Obama/Ayers Update: New York Times Ignores Evidence of Ayers’ Role in Annenberg Board Selection

UPDATED: October 3.

Once again, the New York Times misses the story, parroting the false claims of the Obama Campaign about the relationship between Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. Some months ago the Times reported without comment the Campaign’s lie that the first time Obama met Ayers was in late 1995 at a “meet and greet” held at Ayers’ home for Obama when Obama launched his campaign for the state senate. 

Not so. The Times finally, albeit implicitly, acknowledges they had it wrong: that Ayers and Obama actually met many months earlier at least, when the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) was first formed. But once again they report, without any logical basis, that Ayers had nothing to do with the elevation of Obama to the CAC board.

In fact, an exchange of letters in late 1994, copies of which I obtained from Brown University, between Vartan Gregorian, then President of Brown and the individual responsible for assessing applications for grants from the national Annenberg Challenge, and Bill Ayers, the founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, demonstrates that Ayers played a direct role in “composing” the Challenge’s board of directors.

Another exchange of letters between Gregorian and Adele Simmons, then President of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation and an advisor to Ayers, confirms the active personal role of Ayers in selecting board members.

I was interviewed at length by the New York Times for today’s story. In fact, this was the third Times reporter to interview me about the Ayers/Obama relationship – and I provided the Times with the letters I discuss here. They are not mentioned in the story at all. 

Instead of relying on the contemporaneous written record that documents Ayers direct personal involvement in the formation of the CAC board, the New York Times relies on the recollection, fourteen years later, of only one named individual, Deborah Leff, as well as a vague reference to “several” other people allegedly involved, who say Ayers was not involved in Obama’s recruitment to the board. 

The Challenge Board was chaired by Barack Obama and Obama also served as President of the Challenge. (I will explore the role of Obama in those two executive positions in a later post here.) The Obama campaign and Obama himself have attempted to minimize the candidate’s longstanding and close professional and political relationship with Ayers because of Ayers’ authoritarian politics and past record of terrorist activities.

The Obama Campaign’s Story

The Obama campaign recently issued a statement stating that Bill Ayers had “nothing to do with Obama’s recruitment to the Board.” (Emphasis added.) The campaign contends that the only people involved in the appointment of Obama were Deborah Leff, then president of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, and Patricia Graham, President of the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation. Graham is a noted education historian and professor at Harvard.

A close review of the contemporaneous written records of the CAC, however, make it clear that this claim lacks credibility. The Campaign’s conclusion appears to be based on a statement issued by Leff a few days ago, fourteen years after the letters discussed here were written, when she stated:

“While working with Adele Simmons and Patricia Graham to identify a highly qualified person to chair the education reform organization the Annenberg Challenge, I recommended Barack Obama to serve as Chair. After meeting with Obama to review his qualifications, Patricia Graham asked Obama to become a candidate for the position.”

Of course, this statement does not contradict the possibility that Ayers was also involved as the letters discussed here demonstrate. I am not aware of any statement from Leff stating clearly that Ayers had “nothing” to do with the Obama appointment.  That appears to be a leap made by the Campaign without any evidence.  

In fact, a 1994 letter from Leff to Vartan Gregorian indicates that she viewed Ayers as in charge of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Leff told Gregorian on August 3, 1994:

“The Joyce Foundation strongly supports the proposal for the Annenberg Challenge Grant submitted from Chicago. At its meeting just two weeks ago, our Board of Directors approved a grant of $80,000 to Professor William Ayers at the University of Illinois at Chicago to establish the Chicago School Reform Collaborative [the CSRC - the working group that Ayers organized to develop and submit the CAC grant proposal and that would become an arm of the CAC once established in 1995]….We believe that the….Collaborative represents an effort that is likely to produce the type of sustained, programmatic approach to changing schools that is critical to the principles of the Annenberg Challenge. We give it our fullest support.”

Thus, if the Obama campaign is to be believed it would appear that after the Joyce Foundation gave Ayers and the CSRC its unqualified support and backed it up with money, its President, Deborah Leff, recruited Obama to be the Chairman of the Board of the CAC without involving Ayers.  

