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March 30, 2010, 07:58 PM ET
U. of Wyoming Cancels Speech by William Ayers
The director of a research center at the University of Wyoming has canceled an invitation for William Ayers to speak on the campus, citing safety concerns, the university announced. A spokesman told the Associated Press that the university had received hundreds of calls and messages protesting the visit by Mr. Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago who belonged to a radical group responsible for bombings in the 1970s.
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Comments
1. honore - March 31, 2010 at 09:01 am
i think the bigger question here should be..."who invited and signed off on this speaker? That answer alone will shed a very ugly light on the instituion.
2. banditcat - March 31, 2010 at 09:06 am
Are they afraid that his appearance will radicalize their students? Will their students question policy and politics? And, why does the 'community' believe that this man, a radical student from the 70's, could make them unsafe?
College should encourage students to ask questions, not shelter them from non-mainstream thought or behavior. If they did that, then the study of the American revoultion would certainly be excluded from texts and discussion. Radicals, indeed!!
3. swish - March 31, 2010 at 10:26 am
I'm with you, banditcat, but I think the danger they fear is from the people who made "hundreds of calls" protesting the speaker, rather than from Ayers himself.
4. barnesms - March 31, 2010 at 12:19 pm
A much better choice would be to have Mr. Ayers discuss his actions in the 70's and the pros and cons of such actions. Violence such as his has very little role in civilized society. A discussion on how we best should deal with radical personal philosophies would be apt. It is not the questioning of authority that is important, but the answers we find that are important.
5. princeton67 - April 16, 2010 at 07:53 pm
Click on the "announced" link. Read the spineless excuses for retracting the invitation.
Ayers has spoken at(among other places) Illinois Wesleyan, Florida State, St. Mary's of California, All Souls Unitarian Church (D.C.), and Georgetown U.'s Law Center. Furious debates and questions have ensued: people have learned. No safety issues.
The City of Chicago named him its 1997 "Citizen of the Year" for his role in writing the Annenberg Challenge Grant, winning $49 million of reforming Chicago's public schools. Since 1999, he has sat on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty group.
He is also the only academic in the USA who has spoken, at the invite of Hugo Chavez,to the World Education Forum in Caracas, Venezuela.
Looks as if the only acceptable speaker at the UW will be the Pillsbury Dough Boy - unless the cattle ranchers object.
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