http://www.wyomingnews.com/articles/2010/04/14/news/01top_04-14-10.txt
By Becky Orr
borr@wyomingnews.com
4/14/10
CHEYENNE -- Bill Ayers will come to Laramie later this month after all.
The 1960s radical and longtime education professor will speak April
28 about education issues, though where he will make that
presentation has not been figured out.
University of Wyoming officials banned him from speaking on campus
earlier this month.
Since then, Colorado lawyer David Lane told UW officials that
preventing Ayers from speaking violates the First Amendment. He said
in a letter sent Monday that he would sue if the school didn't allow
Ayers to speak when he comes April 28.
The university has until noon today to respond, Lane wrote. When
asked if UW would respond, university spokeswoman Jessica Lowell said
she had no comment.
UW student Meg Lanker and Ayers retained Lane.
Lanker is working to bring Ayers to Laramie after his first visit on
April 5-6 was canceled.
UW's Social Justice Research Center arranged for Ayers to visit
campus then and talk about education with students. He also was to
meet via teleconference with school principals from Wyoming.
Center Director Francisco Rios called off the visit on March 29 after
people from throughout Wyoming expressed outrage. Ayers' invitation
was withdrawn a week before the scheduled visit, but he still was
paid his $5,000 speaking fee.
Ayers co-founded the radical group Weather Underground in the late
1960s. The group was responsible for bombing public buildings --
including the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon -- in protest of U.S.
involvement in the Vietnam War.
He now is an education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Lanker was angry when the visit was called off. "The day the
cancellation happened, I started out figuring how I could bring him
back," she said Tuesday. "I've gotten a lot of e-mails from people
who want to know how they can help and contribute" to the effort to
bring him here.
Lanker and a student group called UW's Secular Student Alliance
invited Ayers again. The student group backed out Monday.
Lanker said an Albany County commissioner that she did not identify
has offered the use of the fairgrounds for the speech.
She spoke with Susan Weidel, UW general counsel, who responded in an
e-mail on Monday that "the University of Wyoming will not be
available as a venue" for the Ayers event.
"To me, it's obvious they don't want Bill Ayers," Lanker said of UW
officials. "They are denying an education professor the opportunity
to come to an institute to speak about education."
Lanker wants his visit to be on campus. "This is supposed to be the
intellectual hub of Wyoming.
"A lot of people are trying to make this out to be a liberal issue," she said.
It is instead an issue of academic freedom, Lanker added. "If we do
this to one speaker, who's to say we don't do it to another?"
She is raising money to pay for his visit and so far has gotten about $3,500.
Ayers will donate to the Laramie community whatever is raised beyond
the cost of a place to speak, she said.
Ayers is being tried for acts that happened 40 years ago, she said.
"He's 65 years old and a law-abiding citizen, and he has essentially
made something of himself."
Ayers said in an e-mail Tuesday that he wants to come: "The only
action that would fully repudiate the wrong decision, and then undo
the harm, would be for the (UW) president himself, author of that
weirdly disingenuous statement (based on a profoundly dishonest
narrative), to host me."
An invitation to speak should not be seen as an endorsement, but an
opportunity to debate, he wrote.
He is not the injured party in this, he added.
"The injured party is the group of faculty and students who wanted to
engage me ... It was their freedom, not mine, that was trampled, out
of misplaced fear or petty expediency, or both."
Brian Profaizer, president of the UW campus conservatives, said he
learned at 5 p.m. Monday that Ayers will be coming after all.
"I didn't want this guy speaking on my campus, and I didn't want him
in the state of Wyoming," he said.
But enough people want to come hear him, he said. "At least we got
him off campus."
Profaizer worries about threats of violence some people made when it
was first announced that Ayers was coming.
"I hope to God nothing happens and none of them turn their threats
into something serious," he said.
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