Who is Deborah Leff?

It is not entirely clear how Leff would have a basis to have known Obama well enough to recommend him to Annenberg. He would, of course, join the board of Leff’s Joyce Foundation, too.  But that only happened in late November of 1994. Joyce herself had only moved to Chicago from Washington, D.C., to take up the Presidency of the Joyce Foundation in mid 1992, after Obama had moved there after graduating from Harvard Law School the previous year. 

Leff already had a longstanding and close tie to the MacArthur Foundation’s Simmons – from their days at Princeton together, where Simmons was a dean and Leff was an undergraduate and a member of the first class to include women there. 

Apparently Leff was so impressed by the recent law school graduate during the selection process for her Foundation’s board that she thought it appropriate to recommend him at the very same time to Patricia Graham as Chairman of the Board and President of the $160 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Of course, it is conceivable that it was actually Ayers who recommended to Leff that Obama serve on her board. After all, Ayers and the Joyce Foundation had both been directly involved in supporting the Local School Councils governance structure in Chicago as far back as 1988, as had Obama and his Developing Communities Project. That was long before Leff arrived on the scene.

If Leff had not discussed the Obama appointment with Ayers in advance, it must have come as quite a shock to Ayers when he turned up at the first full board meeting of the CAC on March 15, 1995 and found Obama as its Chairman and President. 

Despite the suggestion by the Obama campaign that Leff and Graham set up a parallel process to recruit Obama to the board that did not include Ayers, the Joyce Foundation continued its strong financial support of Ayers including a grant in 1997 of more than $300,000.00 to support his Small Schools Workshop. 

The role of Warren Chapman 

It would have been very odd for yet another reason for Leff to have circumnavigated around Ayers in order to place Obama on the CAC board. The original working group convened by Ayers to prepare the CAC grant proposal in late 1993 was made up of Anne Hallett, Ayers and Warren Chapman. 

Chapman was, at that time, a program officer of the Joyce Foundation – in other words, he worked for Leff. Chapman was an intimate part of the process that led to the successful CAC grant. Was he, too, kept in the dark about the Obama appointment by his boss? If not, did he, in turn, keep the secret from Bill Ayers?

Chapman now works for the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where the CAC records are housed and where the CAC had its first offices and where Ayers is a faculty member. According to Stanley Kurtz of the National Review, Chapman was recently contacted by Ken Rolling, former CAC executive director, who alerted Chapman to the interest of journalist Sam Dillon of the New York Times in exploring the steps that led to Obama’s appointment to the CAC board, including the role played by Bill Ayers. 

Rolling told Chapman and Hallett in an email, obtained by Kurtz via a FOIA request to UIC, that the Obama campaign had referred Dillon to Rolling but that he had “avoided that question head on” when asked how Obama was “picked” for the Board. He told them he “believed Barack was Debbie Leff’s/Joyce nomination.” 

That suggestion (hint?) of Rolling to Chapman and Hallett, of course, is now the story being circulated by the Obama campaign as indicated in a written statement issued to Kurtz. But the “Ayers had nothing to do with it” story fails, in the tradition of Occam’s Razor, to explain all the known facts.

CAC Board Members Surprised at Obama Appointment

In fact, it was not Ayers who was surprised at the appointment of Obama but the other prominent figures in education on the board. The appointment by Obama struck one of the other board members, Stanley Ikenberry, the former President of the University of Illinois and a noted national education policy scholar, as “unusual” because of Obama’s lack of experience and that it was only over time that Obama earned the “respect” of the other appointees to the board.

Thus, a question has been raised whether Ayers engineered the appointment of Obama to the CAC board so that Ayers had a solid ally on the board to support what would turn out to be the controversial agenda of the CAC.

To remind Global Labor readers, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was conceived by Bill Ayers, former Weather Underground terrorist, who organized and led the working group (the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, or CSRC) that applied to the national Annenberg Challenge set up in 1993 by Walter Annenberg.  The Challenge set up its national headquarters at Brown University where Gregorian was President at the time.  Adele Simmons of the MacArthur Foundation served as an advisor to Ayers and the CSRC.

