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Quote by Bill Ayers

“[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.”

Quote by Bill Ayers

Author

Bill Ayers
Bill Ayers

Bill Ayers (born December 26, 1944) is an American educator and former professor who taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He earned his doctorate in education from the University of Michigan and specialized in curriculum theory, teacher education, and educational reform. Ayers is a controversial figure due to his past involvement with the Weather Underground, a radical left-wing organization in the 1960s and 1970s. He has authored several books on progressive education and teaching methods. His academic work has influenced educators in the progressive education movement, though his historical association with radical groups remains a subject of public debate. more

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“I was from my little perch in a prep school I saw the civil rights movement and it was defining the moral dimensions of the time and I was drawn to it and I read James Baldwin and read Invisible Man and these were my touch points. But it was when I got to Michigan and saw a bigger world, a real world, that I got involved.”

“The fact is that in my prep school, I went to a boarding school, 39 young men graduated from that prep school. Five years later, a quarter of us were in SDS, in Students for Democratic Society. Not because we were particularly chosen or because we were as I say, we were lucky but we were mainly luckily to grow up at a time where this black freedom movement was really defining the moral character of what it meant to be a citizen and a person.”

“I was arrested 1965. I had come back from the merchant marines, got into conversations about the war. I had never heard of Vietnam until I was in the merchant marines in constitution square in Athens, and I picked up the New York Herald or the International Herald Tribune and there was my first introduction of the word Vietnam.”

“Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.”