William Ayers was a young radical in the 1960s — this is admitted, accepted, and not in question at all. Now William Ayers is a respected academic, somebody who is no longer advocating violence, who is a crusader for social justice and urban educational reform within the system, and that sounds like it ought to be an interesting and worthy story. So why is the Republican party trying to brand him as a terrorist? He’s a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago!

The latest sad twist is that he was invited to speak at a student research conference, and the craven University of Nebraska-Lincoln canceled the event under pressure from donors and politicians. The governor of the state called the invitation an “embarrassment” and said “Ayers is a well-known radical who should never have been invited to the University of Nebraska”; representatives and senators chimed in with similar sentiments; a regent called it “bad judgment”; donors to the university threatened to withhold further contributions. This is insane. Ayers hasn’t committed a crime, and he’s not a danger to society — this is a fellow who clearly has a deep commitment to improving society (perhaps, to Republican eyes, that is his crime).

Has anybody thought to look at what Bill Ayers actually promotes? He has a website, and it’s trivial to look up what he’s advocating. For instance, here is a description of his book, Teaching Toward Feedom:

In Teaching toward Freedom, William Ayers illuminates the hope as well as the conflict that characterizes the craft of education: how it can be used in authoritarian ways at the service of the state, the church, or a restrictive existing social order-or, as he envisions it, as a way for students to become more fully human, more engaged, more participatory, more free. Using examples from his own classroom experiences as well as from popular culture, film, and novels, Ayers redraws the lines concerning how we teach, why we teach, and the surprising things we uncover when we allow students to become visible, vocal authors of their own lives and stories. This lucid and inspiring book will help teachers at every level to realize that ideal.

Why, that sounds admirable. So why are these lunatics shrieking for his head, and condemning Barack Obama for simply attending meetings as a community organizer at the same time as Bill Ayers?

It’s obvious. The right-wing hate machine, desperate for a way to smear a candidate who has an unimpeachable history as an advocate for social justice, strained to find some dangerous association, and the worst they could come up with is a gentle, writerly academic who let the passions of his youth lead him into violent and illegal actions 40 years ago — actions that he considers just. They ignore his history ever since — apparently, there is no redemption unless you embrace Jesus and Republican intolerance, ala Chuck Colson — and they pretend that his words now simply don’t matter. They stir up the mob to hatred, and the mob calls in threats of violence against an educator, and UNL simply surrenders in cowardice.

Bill Ayers is a reason to vote against Republican demagoguery tomorrow.

John Wilkins just had to ruin my morning.

The bad news is that those of us who teach at small liberal arts institutions have significantly smaller bars than the averages there. The good news is that our football coaches also get nowhere near that amount of money.

This site, Academia.edu, is kind of nifty, but it’ll be even niftier when more people join up. It’s a web page that indexes academics, displaying them and their affiliations in a tree diagram. Play with it, if you’re one of us, sign up, and if you know a professor, let ’em know about it.

They just keep popping up all over the place…is there a tally somewhere? We should calculate how much of Darwin’s genome is still floating about in the gene pool. Anyway, this several-times-great granddaughter of Darwin is Emma Darwin, and she writes well and of interesting things.

Jebus, but we’re in for a world of trouble. I think one of the signs of the apocalypse is when instructors of dangeral studies revive moribund blogs. We’re obviously in a cultural meltdown of epic proportions.

Here it is the time of year when Minnesotans are reviewing the state science standards, and I’m off in California, shirking. At least Greg Laden is on top of things, and while there are some things that need to be fixed, it’s mostly good news: no creationists are making a fuss this time around. Last time, I attended a couple of Cheri Yecke’s dog-and-pony-shows, and there were creationists on stage, on the committees, in the administration, and in the audience. This time, only pro-science people are there, arguing over significant issues and not whether giants were in the earth in those days and how many ID buzzwords they could sneak in.

I’m impressed: Appalachian State University is celebrating the Darwin year with a lecture series of stellar quality. Between September and April, they are presenting talks by Eugenie Scott, Jay Hosler, Ken Miller, Janet Browne, Edward Larson, Sean Carroll, Elisabeth Lloyd, Paul Ewald, Jim Costa, and Niles Eldredge (and also John Haught, but then I guess there has to always be one clunker in the works, to maintain the balance of the universe). I’m wishing I could afford to commute to North Carolina every few weeks now.

Adam Savage of the Mythbusters (the second most easily recognized scientists in the US, right after Bill Nye) has a short article up on Popular Mechanics on how to fix US science education. He only has 3 suggestions, but they’re really just two.

The first is to let students get their hands dirty. Instead of just telling them what science is about, make them do it and work at it and see it being done. Working through an actual experiment is a very different experience from being told what the cleaned-up, simplified results are.

The second is to actually spend more money on science education. Weird, huh? It works, though. Science isn’t cheap, and especially if you’re going to put students to work breaking stuff and using up reagents, it’s going to have an ongoing cost.

The third is a bit obvious and a natural consequence of his first: students will make mistakes, and that’s OK. If they’re actually doing experiments, science class is not like home ec class, where you’re supposed to follow a recipe and get a perfect outcome every time.

Of course, all of these suggestions are already being implemented by good public school science teachers (except maybe the second, since you can’t spend money if you don’t have it), but you’d be surprised at how many creationists think science is a matter of rote memorization.