UI Library To Open Collection Regarding Obama’s Work With Radical Academic
Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 8/26/2008
- Conservative writer says library pulled back access
- Library says it was dealing with legal questions
- Ayers-Obama ties part of political mudslinging
A week after conservative writer Stanley Kurtz claimed that University of Illinois (UI) Chicago officials blocked access to a library collection that might detail the relationship between Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and 1960s radical and professor William Ayers, UI officials agreed to provide such access. The collection concerns the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a nearly $50 million effort to reform Chicago’s schools, funded by the Annenberg Foundation, and spearheaded by Ayers and chaired by Obama in the 1990s. Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
According to Kurtz, librarians initially told him he was welcome to use the collection, some 140 boxes of documents. Then, he wrote, they told him the anonymous donor of the collection had raised legal questions about the granting of ownership, and possible privacy issues pertaining to personal information, such as Social Security numbers and salary information. While media reports did not portray this as a fairly common special collections issue, UI’s initial refusal to open the collection, to critics, sounded like a cover-up. UI officials, however, in their statement, said it was all a misunderstanding.
UI said that, after a “thorough legal review,” the university does indeed have “the legal authority to allow public access to its archive of Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents.” The collection will be opened today, and Kurtz has requested five days of exclusive access to them.
Obama’s critics have in campaign advertising been eager to portray the candidate’s relationship to Ayers, a former member of the radical 1960s group the Weathermen, which bombed the Capitol, as a close one. Conservative commentators have suggested Ayers and Obama may have requested the restricted access, though neither Ayers nor Obama have commented. Here’s a Washington Post analysis of the ties between Obama and Ayers.
