Public Enemy Read online

  I’d been invited to give a named lecture on urban education at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. When I got a call from a dean there, I was sure we were about to have the same old well-worn conversation regarding opposition, security, “Hope you agree,” “so, so sorry,” “blah blah blah.” But she surprised me: “We are all outraged by the manufactured turmoil that’s engulfed us in the wake of the announcement of your upcoming lecture,” she began. She was calling to arrange a conference-call between me and a half-dozen top officials to discuss how to respond to the craziness, and even how to “make the controversy a teachable moment.”

  The conversation a few days later was the most thoughtful and principled I’d known throughout all the crying frenzy. The administration was determined to host me in a safe and orderly environment and hold all scheduled events—informal conversations with small groups of students and alums, a planned semiformal dinner to honor the funder, and the campus-wide lecture—and determined as well to defend academic freedom and give their students and the public a lesson in intellectual courage. The officials assured me that defending the lecture was not a burden to them, but rather it was their duty and their honor. “It’s not about you personally,” one said. “It’s about the mission and the meaning of the university.” They then reviewed a letter written to the campus community by the university president, Francine G. McNairy, an African American woman, outlining the purpose of the lecture and the reason it would not be canceled. She wrote, in part:

  A long-accepted value in higher education is that free inquiry is indispensable to the advancement of knowledge. History is replete with examples of ideas that are now precepts of human knowledge that were initially suppressed because their authors were considered heretics or radicals. The focus of the faculty committee, which more than a year ago invited Dr. Ayers to speak, was to advance the dialogue about effective ideas and successful approaches for closing the educational achievement gap between urban students and their non-urban counterparts. This selection was made devoid of political litmus tests for authors. From an objective standpoint, what should matter are which ideas and approaches work and not who develops them. Free inquiry and free speech are critical elements of academic freedom, which thoughtful Americans from our founding fathers to U.S. presidents and Supreme Court justices, more than 200 years later, have judged essential to preparing students to be productive citizens. University administrators have the obligation to support academic freedom in the academy just as public officials are obliged to support free speech in a democratic society. The protection of academic freedom is necessary to afford faculty and students the right to consider and weigh the value of ideas from all sources.

  The head of campus police reviewed some of the threats they’d received, many directed at me, of course, and plenty aimed personally and with vile specificity at President McNairy, and outlined a complicated plan that seemed overly elaborate to me, but I figured that they knew better than I, and what the hell.

  I was told I’d be picked up at the Harrisburg airport, and as I walked toward baggage claim I searched for my name on one of the little signs held by various drivers. One driver nodded insistently and smiled, and so I nodded and smiled back, but his sign read: “Mr. Bellamy.” He gestured in my direction, pushing the sign toward me, and said in a whisper, “Mr. Bellamy, Mr. Bellamy.” “I’m not Mr. Bellamy,” I said, as he took my elbow, glancing around surreptitiously, and steered me away, speaking softly. “Didn’t you get the e-mail?” he asked. “You’re Mr. Bellamy.” Ah, spycraft, of course!

  He dropped me at a hotel they’d reserved, telling me that the room was reserved for “Mr. Bellamy.” The clerk who registered me at the front desk asked me to sign in—“Mr. Bellamy”—and then asked for a credit card to put on file for incidentals. Suddenly I was underground again, and I had no ID for “Mr. Bellamy” and no idea what to do—all my ancient underground skills vanished.

  I froze.

  Next day the campus was locked down—state troopers with bomb-sniffing dogs, sheriff’s deputies patrolling with unholstered weapons, city and campus police checking IDs and monitoring the scene. The talk was piped into an overflow auditorium, and while it went off without a hitch, I think Millersville will stay away from radical speakers for a while.

