An elementary education theorist from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Bill Ayers, visited Fresno State Friday as a guest of one of the school’s clubs.

The controversial figure spoke to an audience in the Satellite Student Union (SSU), where the event was moved to accommodate a larger crowd. Ayers challenged the educators and education students in attendance to meet their students’ individual needs, and not just see them as their grade level.

Outside of the SSU, about 12 protestors stood holding signs that said things like, “Support our constitution, not communism.”

Ayers was a member of an anti-war group called Weather Underground in the early 1970s, which took responsibility for bombings around the country during the Vietnam War.

After his speech and book signing, Ayers presented a film called “Central Station” to the Cineculture class and club, which sponsored his visit.

It was reported that his visit to Fresno’s Tower District on Thursday was also met with some protest.

Ayers sat down with The Collegian for a five-minute interview.

Q: Are you familiar with the student activism surrounding budget cuts in California?

A: My younger brother is a doctoral student at Cal [University of California, Berkeley], and he’s been part of it. So, he keeps me abreast of it. So, yes.

Q: Do you have any general thoughts about it?

A: I do. I think that one of the things we’re witnessing, and I think we have to worry together about it very deeply, is we’re witnessing a kind of full-scale attack on public higher education. And I think the implications of it in the long run are devastating.

So, when they talk about raising the tuition at Cal [Berkeley] 32 percent, and they talk about cutting offerings, and they talk about you kids graduating from college when 20 years ago you graduated with an average debt of about $5,000 and today you’re graduating with a debt of $25,000, not counting credit cards and other loans. That is an outrage in terms of the promise of education.

The promise of public education was to create equity and create equal access. [It] was to create the possibility of a future that was not so dominated by privilege and oppression. I think that the way we’re going in California, in Illinois, in New York, in Massachusetts, is catastrophic for that future. I think that we have to really have a very major focus on rethinking the role of public higher education.

We need to have a focus on connecting that desire for a robust public education system to opposing, for example, a trillion dollar military budget. These things are related. And we can’t spend everything we have on war, and expect we’re going to have butter as well. Bombs and butter, it’s not possible. So, I hope that students, in their activism, and in their wisdom are able to reframe the debate about public education and make it a human right, which it is. Education is a human right. You have,
I believe, in California something like 50,000 kids who are qualified to get into the state system who will not get in, because of your budget. Something like more than 100,000 kids who are qualified in community colleges who won’t get in. You’re going to have a class size in some of your high schools in California of 35 or 37. This is an abomination if we want to have a democratic future …
As students get engaged in the struggle to save their schools, they should also think about how to transform those schools. I know that at [Cal] Berkeley, when the students took over the library, and said that the library should be open 24/7. And then they took an unprecedented step; they invited the community into the library. The community had never been invited into the library. So, suddenly you had a vision not just of saving the library, but transforming the library and making it into a public asset.