner’s cartoon snarkily places him on an upside-down soapbox. Ayers, with self-deprecating humor, loves the joke on himself. Their collaboration here radiates sweet good feeling throughout.

The presentation of Ayers’s ideas in the medium of a graphic memoir is so engaging that many may miss how innovative his thinking is unless we recall our own educational experiences, when exciting classes and great teachers were the exception and boring classes, uninspired instruction and clocks whose hands never seemed to move were the norm. The approaches that Ayers advocates spring not from theory but from the real-world experience of many teachers who strive to create classrooms for active learning. “All teachers must become students of their students,” he proclaims in his call for observing each child as an individual in the classroom; one size does not fit all when it comes to learning.

“We all have lots of things we’re good at and other things we’re learning to do better,” he tells his students in one frame that emphasizes the pluses rather than the minuses. “As long as I live, I am under construction,” he assures us when he invites the rest of us to join in the same kind of continuing adventure.–John McFarland

Shelf Talker: An innovative educator’s graphic memoir that is as sweet, smart and sassy as it is inspiring.

William Ayers is Wyoming-bound.

We’ve kept you abreast of developments regarding the University of Wyoming’s attempt to ban controversial professor William Ayers from speaking on campus — an effort that led to a lawsuit filed by Denver attorney David Lane.

Yesterday, United States District Court Judge William Downes held a hearing in Casper at which the university claimed its actions were motivated by security concerns, not speech issues. But Downes didn’t buy that.

Moments ago, he delivered a ruling videoconferenced to Denver during which he ordered that Ayers be allowed to speak at the university tomorrow.

Downes cited a four-part test in his decision, ruling that Ayers’s free speech had been violated, that the university’s decision to bar him would cause irreparable harm, that his speech would be in the public interest, and that he can speak in the campus’s multipurpose gym. Although he said it’s unclear if the gym is a designated free speech area or a limited public forum, he determined that the point is moot because the school has no written policy establishing its status.

Regarding the security concerns, Downes said, “These fears were based on, at best, veiled or indirect threats and apprehension” — calling it a “heckler’s veto.” He stressed that “fear is not enough to override the First Amendment.”

After reading an e-mail sent to the university by an anonymous individual, who felt school officials were “f-ing morons” for letting Ayers speak, Downes asked, “Where is the threat in that?” The same went for other terms, including “douchebag,” “assholes” and “prick,” as in this sample message: “For those of you who allowed this prick to speak, I think you should eat a mouth full of buck shot… All the worst to you. Mike.”

About the author of this note, Downes said, “Mike is heavily exercised, and he leaves us no doubt about his opinion of Mr. Ayers. But to read that as a direct threat is patently ridiculous.”

Among the precedents cited by Downes was 1965’s Willams v. Wallace, in which Judge Frank Johnson ordered that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr. be allowed to march from Selma to Montgomery — a landmark ruling in the civil rights movement.

Downes added, “The Bill of Rights is a document for all seasons… Mr. Ayers is a citizen who wants to speak. He needn’t have any more justification than that.” He ordered the university to work with the plaintiffs, led by student Meg Lanker, to organize Ayers’ speech, which is slated to take place at the multi-purpose gym on campus tomorrow at a time to be determined.

Lane’s take? “Judge Downes acted in a very courageous fashion,” he says. “This should send a message to universities across the country that they can’t use security as an excuse to stifle free speech.”

The University of Wyoming, which called off a talk by William Ayers, the one-time Weather Underground leader who is now a leading education researcher, is facing new criticism over the move. While Ayers has been canceled before, Wyoming officials were frank about their concerns over political fallout from a visit (as opposed to claiming security or scheduling problems). As a result, a Colorado lawyer, David Lane (also the lawyer for Ward Churchill), announced that he will sue the university for free speech violations unless it invites Ayers, the Associated Press reported. The suite would be filed on behalf of a student who wanted to see him talk on campus.
Inside Higher Education
April 13, 2010

In the current fight over higher public education we might re-affirm our commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, the belief that every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights; each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. And this means that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each; and conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

We want our students to be able to participate and engage, to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions—who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed?—and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. We focus our efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

We might declare that in this corner of this place—in this open space we are constructing together—people will begin to experience themselves as powerful authors of their own narratives, actors in their own dramas, the essential architects and creators of their own lives, participants in a dynamic and inter-connected community-in-the-making. Here they will discover a zillion ways to articulate their own desires and demands and questions. Here everyone will live in search of rather than in accordance with or in accommodation to. As we wrangle over what to pass on to the future generation, and struggle over what to value and how, students must find vehicles and pathways to question the circumstances of their lives, and wonder about how their lives might be otherwise. Free inquiry, free questioning, dialogue and struggle must take their rightful place—at the heart of things.

Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful questioning and free inquiry. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime throughout history. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt.

The cancellation of an invitation to speak to a legitimate campus group at Wyoming in April is a case in point. Of course I would like to come back now, and in fact the only action that would fully repudiate the wrong decision, and then undo the harm, would be for the president himself, author of that weirdly disingenuous statement (based on a profoundly dishonest narrative), to host me. OK, that’s unlikely, but still…

I’ve said to anyone who’s asked that an invitation should in no way be interpreted as an endorsement, and that inviting someone to campus could be, as well, an opportunity to debate, to sharpen arguments, to engage in spirited disagreement. Perhaps that was the case here. I’ve also pointed out that I am in no way the injured party in any of this. I spoke freely a week ago Monday—to myself, my kids, my colleagues and students—and I was fine. The injured party is the group of faculty and students who wanted to engage me—for whatever reasons (and I have only the vaguest sense of who my original host was, or how the talk might have gone). It was their freedom, not mine, that was trampled, out of misplaced fear or petty expediency, or both.

And then one wonders: if my ideas are so toxic, shouldn’t the noisy posse that shouted down the most basic values in a democracy press the university president to scour the library and purge it of all of my books? Perhaps he should head them off by getting their first, burning the books himself. Who else should be purged, and on what basis? Maybe convicted felons (I’m thinking Martha Stewart, George Ryan, G. Gordon Liddy, and Scooter Libby, but not me since I’ve never been convicted of a felony) should be banned. Or bad role models (all eye-of-the-beholder stuff, for sure, but I’m thinking Elliot Spitzer and Tiger Woods). Or advocates of violence as a proper means of social change (definitely not me, no matter what you hear on the blogasylum, but lots and lots and lots of government officials—from virtually every government in the world). And try to think, then, of what standard exists in the mind of the Wyoming president that impels him to ban me, and only me. What if the French Club invites Sarkozy, or the China Club Hu Jinao or Ha Jin, or the Literature Club Junot Diaz or James Frey or Arundhati Roy, or the Prison Rights Club Mark Clements or Ronnie Kitchens or Nelson Mandela? Should there be a panel to scrutinize every potential speaker and certify them as….what, exactly?

Any way, there is something much greater at stake here than some small speech I might have delivered to 75 students. As campuses contract and constrain, the main victims become truth, honesty, integrity, curiosity, imagination, freedom itself. When college campuses fall silent, other victims include the high school history teacher on the west side of Chicago or in Laramie or Cheyenne, the English literature teacher in Detroit, or the math teacher in an Oakland middle school. They and countless others immediately get the message: be careful what you say; stay close to the official story; stick to the authorized text; keep quiet with your head covered. Oh, freedom.

Wyoming is taking a step onto a slippery slope, and I think journalists, right next to academics and librarians, ought to dispense with the tired and bloodless “he said” and then “he said” and then “he said” form of reporting, and try to explain the serious issues underneath all of this, which have everything to do with whether the public space can be spared for a while longer. Everyone in Wyoming, whatever their politics and orientations, have a stake in the outcome.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A delightful video emerged from the recent student-led struggles at the University of California organized to resist the grinding and relentless undoing of public higher education: a student attends to her daily routine, writing, reading, sitting in a lecture hall, while the camera focuses here and there, and a voice-over intones: “Pen: $1.69; Textbook: $38; Backpack: $69; Dinner (a tiny packet of dry noodles!): $.50…” And at the end of the list: “Education [pause]…Priceless.” The tag-line is perfect: “There are some things that money can’t buy; don’t let education be one of them.”

The crisis in public higher education (mirror to the crisis in K-12 schooling) is not a joke at all: tuition and fees are sky-rocketing across the country, and are already out of reach for millions; staff cut-backs, lay-offs, and reductions in student services have become common-place; massive student loans have replaced grants and scholarships; class-size is increasing while course offerings are decreasing; hiring freezes and pay-cuts and unpaid mandatory furloughs are on the rise as tenure-track positions are eliminated. These and other “short-term” strategies for dealing with the financial crisis are consistent with the overall direction that has characterized public higher education for decades: “restructuring” as biz-speak for a single-minded focus on the bottom line. And all of this is part of a larger crisis of the state, and larger choices about who pays, and who suffers.