  The campaign to demonize and blacklist me was nationally organized, and so picket lines were arranged at every talk I gave. Some were small and sociable, like the one in the tiny town of Arcata, California, where I posed arm in arm with a smiling protestor and her bold red sign “Bill Ayers is a TERRORIST!” And some were large and angry, like the one outside St. Mary’s College near Oakland, where Bill O’Reilly had orchestrated and stirred the mob from his perch at Fox News. “There are enemies in our midst,” he’d insisted, and I was public enemy number one. St. Mary’s was special because Larry Grathwohl, a paid police informant who hung around SDS briefly back in the day, was going to address the crowd. Larry had written a book about the Weather Underground claiming that our apocalyptic plans were to “eliminate 25 million die-hard capitalists.” In light of all the fresh publicity and renewed interest in all-things Weather, Larry was dragging himself out of retirement and rebooting his career as a right-wing warrior with several embellishments, including the double fiction that he had once been an “FBI agent” and that he had infiltrated the Weather Underground. Neither was true.

  At St. Mary’s a man waving an oversized copy of the St. James bible above his head with both hands and quoting the Gospel at the top of his voice rushed toward the podium where I was speaking; in Springfield a couple of people threw tomatoes and eggs; and in Oregon someone was stopped by campus police just short of smacking me in the head with a hard-bound copy of Atlas Shrugged. But mostly folks were as friendly as they could be.

  In Fresno I had half an hour before I was scheduled to speak to a church group, so I went out to chat with the Tea Party picketers and invited them in. The first two guys I met carried signs saying “Ayers Go Home!” I introduced myself and asked what they had against me. “Oh, nothing,” one of them replied gently. “We heard you were friends with Obama, and we can’t stand Obama.” “Whoa,” I said. “That’s not fair—guilt by association.”

  At another event I suggested to a picketer wearing a Ron Paul T-shirt that he and I likely had more in common than he imagined.

  “Like what?” he said.

  “Like full GLBTQ rights,” I said.

  “OK, full gay rights—agreed.”

  “Including the right to marry,” I continued.

  “No,” he said. “The state has no place in the marriage business—none. If for some reason people want to get married, don’t ask me why anyone would, well then leave it to their church or magic circle or cult or commune—and keep the government entirely out of it.”

  I enthusiastically agreed—you’ve convinced me! “No state-sanctioned marriage whatsoever, gay or straight,” I said, “and full equality.”

  We shook hands, and before I could make a pitch for Medicare for all, a fellow picketer stepped up looking distressed. He was wearing a large wooden cross and carrying a sign that said “Ayers/Obama—The Devil’s Workshop,” and told my new comrade, “Homosexuality is an abomination!” I urged them to work out their differences on queer rights while I went back inside to speak.

  At Georgia Southern University—invited, canceled, and finally rescheduled—there was a huge police presence and a crazy meandering route through basement tunnels to the stage. As I stepped to the podium, a large contingent of Hell’s Angels in full regalia and with Tea Party Patriot patches prominently displayed on their arms shambled in and took the first two rows, scowling up at me. I paused as they settled in, welcomed them, and began.

  After forty minutes the floor was opened for questions, and first to the microphone was the leader of the Angels, a bony Viet Nam–era vet named Rooster with faded tattoos covering his arms. “I’m surprised to tell you that I agreed with most of what you said,” he growled. �
��But I worry that you’re a big-government guy.” Rooster wasn’t sure why he thought that, but he was concerned. I tried to reassure him. “The main function of any government anywhere is to tax and spend,” I said, “and so the only real question is who do you want to tax, how much, and what and where do you want to spend the money? You rode up here on a government-built highway; some of you might even say you took the socialist road. Maybe you thought to yourself as you rolled over those bridges and passed the libraries and sewerage treatment plants and the fresh water canals that that was all money well spent. I know I do. When Mayor Daley sold the Chicago Skyway to a profit-making corporation, the tolls skyrocketed and the profiteers still got public money and tax breaks, and most Chicagoans were pretty pissed off. What’s so great about profit and greed? Give us back our Skyway!”

  “I like that,” Rooster said chuckling.

  “But,” I went on, “maybe as a small-government guy you’ll agree with me that we should immediately close down the Pentagon—save a trillion dollars in one stroke.” There was a burst of applause.

