Access to UI Obama Trove?

A week after conservative writer Stanley Kurtz claimed that University of Illinois (UI) 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 in late August provided 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, where the archive is located.

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.

While media reports did not portray this as a fairly common special collections issue, the university's initial refusal to open the collection, to some, sounded like a cover-up. UI officials, however, said critics misunderstood the process and that a legal review showed UI had the authority to grant access.

Obama's opponents 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 U.S. Capitol, as a close one. Conservative commentators have suggested Ayers and Obama may have requested the restricted access, though no such evidence has emerged.