Perlman: Ayers visit posed safety threat
By MELISSA LEE / Lincoln Journal Star
Monday, Oct 20, 2008 - 09:43:19 pm CDT
journalstar.com
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor Harvey Perlman said he was not ordered to cancel a speech by 1960s and ’70s radical William Ayers, and if he had been, he would have resigned.
Perlman said Monday that neither NU President J.B. Milliken nor the Board of Regents forced him to cancel Ayers’ Nov. 15 speech.
“If I had received such an order, I would have resigned,” he said.
The decision to disinvite Ayers actually was made late Thursday night — before Gov. Dave Heineman and other political leaders publicly condemned Ayers’ planned appearance at a UNL education conference.
UNL officials didn’t announce the Ayers cancellation until Friday evening because they wanted to wait until they had made contact with Ayers, who was in Taiwan, Perlman said.
He said he was aware criticism of the Ayers invitation was pouring in from Heineman, Attorney General Jon Bruning, congressional leaders and others. But no great university, he said, lets itself be governed by the views of the majority.
“Did I see it out there? Yes. Did it animate my decision? No,” he said of political leaders’ calls for Ayers to be disinvited.
News broke Thursday that Ayers, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at next month’s College of Education and Human Sciences student research conference. The conference comes during a two-day celebration of the college’s 100th anniversary.
Ayers was chosen by a faculty committee in February for purely academic reasons, Perlman said. And the chancellor supports those reasons.
“I want to emphasize one point as strongly as I can,” Perlman wrote in a Monday e-mail to faculty, staff and students. “I do not think the selection of Ayers to come to Lincoln to address a student research conference on research methodology was in any way inappropriate.”
Still, almost immediately after Ayers’ planned visit was announced, angry phone calls and e-mails began flooding the offices of Perlman, Milliken, the regents, the NU Foundation and Marjorie Kostelnik, dean of the College of Education and Human Sciences.
Heineman called the Ayers invitation an embarrassment to NU and the state, and other political leaders echoed that criticism. Milliken and regents said the invitation reflected poor judgment.
Given Ayers’ background — he was a founder of the Weather Underground, the group that claimed responsibility for bombings of government buildings in protest of the Vietnam War — Nebraskans’ anger was understandable, Perlman said.
But, he said, some callers, e-mailers and bloggers went beyond civil disagreement. So UNL quickly assembled its threat assessment team, which includes university police, the University Health Center and an associate psychology professor who is an expert in the area.
The team spent hours analyzing hundreds of contacts to the university, said that professor, Mario Scalora.
Scalora wouldn’t discuss specifics of what the team found, citing fear of copycat threats. But he called the negative reaction to Ayers’ planned speech “intense and unprecedented.”
“What was unique about this circumstance was the amount and intensity of the contacts in a brief period of time,” he said.
He and UNL Police Chief Owen Yardley reported to Perlman, who was in China at the time, that they were deeply concerned about campus safety should the Ayers speech go on as planned.
By late Thursday, Perlman said, it seemed clear cancellation was the best option.
“I find it difficult to accept that the actions of a few individuals can deprive this university of its right to select speakers who can contribute to the education of our students,” he wrote in his campus e-mail. “Nonetheless I take seriously the responsibility I have for the safety of members of this community, particularly the students.”
The decision stayed within a small circle of administrators until UNL reached Ayers.
Perlman lamented that a small number of people forced UNL to make a decision some faculty feel is an infringement on academic freedom.
But “you have to worry about the fringe,” he said.
He also said Ayers has given 71 campus talks in the past decade and that Ayers spoke in Lincoln in 1991 at a conference sponsored by the Nebraska Department of Education.
* * * |