  “Not the Pentagon,” Rooster objected.

  “So now you’re the big-government guy,” I pointed out.

  After I’d signed a bunch of books and the event was officially over, I left the auditorium with my friend and host, the incomparable Professor Ming Fang He, education scholar, survivor of the Cultural Revolution, and self-described “Chinese redneck” (“because I am a sun-burned peasant too”). We found Rooster and his girlfriend, Rose, and a dozen more Hell’s Angels waiting for us in the parking lot. I thought they were going to kick the shit out of me, but instead they just wanted to keep talking.

  Ming Fang called her friend Min Chuan Yu, chef and owner at Shui Wah Chinese Cuisine, a dim sum place in downtown Statesboro, and wondered if she would be willing to stay open to accommodate some out-of-town scholars. “Come soon,” she urged, and we jumped in Ming Fang’s car and led the noisy motorcycle gang into town. Perhaps Min Chuan was surprised to see our motley crew file in, but she didn’t blink or give a hint of disapproval, bowing politely and welcoming everyone in turn. Each Hell’s Angel bowed in response—a sight to see—and soon we settled in to a feast of har gau, barbecued pork buns, and crispy calamari “fries” dusted with chili powder. Ming Fang took Rose into the kitchen for a tour while the rest of us ate and argued.

  As the dinner was ending, Rooster offered a toast with his water glass: “To a great evening,” he said. “You’re a good guy, Bill. Why do they write such shit about you?”

  “I can only guess,” I said as I toasted the anarchist tendencies of the Angels, “but then why do they write all that bullshit about you?”

  “Good point—I never believe the crap in the papers anyhow.”

  Ming Fang toasted Rose, “my new Georgia flower and sister,” and insisted on taking the check, treating us all to what she judged to be “the most interesting academic session of all time!”

  As the 2008 election careened toward the home stretch, the pressure-cooker that was, after all, our lives got steamier, the shrieking 24/7 whistle grew ever louder, and my head became even dizzier. The Palin-McCain campaign ratcheted up the rhetoric, doubling down on the bet that the Obama-Wright-Khalidi-Ayers connection would destroy the rising superstar, and the Republicans launched multimillion-dollar ad campaigns featuring one or several of the Obama “pals” across the country. The Looney Tune Right stepped up its freelance dealing, and the hate kept escalating.

  Fox News ran pictures night after night of our front door with the address prominently displayed. In a couple of weeks’ time I got a mountain of identically printed cards in the mail with postmarks from California to New York, each accusing me of murdering a police officer and predicting that “justice” would be served. While the wave of postcards lacked spontaneity—I wondered what kind of far-flung franchise operation ginned up this whole deal—it had its effect. I was weirdly disconcerted and preoccupied, wondering uneasily several times a day about what I might find at home later, and then peering anxiously into my mailbox every afternoon. But the cards—and nothing heavier—kept coming, some with little personalized notes: “Your blasphemy has been noted.” “You’ve rejected Jesus at your eternal peril.”

  Our house was under siege—reporters from around the country and the world periodically set up camp in the park across the street, trampled the bushes as they occupied our little front yard, interviewed our neighbors, marked our comings and goings, and occasionally rushed up to ask one more unanswerable question. Bernardine ran the gauntlet every day to get to and from work, but I was mostly hunkered down inside working at the dining room table on a comic-book edition of my book To Teach with my collaborator, Ryan Alexander-Tanner, the brilliant young Oregon cartoonist who was crashing on our top floor—some version of house arrest but with a resonance. Ryan and I made ourselves focus on the work, and we stayed blissfully unaware of most of what was going on outside except when we ventured out for pizza and candy or coffee to fuel our efforts. Then we would blink our eyes and catch our collective breath as the craziness pushed forward.

