Obama/Ayers Update: Letters Indicate Ayers’ Role in Obama Appointment to Chicago Annenberg Challenge Board

An exchange of letters in late 1994 (links below) between Vartan Gregorian, the President of Brown University, Adele Simmons, President of the MacArthur Foundation, and Bill Ayers, the founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, demonstrate that Ayers played a direct personal role in the recruitment of members of the Challenge’s board of directors.

The Board was chaired by Barack Obama.  

The Obama campaign recently issued a statement stating that Bill Ayers had “nothing to do with Obama’s recruitment to the Board.” 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.

The Campaign’s conclusion appears to be based on a statement issued by Leff a few days ago, fourteen years after the letters were written, where 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, it is not clear from this statement that Ayers was not also involved as the letters demonstrate. In addition, a 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.  

Now it turns out that Obama had recently joined the board of Leff’s Joyce Foundation also in 1994. Apparently Leff was so impressed by the recent law school graduate during the few short months he had served as a rank and file member of her Foundation’s board, that she thought it appropriate to recommend him to Graham as Chairman of the Board and President of the $160 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Thus, 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. 

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 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.

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.

The statement by the Obama campaign appears to be contradicted by the letters between Simmons, Gregorian and Ayers.

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.

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 to Gregorian.  They wrote:

“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, also played an 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.

Letters

1) 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.

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I am a lawyer, political scientist and law professor. I teach courses and conduct research on the global capital markets, business law, international human rights and labor law.

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SusanUnPC’s note: We all know Steve Diamond for his investigative work on Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers. Steve is a lawyer, political scientist and law professor. His blog is Global Labor and Politics.