Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

Under the Tree with Bill Ayers
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“Under the Tree” is a new podcast that focuses on freedom—a complex, layered, dynamic, and often contradictory idea—and takes you on a journey each week to fundamentally reimagine how we can bring freedom and liberation to life in relation to schools and schooling, equality and justice, and learning to live together in peace. Our podcast opens a crawl-space, a fugitive field and firmament where we can both explore our wildest freedom dreams, and organize for a liberating insurgency. "Under the Tree" is a seminar, and it runs the gamut from current events to the arts, from history lessons to scientific inquiries, and from essential readings to frequent guest speakers. We’re in the midst of the largest social uprising in US history—and what better time to dive headfirst into the wreckage, figuring out as we go how to support the rebellion, name it, and work together to realize its most radical possibilities—and to reach its farthest horizons?

  1. Sep 30

    WAKE NOW in the FIRE with Jarrett Dapier

    “Poets,” Stanley Kunitz writes, “are not easily domesticated… and they can be outrageous; but they are also idealists and visionaries whose presence is needed… to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, and to challenge [spiritual] apathy.” Poets, yes, and teachers and librarians along with citizens and artists of every stripe and kind. Everyone is invited to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, to challenge apathy, leaning into the never-ending pursuit of new knowledge, novel insights, the complex, fugitive concept, “truth,” and the right to think at all. We’re remembering the brilliant artist, writer, and film-maker Marjane Satrapi who lived her life fighting for freedom in her native Iran as well as internationally—she “died of sadness” a few weeks ago, and we join legions of her admirers and comrades-in-arms in mourning her passing. Persepolis, her acclaimed comic book/memoir of a childhood and adolescence during and after the Islamic Revolution, was banned again and again in multiple venues. When a Texas state representative recently released a list of 850 books---including Persepolis—and advised school libraries to report whether they had any of the titles on his list, a school district in San Antonio removed more than 400 books. And when the McMinn County school board voted unanimously to ban the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from the school’s classrooms and library, a Tennessee pastor organized a book burning, live-streamed on Facebook, where books with “demonic influences”—including Persepolis— were fed to the flames. As Governors and Senators join the troglodyte choir, it becomes increasingly clear that as terrible as banning Marjane Satrapi or Art Spiegelman is in itself, the larger target is any third-grade teacher or high school English teacher anywhere in the country. The main victims of this galloping censorship are children and youth, of course, but it’s important to note that while truth-telling can and is being banned in schools by state legislators and local boards, it’s a wide, wide world out there, and repression activates resistance. Neither kids nor teachers are simply one-dimensional victims of ignorant policies. Teachers are launching Banned Books Clubs and after-school local history study groups at high schools around the country, and the message is clear: you need no one’s permission to interrogate the world. We’re joined by Jarrett Dapier, a librarian and champion of the right of free people to read freely, and the author of Wake Now in the Fire, a fictionalized graphic account of a series of true events when a community—teachers, students, and parents in Chicago—fought for and won the right to read Persepolis.

    WAKE NOW in the FIRE with Jarrett Dapier

  2. Sep 16

    What Debt Demands with Kristin Collier

    Debt is everywhere, and its demands are boundless—debt demands repayment, of course, and it typically demands interest on top of that. But debt’s visible and obvious demands are just the beginning. Debt’s sticky, spidery web demands, as well, fear and anxiety, distrust and dishonesty, guilt and shame—it demands insecurity and precariousness. The demands are financial, of course, and personal, but also psychological, cultural, political, and existential. We’ re joined by Kristin Collier, author of What Debt Demands:Family Betrayal and Precarity in a Broken System, part memoir and part research from the ground—a compelling journey through the matrix that debt has woven, and a vision of what it would mean to be bound to one another rather than to the state or to the banks.

    What Debt Demands with Kristin Collier

  3. Aug 27

    The Witch Hunt with Tom Alter

    Colleges and universities—and all educational institutions—are natural sites of struggle over fundamental questions: what knowledge and experiences are of most value? Who should have access to that valuable knowledge? What is the truth about this or that, and what’s the evidence? Where do we come from and what we hope to be? These questions are messy, full of conflict, even dangerous, and universities are both venues to discuss ideas, and stages where we put those ideas into practice, arguing and contending over the meaning of history, class, race, religion, gender, sexuality, and every other aspect of what it means to be fully human. We’re joined by labor historian Tom Alter, a tenured professor at Texas State University who was summarily fired this year for his political beliefs, and who is engaged in a fight about the right to think at all---a struggle that has implications for all of us.