  For three days, a crew from The O’Reilly Factor followed us to the supermarket and the coffee shop, recording our every move. When I gave a talk one night at Shimer College, a tiny local school organized around a Great Books curriculum, they captured the full hour and a half on tape. I was pretty sure they would do something on air with the footage since my lecture hit topics that might provide fodder for their hack attack—democracy and education, the importance of active engagement in civic life, the difficulties of making moral decisions in immoral societies—but I was wrong. A quiet address from me was apparently not the proper optic for them, even if the themes were inherently incendiary and the students led an animated conversation. They needed conflict, they longed for confrontation, they sought red meat. And so every step outside the house invited three of them—camera man, sound man, eager on-air correspondent—to rush urgently toward me, shouting and gesturing as if something of real importance had just occurred that very moment and I was the one person on earth who needed to say something that could make sense of it all. “Mr. Ayers! Professor! One minute! Please! Can you tell us, sir . . . ?” I tried to stay cool, to align my movement with my breath, to meditate on classic silent films, and to go about my business—shopping, scoring the coffee—and avoid ducking my head like a guilty perp or appearing terrified like a turkey at Thanksgiving or bursting into tears like a lost child. “What are you trying to hide?” In that scene and that context, just walking on looks so wrong—seriously, try to stay dignified with the scrum in your face and you’ll see how tough it can be.

  One day Ryan and I were taking a break from writing, chilling out in the living room, when we heard the crackle of a microphone, and looked out to see a Chicago tour bus idling in front, the tour guide pointing our way and the tourists snapping photos. We were on the tour!

  Another day the young man on assignment from Fox tried to push his way through our front door, shouting that if I believed in the First Amendment I had to answer his questions. I wanted to pause, pull out the copy of the Constitution I always carried in my back pocket, and patiently explain the Bill of Rights to the kid, but the scene was way too noisy and a bit too pushy. I told him to get the hell off the porch. That night, Bill O’Reilly, focusing a close-up on the black T-shirt I was wearing with its large red star in the center (Communism! Or Macy’s! Or Heineken!), smirked as he said that this well-known socialist (me!) was suddenly a defender of private property (my residence!). I later sent O’Reilly a brief excerpt from Friedrich Engels explaining the difference between personal property and socially produced wealth, but I never heard back.

  I increasingly felt the snowballing impact of the public campaign. I was scheduled on the local public radio station regularly for several years, for example, mostly to participate in conversations about education issues, but as the campaign escalated the invitations ceased. After one of my last appearances I hung around
for a bit with the host, Steve Edwards, a thoughtful, liberal reporter. He told me that the station got a flood of objections every time I appeared, something he couldn’t understand given the content of my positions, and then asked me, “What’s it like to be so widely hated in the public mind?” He was perfectly serious and genuinely curious, but I couldn’t help laughing out loud.

  “Do you really think there’s something out there that could sensibly be called ‘the public mind,’ Steve?” I asked. “And if so, could it possibly be stable or coherent or immutable?”

  “No, not really,” he agreed. “And you don’t seem a likely candidate for the post of public enemy, but it must be weird to be you right now.”

  “It’s not really how I experience my life,” I said.

  There were parallel campaigns on several campuses to purge my books from schools of education—I heard first from folks at Arizona State and Georgia State, and then from faculty across the country. The campaigns were not universally successful, but they were a troubling trend nonetheless. At little Wheaton College, the Evangelical school outside Chicago famously attended by Billy Graham, an ad hoc committee of alumni formed to investigate why education majors were required to read my blasphemous words and to demand that I be completely purged from the curriculum. That one succeeded.

  In any case, the non-invitations made a certain sense to the faculty committees, student assemblies, public programming groups, or conference planners charged with choosing who to include. They granted themselves permission to embrace freedom of expression in general—we don’t have any blacklists, they could honestly tell themselves, we don’t want to encourage the censors or organize a repression. But the best way to keep the thought police away, the logic unspooled, and to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-intellectualism and tyranny was to organize a reasonable self-censorship and a moderate self-control. Perhaps they figured that there were “plenty of other respected educators one could invite to speak,” as the governor of Nebraska so considerately clued-up the professors at “his” university. And, of course, it’s true—there are.