A few snapshots: state support for the University of Illinois system stands at about 16% today, down from 48% two decades ago. In California state colleges will turn away 40,000 qualified students this year, while the community colleges, in a cascading effect, will turn away 100,000. And this year a 32% fee hike is proposed at the University of California at Berkeley, (a proposal that triggered the current student movement there) while the school pays its football coach $2.8 million a year, and is just completing a $400 million renovation of the football stadium. The sports reporter Dave Zirin sums this mess up nicely: “This is what students see: boosters and alumni come first, while they’ve been instructed to cheer their teams, pay their loans, and mind their business.”

These and similar trends are national in scope and impact: the average college graduate is between $20,000 and $30,000 in debt for student loans (not including credit card and other debt), compared to $9,000 in 1994; Pell Grants cover less than 32% of annual college costs; less than 20% of graduate students are unionized, and student labor at below market wages keeps the whole enterprise afloat; tenured and tenure-tack faculty are disappearing, today holding barely 30% of all faculty lines; out-of-state students are increasing in most public schools because they pay significantly higher tuitions, and that pattern is turning public colleges and universities into “engines of inequality,” places with both less access and less equity, less social justice and fewer highly qualified students, private schools in fact, while remaining pubic in name only.

But even this grim picture can be brought into sharper, and it turns out, more painful focus. California spends more on prisons than on higher education—across the country, spending on corrections is six times higher than spending on higher education—and from 1985-2000 Illinois increased spending on higher education by 30% while corrections shot up100%. Here we get a clearer insight into the budget crises that are being rationalized and balanced on our heads: a permanent war economy married to a prison society, with the abused and neglected offspring paying for the sins of the parents.

I’ve been reminded again and again of Don DeLillo’s grimly funny and super-smart novel White Noise, whose narrator is Jack Gladney, a professor of “Hitler Studies” at a small mid-western college, who is sleep-walking through his life to the dull background sounds of TV and endless radio, the muzac of consumerism and electronics, unrestrained advertising and constant technological innovation, appliances and microwaves. When an industrial accident creates what is at first described officially as a “feathery plume,” but later becomes a “black billowing cloud,” and finally an “airborne toxic event,” everything becomes a bit unhinged. Jack’s response to an order to evacuate is disbelief: “I’m not just a college professor,” he whines. “I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.”

Well, not anymore, Jack. Our own feathery cloud has turned toxic at breath-taking speed, and those folks in the mobile homes might be your natural allies after all. When the administration at Cal closed the libraries and restricted hours of operation to save money, students implemented a 24-hour “Study-In” where they were joined by faculty as well as community members who had never before had access. Folks joined hands and chanted, “Whose university? Our university!” As one grad student said: “When we started we wanted to save the university; today we want to transform it, to decolonize it, to open it up.”

Higher education itself is being radically redefined by the wealthy privateers and the neo-liberals as a product to be bought and sold at the marketplace, a commodity like a car, a box of bolts, or a toilet, rather than either a right (something fought for by generations) or an intellectual, ethical, and spiritual journey (education as enlightenment and liberation). The meteoric rise of for-profit universities (and the mindlessly trailing along by eager university administrators grasping their freshly-minted MBA’s) is one part of that trend. Another piece is private universities competing to secure their advantages at the expense of their “competitors” as well as the public: Harvard with its $36 billion endowment, Northwestern with $7 billion. (Northwestern’s new president offered the silly sentiment that he was hoping to make his university “elite without being elitist,” and one wonders exactly what “public” or “common” interest these tax-exempt institutions serve?)

Perhaps it’s time to envision the world we want to inhabit, and then to begin to live it, here and now, on campus and off. Here are a few possible campaigns as starting points to get our creative and activist juices flowing: cancel all outstanding student debt (good enough for the banks, why not us?); equal pay for equal work; truth in language (a furlough is not a camping trip, it’s a pay-cut; “selective admissions” is more honestly restrictive admissions); universal free open-access high quality public post-secondary schools (whew!).

The current frontal attack on higher public education is an attack on democracy itself. Education is a perennial battleground, for it’s where we ask ourselves who we are as people, what it means to be human here and now, and what world we hope to inhabit. It’s where we assess our chances and access our choices, and it’s where we take up dynamic questions of morality and ethics, identity and location, agency and action. We want to know more, to see more, to experience more in order to do more—to be more competent and powerful and capable in our projects and our pursuits, to be more astute and aware and wide-awake, more fully engaged in the world that we inherit, a world we are simultaneously destined to change.

On March 30, 2010, officials at the University of Wyoming, citing “security threats” and “controversy,” canceled two talks I was invited to give in early April, 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.” I’d been invited in August, 2009, but one week before I was to travel to Laramie, I was told I had been “disinvited.”

