• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

Nebraska tells Ayers to stay away

Sandhusker

Well-known member
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln rescinded its speaking invitation tonight for 1960s radical-turned-educator William Ayers.

Just 11 days after next month’s election, the University of Illinois-Chicago professor, William Ayers, is scheduled to speak at a student research conference held by the UNL College of Education and Human Science.University officials cited "safety reasons" for canceling Ayers' Nov. 15 appearance.

Spokeswoman Kelly Bartling declined to elaborate on what safety concerns would keep Ayers from addressing a College of Education and Human Sciences event.

Earlier today, Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman strongly condemned the invitation and called on the NU Board of Regents and President J.B. Milliken to block it.

Heineman said through a spokeswoman this evening that he was pleased the university had reconsidered and rescinded the invitation.

An Omaha charitable foundation had announced it was pulling all of its contributions to the university. Several other donors also have indicated to university fundraisers that there could be a financial cost if Ayers speaks.

And Nebraskans by the hundreds continued to register their opposition with university administrators and others, lighting up phone lines and filling e-mail boxes.

Heineman said Ayers' invitation was "an embarrassment" to the state and that it goes beyond the bounds of the university's mission.

"Our citizens are clearly outraged and want action," Heineman said in an interview. "This is their university. This isn't even a close call. The university should immediately rescind the invitation."

Dean Marjorie Kostelnik said she spoke Thursday night with UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman about "the climate around this issue."

She said she also has spoken with representatives of Milliken's office.

Other public officials weighed in about Ayers on Friday, a day after the UNL speech was announced.

Both Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat, and Rep. Lee Terry, a Republican, called for cancellation of the speech.

"The invitation made to William Ayers to speak at my alma mater in the midst of a heated national election when he is such a highly controversial figure is an outrage," Terry said.

Nelson said the visit would not promote the unity now needed in the nation.

Attorney General Jon Bruning also said UNL made the correct choice.

"I think its good news for the university," he said. "I dont think there was any good way for the university to disassociate itself with his past."

State Auditor Mike Foley sent the university a long request for information on Ayers' trip, its planning and how it is being funded. UNL officials have said Ayers' appearance would be privately funded.

Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical group that staged domestic bombings to protest the Vietnam War. Ayers was charged with conspiracy to incite riots, but the charges were dropped because of misconduct by prosecutors.

Ayers went on to gain respect in the education field and become a scholar known for his ideas on school reform. At UNL, the plan was for him to limit his speech to graduate education students to that topic.

The invitation to Ayers was extended in February, long before he became a household name in this year's presidential election because of his ties to candidate Sen. Barack Obama through their shared work a few years ago with a school reform effort.

The Gilbert M. and Martha H. Hitchcock Foundation in Omaha told the university Friday that it would halt all contributions to the university unless the UNL education faculty rescinded Ayers' invitation. The foundation has given millions to the university in the past.

While other donors haven't been as explicit, Clarence Castner, who leads the University of Nebraska Foundation, said it became clear that other contributions were "in jeopardy."

Scholars said a decision to pull an invitation to Ayers could be seen by educators nationally as a school-sponsored curb on academic freedom.

It would make UNL a less attractive school to the faculty members it seeks to recruit, said David Moshman, a UNL education professor writing a book on academic freedom.

Heineman said Friday that "there is no way" the university should lose contributions over Ayers. There are plenty of other respected educators the university could invite to speak, he said.
 

loomixguy

Well-known member
That is the smartest thing the Rodents have done in YEARS!!!

I am an '82 Alum, and my brother is a '69 Alum with a JD in '72, and both of us always thought that the "Profs" on City Campus were a bunch of Commie Pinko Sword fighters.

East Campus, with the likes of RB Warren, Ted Doane, Keith Gilster, and Dr. Flowerday was a man's world. Even Jack Shinstock and Sleepy George Peterson had a pair!

I think the Rodents and Harvey realized that the U stood to lose a whole bunch of dough if Ayres set foot on UNL soil.
 

fff

Well-known member
The fact that they even invited him shows how unimportant most people think his past is. He's worked and grown his reputation as an educational guru enough to get invited to Nebraska and recognized with civic awards in other places. This sudden attention to his radical past may hurt that, but there's a movie script about his life being circulated around that will probably be helped by all the attention.
 

MsSage

Well-known member
"Social Justice” and Other High School Indoctrinations
By Sol Stern
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, April 13, 2006

Leftist political indoctrination in the classroom is now even more pernicious in K-12 education than it is on the university campus. While their protestations are often a sham, the higher education professorate at least pays lip service to the ideal of political neutrality in the classroom and of disinterested scholarship. When there have been revelations of professors egregiously indoctrinating students in leftist political views or intimidating conservative students (as in the Ward Churchill case) administrators have responded that these are isolated examples. When confronted with surveys showing that liberals outnumber conservatives in their humanities departments by a factor of 10-1 – or greater – these administrators usually argue that this is irrelevant, because professors are in any case duty bound to keep their personal political views out of the classroom.

Thus the job of reforming higher education can be advanced by revealing the professorate’s hypocrisy, and then by challenging the universities to live up to their own stated ideals. The situation is altogether worse in K-12 education (although perhaps less hypocritical.) Here we have many of the nation’s leading teacher training and professional institutions stating openly that it is the obligation of all caring K-!2 teachers to help mold their students’ attitudes on controversial political and social issues. These institutions openly support the idea of teaching and advocating for “social justice,” “peace,” “diversity” and “multiculturalism” in the classroom.

