On the evening of May 7 at the Luxe Hotel in Los Angeles, Dr. Mary
Grabar, who taught college English for 20 years and has been writing about
education for the last 10 years, will discuss the
influence of 1960s radical Bill Ayers and his comrades, and offer strategies
for fighting it.
Mary Grabar was born in Slovenia but her parents took her and fled the
communist regime to Rochester, New York. She went on to teach in colleges and
universities in Georgia for 20 years, earning a Ph.D. in English from the
University of Georgia in 2002.
Today she is a dissident to the reigning political correctness on our
college campuses. She came to conservatism after witnessing the deliberate
destruction of our literary heritage and our respect for the West and for the
United States by radical professors in her graduate seminars. In 2011 she
founded the Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc., dedicated to “resisting the
re-education of America.”
I recently posed to Ms. Grabar some questions about her book and the
upcoming presentation.
Mark Tapson: Tell
us about your own experience as a professor surrounded by radical colleagues on
campus.
Mary Grabar: That’s
the subject of another book I published under the Dissident Prof imprint called
Exiled: Stories from Conservative and
Moderate Professors Who Have Been Ridiculed, Ostracized, Marginalized,
Demonized, and Frozen Out. I was inspired to start Dissident Prof after I
came out as a conservative in graduate school (actually the disdain for
literature that I saw in graduate school compelled my conversion). I started
writing about my experiences, and getting emails from others who were in
similar positions—others who had not been able to get tenure track jobs but
were schlepping around from campus to campus as I was, and teaching the labor
intensive introductory courses for a pittance.
In my field, English, it’s about impossible to keep your political views
to yourself because in order to be considered for any tenure-track position you
are required to do scholarship that denies any value in the study of literature
other than as a tool to root out racism, sexism, able-ism, species-ism, and all
the other categories that follow the Marxist line. In the offices, hallways,
mailrooms, and parties, you’re expected to take the party line when the topic
turns to politics. So if someone is singing the praises of Hillary Clinton or
Elizabeth Warren, your silence is taken as admission that you might be a
Republican!
I’ve found myself suddenly without classes in an upcoming semester when
one of my pieces of writing became known to a department chair or the college
president. But it doesn’t seem that Bill Ayers or his Weatherman comrades had
any trouble landing tenure-track jobs, does it?
I am fortunate. My last semester of teaching was in the spring of 2013,
in the former privately-funded Program in American Citizenship and Democracy at
Emory University. I also taught at state
universities and a community college. I am now a resident fellow at the Alexander
Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.
MT: What compelled you to write a book about Bill Ayers?
MG: Back in 2009 Ayers and his wife
(“partner” as he prefers to call her) Bernardine Dohrn came out with a book
called Race Course against White
Supremacy and I wrote about it. I vaguely knew about Ayers’ past with the
Weather Underground, but then started looking into what are taken to be his
scholarly books. I saw that he was doing the same thing to K-12 education
through colleges of education that was being done to higher education. I wrote
a couple of reports on him for America’s Survival. It was at one of their
conferences that I met the late Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated the Weather
Underground as an FBI informant. He confirmed for me what a despicable,
cowardly person Ayers is.
I was reading news articles about Ayers’ talks at colleges and high
schools and noticed that reporters never questioned his credentials. The line
was always that Ayers went overboard in his youth protesting the Vietnam War
but had settled down to a respectable career as an education professor. That
line continues to this day. I flinched when Megyn Kelly kept referring to him
as “professor” when she had him on her show on Fox News last year. And now
Bryan Burrough, author of Days of Rage,
continues this meme.
I want to show that although Ayers was a failed bomber, he was successful
in helping to transform and destroy education. And he did it at taxpayers’
expense. He has trained hundreds of teachers. He worked closely with Obama and [U.S.
Secretary of Education] Arne Duncan in Chicago in funding programs aimed at
radicalizing students. One of his closest colleagues, Linda Darling-Hammond,
was on Obama’s education transition team, and was in charge of developing one
of the two Common Core tests. And Bill Ayers has appeared at conferences with
Duncan and other officials in organizations that devised Common Core.
Education has always been the gateway for the smart and ambitious to get
into the middle class. Ayers aims to destroy that opportunity, especially in
the “urban schools,” which is what the University of Illinois at Chicago, where
Ayers taught, specializes in.
MT: What are some of the ways in which his influence is felt in American schools?
MG: Bill Ayers likens a traditional
school to prison because it requires students adhere to dress codes, schedules,
and rules of discipline. But he has had captive audiences and has used his
power as a professor to indoctrinate future teachers. His education philosophy
is based on anarchism, progressivism, and Marxism. It’s all about radicalizing
children in social justice lessons, and making them see themselves as victims
of an evil capitalistic system.
It’s a toxic mixture, especially for the most vulnerable children who
benefit the most from a traditional education, as studies show. His philosophy
then filters down to practices and policies. Obama’s Justice Department order
on racial quotas for school punishment parallels Ayers’ calls for eliminating
discipline of inner-city students.
The last thing that Ayers and his fellow Marxists want is for inner city
boys to become middle class husbands and fathers. What they are producing is
more Trayvon Martins, more rioters in the streets of Baltimore. The black
community should be outraged that these upper-class white radicals are using
their children in this way.
Sadly, Ayers’ books are among the most widely used in education schools.
Future teachers study them. He speaks at education conferences, and as I saw in
2013 at one major conference, is revered as a legitimate academic and mentor. But
his speeches are nonsensical hashed-over ruminations of stoned-out hippie.
What Bill Ayers would have in the classroom extends the 1960s agenda of
smashing monogamy, ending the bourgeois family and its values, destroying the
work ethic, patriotism. So what we have is kids indoctrinated with lessons
about the police—the 1960s narrative about the “pigs”—fatherless, rootless,
joining gangs, and looting in the streets. It’s a Marxist’s dream come true. Those
like Bill Ayers don’t have to do the dangerous work of setting bombs any more.
They can watch the Crips and the Bloods unite against the police, as we’ve been
seeing on the streets of Baltimore. They can watch from the comfort of their
homes in nice gentrified neighborhoods, as they collect retirement checks and
honoraria for speaking gigs.
MT: What can we do to push back against the influence of Ayers and his
fellow radicals in education?
MG: I’m trying to make people
aware. I’m trying to do it through Dissident Prof. After an almost two-year
process, we won non-profit status from the IRS.
Good, decent Americans are appalled whenever Bill Ayers is invited to a
campus to give a talk because of his lack of repentance about his terroristic
past. But there are other reasons to oppose such visits as well, such as his
use of the educational system to promote the same ideas he held as his group
was setting bombs.
And we also have to consider who it is that is inviting him, the groups
that have sprung up on campuses, such as Penn State’s Law and Education
Alliance, and the Pennsylvania Equity Project. Both of these groups invited
Ayers to speak in March. The fact that Ayers would be considered someone worthy
of listening to in an academic setting shows how rotten education has become.
I want to raise awareness among citizen groups and political leaders. I
want those like Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly to know that Ayers and his
comrades are academic frauds. It’s not a matter of censorship. It’s a matter of
using our resources wisely so that colleges do not waste money on hosting Ayers
or promoting his ideas.