In February, as the University began to publicize my scheduled visit, a campaign to rescind the invitation was initiated on right-wing blogs, accelerating quickly to a wider space where a demonizing and dishonest narrative dominated all discussion. A wave of hateful messages and death threats hit the University, and was joined soon enough by a few political leaders and wealthy donors instructing officials in ominous tones to cancel my visit to the campus. On March 28 an administrator wrote to tell me that the University was receiving vicious e-mails and threatening letters, as well as promises of physical disruption were I to show up. This is becoming drearily familiar to me, as I’ll explain.

A particularly despicable note from Frank Smith who lives in Cheyenne and is active in the Wyoming Patriot Alliance, said, “Maybe someone could take him out and show him the Matthew Sheppard (sic) Commerative (sic) Fence and he could bless it or something.” He was referring to Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was tortured and murdered in 1998, left to die tied to a storm fence outside Laramie.

Republican candidate for Governor Ron Micheli released a letter he’d sent to all members of the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees asking them to rescind the invitation. Matt Mead, another gubernatorial candidate, said through a press release that while he is a self-described “fervent believer in free speech and the free exchange of ideas,” that still allowing me to speak would be “reprehensible.” He concluded that I should have “no place lecturing our students.”

I sympathized with the University, and told the folks I was in touch with how sorry I was that all of this was happening to them. I also said that I thought it was a bit of a tempest in a tea pot, and that it would surely pass. Certainly no matter what a couple of thugs threatened to do, I said, I thought that Wyoming law enforcement could get me to the podium, and I would handle myself from there, as I do elsewhere. I said I thought we should stand together and refuse to accede to these kinds of pressures to demonize someone and suppress students’ right to freely engage in open dialogue. After all a public university is not the personal fiefdom or the political clubhouse of the governor, and donors are not permitted to call the shots when it comes to the content or conduct of academic matters. We should not allow ourselves to collapse in fear if a small mob gathers with torches at the gates. I wouldn’t force myself on the University, of course, but I felt that canceling would be terribly unfair to the faculty and students who had invited me, and would send a big message that bullying works. It would be another step down the slippery slope of giving up on the precious ideal of a free university in a free society.

No good. On March 30, 2010 the University posted an announcement of the cancellation of my visit with a long and rambling comment from President Tom Buchanan. He begins with the obligatory assertion that academic freedom is a core principle of the University, but quickly adds that “freedom requires a commensurate dose of responsibility.” We are charged to enact free speech and thought “in concert with mutual respect.”

Nothing that I did or said in this matter was disrespectful or irresponsible, and yet, in the absence of specific references, readers are led to imagine all kinds of offenses.

The announcement is punctuated with a deep defensiveness: anyone who thinks the University “caved in to external pressure,” Buchanan writes, would be “incorrect.” Anticipating what any casual observer would conclude, he builds a strained and somewhat desperate counter-narrative. Buchanan pleads that UW is “one of the few institutions remaining in today’s environment that garners the confidence of the public,” and that a speech by me would somehow undermine that confidence.

He concludes that “this episode illustrated an opportunity to hear and critically evaluate a variety of ideas thoughtfully, through open, reasoned, and civil debate, it also demonstrates that we must be mindful of the real consequences our actions and decisions have on others.” That’s some sentence, and while it’s impossible to know definitively what he’s referring to as the “episode” (it might be the public lecture itself, but then it could be the cancellation of the lecture, or even the barbarians at the gates threatening to burn the place down, or withhold funds, that would provide the opportunity to critically evaluate matters). It has an unmistakable Orwellian ring: we cancelled that lecture as an expression of our support for lectures! And it’s eerily similar to the classics: we destroyed that village in order to save it! Work will make you free! War is peace!

One of the truly weird qualities of the Buchanan statement is a hole in its center, the deafening silence concerning why the campaign against me was organized in the first place. The reason is familiar to me as noted: in the 1960’s I was a leader of the militant anti-war group, Students for a Democratic Society, and then a founder of the Weather Underground, an organization that carried out dramatic symbolic attacks against several monuments to war and racism, crossed lines of legality, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense. And then during the 2008 presidential I was unwittingly and unwillingly thrust upon the stage because I had known—like thousands of others—Barack Obama in Chicago. The infamous charge that the candidate was “pallin around with terrorists,” designed to injure Obama, also demonized me. I’ve been an educator and professor for decades, but the hard right has accelerated the lunacy against thousands of folks— activists and artists, academics and theorists, outspoken radical thinkers—and wherever possible mounted campaigns exactly like the one in Wyoming. Often university officials stand up on principle and resist the howling mob, as they did recently at St. Mary’s in California; sometimes—as at a student-run conference at the University of Pittsburgh in March—they compromise, restricting access to talks and surrounding a speaker with unwanted and unnecessary police protection; sometimes, as in this case, the university turns and runs. It’s a sad sight.

