One Point for Tawna

So about a month and half ago I presented a paper at OVPES—The Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society Annual Conference in Dayton Ohio. There were faculty, graduate students, and a few independent authors from universities and places across the east coast, but most coming from Ohio. It was quite the experience, and I've been needing to write it down for quite awhile now. Be sure to at least read the part about the man I presented after. Makes for an interesting read.

I ended up presenting at this conference partly by accident. My philosophy advisor suggested I submit one of my class papers to GSCOPE, a graduate student philosophy conference being hosted at OSU (my school), to get me a head start presenting at conferences. There were a few conferences asking for papers at that time, and I accidently submitted to the wrong one—the one I did submit to being actually much more prestigious and harder to get accepted into. Whew. Go me. (Even if by accident.) Conferences are kind of like applying for a job—lots of applicants trying to say why what they have to offer is interesting, good, and insightful. You submit your work, or a summary of it, and they send it out anonymously to different reviewers in the organization across the country in your field, they tear it apart and give feedback and decide whether or not you should be accepted. It is kind of the same for publishing, though that is even harder. I got back my reviewer feedback and found that my paper was accepted with revisions. I was so excited, and when I sent the reviews on to my advisor, he was very excited too…and surprised that it was not for the conference he had suggested. All along I had thought I'd been working with people from the graduate student conference. I was pleasantly surprised to be accepted to the more difficult conference. That will look good on my resume, and was a good confidence boost for a first year doctoral student. Even if they hadn’t actually READ my full paper yet. Haha. Anyways.

The conference took place in Dayton Ohio during the first week of Autumn Quarter this year—great timing—and so west I went to make it down there. I had little idea what to expect, as they really gave me no information, and all I had to go on was the pep-talk my advisor gave me a few days before the presentation.
I got to the Bergamo Conference center during the lunch hour, and found the one other person that I knew at the conference—a co-worker of mine who is in the advanced part of his doctoral program. We chatted and then went to hear the afternoon’s keynote address.

The room was a strange set up, which made me nervous because it was the same room I’d be presenting in immediately after, and I wondered what the keynote speaker would do with his presentation. However, I soon realized that he was not your typical keynote presenter. I had earlier seen a man walk past me and assumed he was someone there with the church camp that was going on. (The conference took place at an old Catholic monastery turned hostel/conference center, so there was another large group there for something else.) When the keynote speaker was being introduced, I soon realized he was the same man. Enter William (Bill) Ayers.

He was dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, brown vest, and shoes that looked like water-socks. He had an earring in each ear, and basically looked like an old hippie who never really wanted to grow up out of the 60’s or 70’s. Not what I expected for our keynote-speaker. What I expected even less what just how completely left-wing/liberal this man was. In fact, that doesn’t describe this man at all. He blew the left-wing out of the water. You expect pretty liberal individuals in a philosophy venue, but this man was unbelievable. Imagine walking into a random lecture with a few colleagues, and finding out you’d stumbled onto a lecture with Mussolini or some other extreme political leader and his friends by accident. That was all I could think of to describe it when talking with friends and family as I drove home from the conference. Wow. I couldn’t think of anything to say at first but WOW. During his “discussion” (he didn’t go off a prepared paper on the topic of conference, but mostly just told stories and elaborated on his political views and hopes and dreams for America) he talked about how angry he got when people called Obama a socialist because he wasn’t socialist enough, in Ayers view. He talked about how glad “we” all were that the American government was crumbling so that we could rebuild it back to a socialist/communist country and really learn to love and be equal. Imagine an hour and half of outrageous claims like that (with a few happy feel-good stories interspersed) and you'll about have Ayers talk. At this point I am just being blown away by what I am hearing—totally dumbfounded—and am feeling especially out of place as I notice lots of heads nodding and smiling and him getting many pats on the back by those sitting nearest to him. There were only a few stoic faces in the group. Yiiiiiiiiiiiiikes!!!!!!!!! I turned to my friend Brad and asked “am I the ONLY conservative in the room?” To which he promptly replied “oh yes, by far! And this is a conservative conference, so far as the philosophy conferences go.” Double yikes!

