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But when the university announced in mid-October that Ayers would speak on campus on November 15, all hell broke loose. A faculty committee from the College of Education and Human Sciences had invited him way back in February, when Ayers was simply a Chicago educator with a colorful background. But by October he’d become Barack Obama’s unrepentant terrorist sidekick and all the proof any hysteric needed that America simply didn’t know enough about the Democratic candidate with the Muslim name to risk putting him in the White House.
Afterward, the Lincoln Journal Star published an account of the episode that included this handwringing assessment from the dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications to the president of the university: “I believe in freedom of expression with all my heart, and I also believe in being careful about that freedom when there are folk who will be incensed by that freedom. I am not sure what should be done.”