Ayers Role: The exchange of letters with Brown University’s Vartan Gregorian

On November 18, 1994, Brown University’s President Vartan Gregorian, now president of the New York City-based Carnegie Corporation, wrote to Bill Ayers and Anne Hallett about the “proposal you have submitted in response to the Annenberg Challenge.”  He called the proposal “ambitious,” “exciting,” “wise” and “appropriate.” He wanted Ayers and Hallett to respond to a few questions and then promised to submit the proposal for final approval to Ambassador Walter Annenberg. His comment on the board of directors was as follows:  ”This probably goes without saying, but I urge you as you compose the governing Board and the Collaborative, to engage people who reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of Chicago.” (Emphasis added.)

On November 18, 1994, President Gregorian wrote to Simmons a letter that was also copied to Bill Ayers.  Gregorian wrote that he had “a couple of questions about the management and accountability structures for the project.”  He told Simmons that because he thought the MacArthur Foundation might be a future contributor of funds to the CAC she would be interested in his concerns.  He wanted to “be sure that we have considered the issue of management carefully.” He concludes by noting that he “plans to transmit the Chicago proposal [from the Ayers and the CSRC] to Ambassador [Walter] Annenberg as soon as these remaining administrative details have been received.”

On November 29, 1994, Simmons replied to Gregorian and copied her letter to Bill Ayers.  She told Gregorian that 

“Bill Ayers, Debby Leff, Pat Graham, Anne Hallett, and I had breakfast on November 22, and reviewed the issues raised in your letter….We are constituting a governing board that will be diverse and bi-partisan and will include civic leaders who have a long-standing interest in the public schools as well as the people who are actually working in the schools. We expect this group to include no more that [sic] eight people, and we should be able to send you a list of several of the names by early next week. It is this group that will be accountable for the implementation of the project, for raising the matching funds, and for overseeing the evaluation.”

On December 1, 1994, Ayers and Anne Hallett (who co-chaired the CSRC with Ayers) wrote back to Gregorian:

“Thank you for your letter of November 18, 1994. We are continuing to build a broad base of consensus and support for the main thrust of the proposal….We have given careful thought to the issues raised in your letter. We are working with Adele Simmons, Deborah Leff, and Pat Graham on issues of management and governance to ensure that Chicago’s Annenberg Challenge initiative is successful. We offer the following responses:….Board of Directors. A five-to-seven person Board of Directors of highly respected Chicagoans is being assembled. Pat Graham, president of the Spencer Foundation, has agreed to serve and is willing to work with the Board. The duties of the Board will be to approve grants, to help raising matching funds, and to hire the executive director….The Board and the Collaborative will reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of Chicago.”

Thus, it is clear from the contemporaneous written record of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, that Bill Ayers, who conceived and led the organization, submission and implementation of the CAC’s grant application, was viewed by Gregorian as responsible for composing the Board of Directors of the CAC and that, in fact, as evidenced by the Simmons letters indeed played a personal, active and direct role in the recruitment and formation of the CAC’s board of directors.

This is consistent with the fact that Ayers was the agent of the CSRC who applied for the grant. Ayers, thus, had formal responsibility for establishing the CAC as a result of receiving the grant from the national Annenberg Challenge via Vartan Gregorian.  There is no written evidence that I have found indicating that Gregorian ever wrote or communicated separately with Leff or Graham where he asked them to take over that responsibility from Ayers.

Copies of all of the letters cited here are linked below.

Letters

1) Gregorian to Ayers, November 18, 1994. Page one. Page two. Page three.

Gregorian to Simmons, November 18, 1994. Page one. Page two. Page three.

2) Simmons to Gregorian, November 29, 1994. Page one. Page two.

3) Ayers/Hallett to Gregorian, December 1, 1994. Page one. Page two. Page three.

4) Leff to Gregorian, August 3, 1994. Page one. Page two.