Bill Ayers - Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident

Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist

Teaching toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom

Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice

On the Side of the Child: Summerhill Revisited

A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court

The Good Preschool Teacher: Six Teachers Reflect on Their Lives

To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher

To Teach: The Journey, in Comics (with Ryan Alexander-Tanner)

Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom (with Rick Ayers)

Teaching Toward Democracy: Educators as Agents of Change (with Kevin Kumashiro, Erica Meiners, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall)

Race Course: Against White Supremacy (with Bernardine Dohrn)

To all those whove kept the faith as theyve trudged toward liberationteaching freedom, saving the earth, resisting the race to incarcerate and the steady descent into a brutal new Sparta,

to the aging radicals and the up-and-comers, the New Abolitionists and the old freedom fighters,

to the undocumented and the unafraid, the occupiers,

to the everyday people defying oppressive authority and rising in solidarity with the disadvantaged, the marginalized, and the despisedthe wretched of the earth and our best hope for the future.

It was a mid-April evening, the sweet smells of springtime upon us and the last light reluctantly giving way outside the front window, when my graduate seminar ended and everyone pitched in to clean up. A dozen of my students were spread out in our living room, cups and dishes scattered everywhere, small piles of books and papers marking specific territory. Until a moment before, all of us had focused intensely on the work at hand: thesis development, the art of the personal essay, and the formal demands of oral history research. As a professor for two decades, my favorite teaching moments often popped up during these customary potluck seminars at our homesomething about sharing food in a more intimate personal setting, perhaps, or disrupting the assumed hierarchy of teacher authority, or simply being freed from the windowless, fluorescent-lit concrete bunkers that passed for classrooms at my university. But the seminar was done for this evening, and as students began to gather their things, a self-described political junkie clicked on the TV and flipped to the presidential primary debate, well under way by now, between Hillary Clinton and the young upstart from Chicago, Barack Obama.

ABC was broadcasting the debate to a record-setting audience, and the debate moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos seemed to be doing their best to make a mess of things, avoiding anything of substance in favor of a kind of weird political cage fightingbloody performance artthrowing up little bits of trivia and gossip and gotchas, inviting snarls and cuts without any serious illumination or thoughtful reflection. I wandered in and out from the kitchen, muttering that no one watching would be the wiser for the time spent, but my students didnt pay me any mind. The only explicit response I got was from one of the youngest, who glanced at me impatiently as she emphatically shushed me. Everyone, it seemed, was captured by the theater riot beaming from the screen, political junkies all, fascinated by what was being framed by the big brains of punditry as a historic contest. I stood near the back of the room.

Stephanopoulos, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, turned to Senator Obama and said, On this... general theme of patriotism in your relationships... The general theme in question was becoming central to the dramatic narrative spun by everyone now running against Obama, and Stephanopoulos was about to press him about his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose most impassioned statements about racism, war, and the American government (God damn America!) had been widely disseminated and discussed.

But do you believe hes as patriotic as you are? he asked.

Obama replied, This is somebody whos a former Marine. So I believe that he loves this country. But I also believe that hes somebody who, because of the experiences hes had over the course of a lifetime, is also angry about the injustices hes had.

Now Stephanopoulos was bearing down on the general theme of patriotism in your relationships. A gentleman named William Ayers, Stephanopoulos began. He was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. Hes never apologized for that.... An early organizing meeting for your state senate campaign was held at his house, and your campaign has said you are friendly. Can you explain that relationship for the voters and explain to Democrats why it wont be a problem?

I thought Obama looked slightly stricken, temporarily off-balance, and uncharacteristically tongue-tied. I was probably projecting, because I felt suddenly dizzy, off-balance, and tongue-tied myself. But I know for sure my students were thunderstruck. Their heads snapped in my direction and a few literally dropped to the floor, one with both hands over her mouth. Obama replied: This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, whos a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from.... The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesnt make much sense, George.

He had us at hes a guy who lives in my neighborhood.

An explosion of laughter ricocheted around the room. Some were genuinely amused, some disbelieving and a bit horrified; everyone clamored to make sense of the bombshell that had just dropped into our little seminar, and by extension, reverberated around the country and the world. I sat down, and the student who had shushed me a moment ago turned to me and said, Oh my God, that guy has the same name as yours. Another explained to her excitedly that thats because we were indeed the same guy: Bills the guy, and were in the neighborhood George is talking about!

No one in our living room really heard Hillary Clinton raise the stakes. She was concerned about Obamas association with someone who, she pointed out, said in an interview published in the New YorkTimes on September 11, 2001, that he didnt regret bombing government buildings even though, Clinton claimed, in some instances people died, and he was just sorry they hadnt done more, and that the relationship continued after 9/11. No one heard Obama match her poke for poke: Your husband, he charged, pardoned or commuted the sentences of two members of the Weather Underground, which I think is a slightly more significant act than me serving on a board with somebody. Neither candidate really knew what they were talking about, and each seemed simply to be following fact-free scripts written by pollsters or aides assigned the dirt detail. Clearly, both camps had done some shabby opposition research, and each was busy, busy, busy spinning its particular phony narrative. Each candidate threw a few more chips on the fire before moving on, and no one listening or watching learned anything substantive from the exchange.