After the lecture (propaganda, I should call it) was over, Brad pointed out to me that William Ayers was none other than the father of one of the characters we read about in a book that I use in the class I teach (a non-fiction). I actually have a picture of him on one of my PowerPoint slides that I show my students toward the end of the quarter as a “who’s who” type of thing. It was all starting to make sense, as what we find out about Bill Ayers from the book is that he had to go into hiding from the American government for years because of his ties to communism and anti-american affiliations during the 60’s & 70’s. He even met his wife in hiding; how romantic.

All of this was made even more interesting by the fact that I then went on right after that to present a paper on the value of religious schools in teaching choice and autonomy (more on it’s reception in a bit). A very right-wing conservative viewpoint being presented in a break-out session immediately after Ayers is being congratulated for sharing his views on the joys of the downfall of the American government. Right. K. Anyone else think it’d be fun to step in and fill my role right then? I couldn’t help but find humor in the situation.

To make matters even more interesting, when I got home I looked Ayers up on Wikipedia (I KNEW he’d be on there) and found things like this:
“In 1969 he co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group that conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings during the 1960s and 1970s, motivated by U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.” (Those buildings included the New York City Police Department headquarters, U.S. Capitol Building, and the Pentagon.) In the words of my high school Spanish teacher: wow, y doble wow. I find the sentence that follows immediately after that one interesting, considering what was just said. “He is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.” Well, remind me not to send my kids there for school. It is scary that this man is highly regarded in the field of education reform.

There is tons more interesting stuff about him—some of you may recall a controversy during the last presidential election because of Obama’s possible ties to an extreme anti-american radicalist…that was Ayers—but I will leave that for you to look up on Wiki if you are interested. I read part of the manifesto of the group he created and it was just unbelievable. You know there are people out there who believe things like he does, but you don’t expect to sit down and have lunch with them. Or ever even meet them, really.

So yep, that was who I got to listen to and then follow after with my paper at the conference. Let’s be glad he wasn’t sitting in my session—he’d have gone ballistic. He was, however, extremely well versed in his beliefs, and during his talk I felt kind of like I was being hit with an unexpected tidal wave and had to hurry and try and find a firmly rooted tree to grab onto. The problem with that is that while some of what he said was accurate, most was twisted and wrong. Just like Satan—he uses partial truths and laces them with untruths and false ideas so perfectly that you often don’t know how to distinguish where one stops and the other begins. And then he bombards you with them until you don't know whether you are standing or sitting an which way is up or down. That is scary, and reminded me of how important it is to stay close to the scriptures—to read them daily—and to always listen to the words of the Lord’s true prophets and apostles so that I can discern the truth from the evil. And just stay awaaay from the evil, if possible :) It really is scary how well Satan does that, and does that through others who he has deceived (sadly). The great thing that I came to appreciate even more that day as I felt outnumbered and overwhelmed and under-studied, is that we have the Spirit, and that is a feeling that I can recognize and use to discern such truth. The things of the Lord bring peace, and clarity of mind, and joy. All I ever feel when I listen to liberals (such as in some of my classes) is the butt end of their anger at the world, confusion, and discord. Some truths are there—loving others, etc.—but I know that the way of the Lord is so much more clear and does not coerce or force or push or shove. I’ve never met an even-keeled or even-tempered liberal. ;) But enough of that. It was a really good experience, and I am glad I did it and went. For those of you who are curious, my paper went very well. I was congratulated by many of the listeners of my panel, and told how pleased they were that I presented on the topic that I did. One person actually told me: “I am impressed. That was very brave of you to present that paper in front of this group. We need to hear things from the other side, and that is very unusual in this group. Very brave of you. Well-done.” Haha. I told him I only did it because I was naive of who my audience was. Another visiting professor told me he’d love to talk with me about my ideas over the dinner later, but I had already planned on booking it out of there immediately after finishing. I had no real interest in staying there. So, all-in-all, it was a really good experience. Funny, but a really good learning experience. I am glad that I was able to offer them a different perspective. One point for me on the philosophic debate scoreboard. Woo-hoo. :)

(Oh, and did I mention I locked my key in my car afterwards? What a day for interesting learning experiences! :).)