Raleigh PR| Triangle Educators Speak Out On Ayers

Controversial Professor Is Central To Presidential Election Race

Faculty members at any of the Triangle’s major universities frequently find themselves in the spotlight, be it for recognition of achievement or research news. But sometimes the story is less than glowing — such as today’s revelation by Eric Ferreri of The News and Observer that several members of local academia have signed a national petition giving support to Bill Ayers.

I’ll stay out of the political muck in discussing Ayers. Essentially, he and wife Bernadine founded radical group Weather Underground in 1969, and were indicted a year later on charges of inciting to riot and conspiracy to bomb public buildings, but due to prosecutorial misconduct, all charges were dropped. Still, Weather Underground did carry out bombings that killed people, although Ayers was not accused in relation to any fatal incident.

Today, Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and wife Bernadine teaches at the Northwestern University law school. Bill Ayers has, by many accounts, reformed into a premier scholar on education.

But as many have launched questions as to the extent of the relationship between Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and Ayers, several local professors have put themselves out there in defense of Ayers, who they say has atoned for crimes committed four decades ago and thus is no different from a reformed ex-convict.

Of course, the faculties of Triangle universities have long championed their free speech as an indication of how forward-thinking the state’s higher education proves to be. Most famous is Duke University’s “Group of 88″, whose advertisement in the school’s newspaper helped fuel the controversy surrounding the Duke lacrosse case in 2006.

Should local professors willingly embroil themselves into these issues, knowing that their actions might reflect on the institutions they work with? It’s a gutsy move to defend Ayers, and in this case — that is, defending someone who has garnered praise for his higher education work — their input is relevant. But after instances such as the “Group of 88,” careful consideration is necessary. Schools such as UNC and Duke — who both employ professors on the Ayers petition — are not going to stifle free speech anytime soon, and they shouldn’t. But whenever their representatives step into a heated debate, they must remember that our esteemed academic reputation isn’t bulletproof.

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