Of course I wasn’t invited to speak about any of this, and it’s unlikely any of it would have come up without the active campaigning and noisy thunder from the relatively tiny group that is the ultra-right.

I would have focused my talk on the unique characteristics of education in a democracy, an enterprise that rests on the twin pillars of enlightenment and liberation, knowledge and human freedom. Education engages dynamic questions of morality and ethics, identity and location, agency and action. We want to know more, to see more, to experience more in order to do more—to be more competent and powerful and capable in our projects and our pursuits, to be more astute and aware and wide-awake, more fully engaged in the world that we inherit, the world we are simultaneously destined to change.

To deny students the right to question the circumstances of their lives, and to wonder how they might be otherwise, is to deny democracy itself.

It’s reasonable to assume that education in a democracy is distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy; surely school leaders in fascist Germany or Albania or Saudi Arabia or apartheid South Africa all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters; they also graduated fine scientists and musicians and athletes, so none of those things differentiate a democratic education from any other.

What makes education in a democracy, at least theoretically, distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights; each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. Democracy is geared toward participation and engagement, and that points to an educational system in which the fullest development of all is seen as the necessary condition for the full development of each, and conversely, that the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

In a vibrant and participatory democracy, we might conclude that whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their children is precisely the baseline and standard for what the wider community wants for all of its children. If children of privilege get to have small classes, abundant resources, and a curriculum based on opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the furthest limit, if the Obama kids, for example, attend such a school, one where they also find a respected and unionized teacher corps, shouldn’t that be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere? Any other ideal for our schools, in John Dewey’s words, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions—who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed?—and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. Our efforts focus not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

Teaching in a democracy encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education in a democracy is always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider world.

How do our schools at every level—K-16—measure up to the democratic ideal?

Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt. While many long for an education that is transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce schooling to a kind of glorified clerking that passes along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run.

Educators, students, and citizens must press for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving public schools—including public higher education—of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served. All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers.
We might try now to create open spaces in our schools and our various communities where we expect fresh and startling winds to blow, unaccustomed winds that are sure to electrify and confound and fascinate us. We begin by throwing open the windows. We declare that in this corner of this place—in this open space we are constructing together—people will begin to experience themselves as powerful authors of their own narratives, actors in their own dramas, the essential architects and creators of their own lives, participants in a dynamic and inter-connected community-in-the-making. Here they will discover a zillion ways to articulate their own desires and demands and questions. Here everyone will live in search of rather than in accordance with or in accommodation to. Here we will join one another and our democratic futures can be born.

A primary job of teachers and scholars and journalists, and a responsibility of all engaged citizens, is to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of all authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows must be nourished and not crushed.

As campuses contract and constrain, the main victims becomes truth, honesty, integrity, curiosity, imagination, freedom itself. When college campuses fall silent, other victims include the high school history teacher on the west side of Chicago or in Laramie or Cheyenne, the English literature teacher in Detroit, or the math teacher in an Oakland middle school. They and countless others immediately get the message: be careful what you say; stay close to the official story; stick to the authorized text; keep quiet with your head covered.

In Brecht’s play Galileo the great astronomer set forth into a world dominated by a mighty church and an authoritarian power: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declared recklessly. Intoxicated with his own insights, Galileo found himself propelled toward revolution. Not only did his radical discoveries about the movement of the stars free them from the “crystal vault” that received truth insistently claimed fastened them to the sky, but his insights suggested something even more dangerous: that we, too, are embarked on a great voyage, that we are free and without the easy support that dogma provides. Here Galileo raised the stakes and risked taking on the establishment in the realm of its own authority, and it struck back fiercely. Forced to renounce his life’s work under the exquisite pressure of the Inquisition, he denounced what he knew to be true, and was welcomed back into the church and the ranks of the faithful, but exiled from humanity—by his own word. A former student confronted him in the street then: “Many on all sides followed you…believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching— in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”

This is surely in play today: the right to talk to whomever you please, the right to read and wonder, the right to pursue an argument into uncharted spaces, the right to challenge the state or the church and its orthodoxy in the public square. The right to think at all.

This is some of what I would have discussed in Wyoming, but that will not happen, at least not this week. Canceling this talk underlines the urgency of having multiple and far-ranging speeches, dialogue, and discussions at every level and throughout the public square.