Think twice about inviting Ayers to Deis
However, we shouldn't bring Ayers here simply because of a media storm that came and went during the campaign.
According to Behrendt, "Ayers has unique historical insight to share . especially in light of Brandeis' reputation for activism." She also referred to Ayers' tendency to participate in "extreme activism," and offered that bringing Ayers here might allow us to question "the limits of activism."
But exactly what activism are we talking about? The tactics Ayers employed were unproductive and certainly not aligned with any social justice mission we seek to follow at this University. Ayers was a founding member of Weathermen. Later known as the Weather Underground Organization, this radical leftist group was responsible for creating domestic chaos in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among other activities, Ayers and others in the organization detonated bombs in loud protest to the United States' role in the Vietnam War.
In interview after interview, Ayers defends his radical actions by noting that WUO bombings never hurt or killed a single person. This is, of course, excluding those members of the organization that were killed when a bomb exploded prematurely in their Greenwich Village apartment in New York City.
Yet if there was never intent to kill or hurt anyone, then what was the point of even using bombs? This question may seem facetious, but there's something to it. If Ayers' goal was a just and violent revolution to completely eliminate the possibility of any further atrocities at the hands of a tyrannical government, then the use of bombs at least makes sense. You usually need weaponry to overthrow a government, so if that had been his goal then using bombs makes perfect sense. But that wasn't his goal.
Ayers was trying to send a message. Obviously, using bombs to target buildings such as the Pentagon was meaningful in a rather twisted way. But aside from making a very loud point, a bomb is always a bomb. Dangerous protest maneuvers such as bombings accomplished even less with regard to altering U.S. foreign policy than the U.S. aerial bombings from the skies over Southeast Asia accomplished with regard to containing communism. Bombs put people's lives at risk, bombmakers and bystanders alike. If injuring and killing were not Ayers' intentions, then there was no reason for him to have used bombs.
The WUO's bombs changed nothing. The U.S. involvement in Vietnam finally began to wane not with the superficially meaningful detonation of a bomb in some government office but with the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. It was the politics behind the war that changed-for all sides involved.
Maybe bombing some noteworthy locations during the Vietnam War granted Ayers the illusion he was doing something worthwhile. But we don't need to feed into such a fruitless ideology or a now distant media cycle that obsessed over it.
I don't particularly mind that Ayers is unrepentant of the risks he took with his actions. That's his business, not mine. But such risks do not fit in with any concept of social justice that this University represents. And we don't need to spend thousands of dollars to figure that out.
Now, education reform, on the other hand-that's something I'd certainly love to hear more about. But with the skyrocketing costs of bringing Ayers to campus, I'm sure that we're capable of locating a less expensive person to come and talk to us about that.
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