Nor is there any doubt as to what is meant politically by these objectives. For example, the goal of “social justice” as presented in teacher training is biased towards the idea of equal outcomes and racial preferences, rather than equal opportunity and meritocracy. As defined by the education schools, social justice teaching does not allow a teacher, say, to propose in the classroom that democratic capitalism has historically produced the most just society. Nor is it likely that a teacher in training in the education schools would be encouraged to suggest to students that the best way to achieve world peace is to deter aggression through maintaining the military superiority of the United States.

At Teachers College, Columbia University, one of the oldest and most prestigious graduate education schools in the United States, the ideal of “teaching for social justice” is literally infused throughout the curriculum and helps define the mission of the college. The “scholarly” publishing ventures of the college – Teachers College Record and Teachers College Press – grind out a steady stream of articles and books extolling the benefits of training teachers to advocate for social justice in the classroom.

One of the leaders in this effort is William Ayers, who took a doctorate in early childhood education from Teachers College in the late 1980s and is now Distinguished Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ayers will be remembered as one of the leaders of the Weather Underground of the 1960s and 1970s. He participated in numerous acts of terrorism against our democratic institutions during that period, including planting a bomb in the Pentagon. Coming up from the underground in the early 1980s, Ayers found a second act for himself as an education professor (thereby proving F. Scott Fitzgerald wrong.) Without having expressed a word of repentance for his terrorist past, Ayers now promotes the infusion of “social justice” teaching throughout the K-12 curriculum. In fact, Ayers convinced Teachers College Press to launch a book series on social justice curriculums.

“Teaching for social justice continues the difficult task of constructing and reinvigorating a public,” says Ayers. “It builds on a fundamental message of the teacher – you must change your life – and goes a notch deeper: you can change the world.” And, according to Ayers and Teachers College, teachers can “change the world” not only in the social studies classroom, but in every discipline, including science and math. Thus one of the volumes in the book series is titled “Teaching Science for Social Justice.”

Here’s a sample of the Teachers College approach to teaching science: “Science education for social justice is transformative for all participants. Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself, in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative implies not only how science is a political activity, but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their lives.”

Now you might think this so unredeemingly stupid and totalitarian that it would fall of its own weight, that it couldn’t possibly have any effect on the real world of American public schools. Well think again. One of the authors of the above statement, Maria S. Rivera Maulucci, is the director of the Region 1 Science and Technology Center of the New York City Department of Education. She supervises science instruction for over 100 schools. And all New York City teachers have been given a curriculum guide that is dominated by the ideas of a radical education guru from Australia named Brian Cambourne, who believes that all teachers ought to strive to inculcate in their students a “literacy for social equity and social justice.”

A few days ago we learned about an 8th grade science teacher, also a Democratic party candidate for the Alabama state legislature, who showed an obscenity laden anti-Bush video to his students. Perhaps he was inspired by the Teachers College Press book on using the science classroom for social justice.

Since each prospective K-12 teacher trained in one of our education schools is likely to go on to affect the lives of thousands of American students, it should be clear why the American public and our elected officials should be concerned about how those teachers are trained and what they are learning, about what is permissible and not permissible in the classroom.

Ideas have consequences. At the present time there are a lot of bad ideas about classroom teaching percolating around the nation’s education schools. It’s those bad ideas that produced someone like Jay Bennish, the Colorado high school who delivered a 20 minute anti-American rant in the classroom and who was exposed by Sean Allen, one of his students. But we shouldn't have to rely on 16 year old high school students bringing tape recorders into the classroom to alert us to examples of wrongdoing.

The public schools are our schools. We pay the taxes that sustain them. Lacking alternatives, most of us are forced to send our children to schools that may be dominated by Bill Ayer’s totalitarian cast of mind. We – that is parents and taxpayers – should cut these pernicious doctrines off at the source, by demanding that our education schools and our teacher organizations themselves adopt a professional code of ethics, something like a Hippocratic Oath for educators. That code of ethics should say clearly and unequivocally that the role of the classroom teacher is to teach the basic skills, to mold students intellectually, not turn them into activists for any social or political cause. If the educators won't do this voluntarily, then let the legislators do it for them.
[/url]
 

fff

Well-known member
So where do you stand on teaching Creationism in school?

And I'm totally shocked:

If the educators won't do this voluntarily, then let the legislators do it for them.

You want to turn our schools over to politicans? At a time the Democratic Party seems to be on the rise? :lol:
 

loomixguy

Well-known member
No, it shows that the tards who invited him did not even take the time to do a google search on Ayers.

YOU invite him to speak at YOUR alma mater. Grade school assemblies are always popular.
 

MsSage

Well-known member
No I do NOT want politics in schools. BUT they DO.
As for teaching Creationism in schools Yes but so does Darwinism.
Children need to be shown both.
 

Yanuck

Well-known member
Seems like the Obama connection isn't helping Ayers career out any! for the first time in my life I can say honestly say and mean it.....GO BIG RED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

jigs

Well-known member
Yanuck said:
Seems like the Obama connection isn't helping Ayers career out any! for the first time in my life I can say honestly say and mean it.....GO BIG RED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


not gonna hear me say that....ever!
 

Yanuck

Well-known member
jigs said:
Yanuck said:
Seems like the Obama connection isn't helping Ayers career out any! for the first time in my life I can say honestly say and mean it.....GO BIG RED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


not gonna hear me say that....ever!

Well...what can I say, I'd rather be patriotic this way than Joe Biden's way of paying more taxes!
 

fff

Well-known member
MsSage said:
No I do NOT want politics in schools. BUT they DO.
As for teaching Creationism in schools Yes but so does Darwinism.
Children need to be shown both.

Various courts have ruled Creationism is religion. I don't know any school that teaches "Darwinism".
 
Top