    The Witch Hunt with Tom Alter

  4. Aug 12

    Educational Apartheid with Eve Ewing

    The US school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives. Join Eve L. Ewing and Bill Ayers at a season of the Socialism 2025 conference for a discussion of the historical origins of white supremacy and racial hierarchy baked into the DNA of American schooling.

    Educational Apartheid with Eve Ewing

  5. Jul 30

    The Red Lobster Declaration— A Manifesto for Educational Liberation with Jared Rock and Mike Schuwerk

    We know what the authoritarian vision of education and schooling is—it’s laid out in detail in Project 2025: an end to public education, taxpayer funding for religious and private schools, teachers reduced to clerks, and students as indistinguishable widgets moving along an assembly line as bits of information are poured into their upturned heads. For decades there’s been a relentless campaign to define education in instrumentalist, linear, and expedient terms, and high-stakes standardized tests have been a common cudgel in the hands of the powerful, a kind of modern and scientized eugenics device. Simultaneously, the marketeers have organized a fire-sale, relentlessly selling off our public assets to private interests. All of this activity undermines the nature of intellectual inquiry and cognitive growth, transforming education into a matter of consumption, competition, and a hierarchy of winners and losers; the result is the eclipse of the public, the demolition of the commons, and the destruction of authentic learning. Join Bill in conversation with Jared Rock and Mike Schuwerk as they discuss their own North Star: Educational Humanism in a Post-Managerial Age, a liberatory alternative to the devastating dystopia we’re living through.

    The Red Lobster Declaration— A Manifesto for Educational Liberation with Jared Rock and Mike Schuwerk

  6. Jul 12

    We Who Believe in Freedom with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

    What’s happening? How did we get here? Where are we on the clock of the world? And where do we go from here? Today—and everyday—we need to ask ourselves deep and fundamental questions in order to continue to develop a dynamic and concrete analysis of concrete conditions—a guide to resistance and action. Surrender is not an option, and living in a perpetual defensive crouch is never the way forward. No. In the words of the legendary organizer Ella Baker, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” In June, 2026 Bill met up with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor at Haymarket House for a wide-ranging conversation about this political moment and what the known demands of us now. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a MacArthur Fellow and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the co-founder of Hammer & Hope, a magazine of Black politics and culture, and author of several books: Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.

    We Who Believe in Freedom with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  7. Jun 18

    RUNNING TOWARD FREEDOM with Walter Riley

    Fugitives are on the run—not free yet, they are running and running hard…running toward freedom. Refugees have escaped war or catastrophic climate collapse or extreme social disintegration, and forced to flee their homes, compelled to confront a fresh landscape, they invent new ways of living, learning, loving, and being—on the run. Walter Riley is a long-distance runner—he’s been in the mix and on the move for eight decades. A refugee from the Jim Crow South where as a teenager he was a renowned organizer and activist, and at 19 moderated a conversation with Malcolm X in Durham, NC, Walter Riley is a civil rights attorney in Oakland, California, winner of the National Lawyers Guild’s Champion of Justice Award, and a founder of Haiti Emergency Relief (visit Episode #38 where Walter is in conversation about Haiti with our Beloved late comrade Malik Alim). Walter Riley is a fugitive from our soul-crushing racial capitalist system, and a powerful revolutionary thinker and strategist. His son Boots Riley says that his dad teaches us that “we must participate, we must engage, we must seek to change the world.” In motion and in action we will develop our thinking and figure out with more clarity “how to fight, how to live, how to love…” Arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder, heart-to-heart, Walter Riley returns to “Under the Tree” for a discussion of movement-building in this political moment as well as his new book (with Jesse Strauss and a Foreword by Boots), Civil Rights and Structural Attacks.

    RUNNING TOWARD FREEDOM with Walter Riley

  8. Jun 4

    …AGAIN with Mark Nowak

    We're delighted to be joined—again—by Mark Nowak, a labor activist, organizer, legendary teacher, and prize-winning poet, who is the founding director of the Worker Writers School. I've participated in sessions at the School several times, and the joy and energy that explodes into the room is striking as domestic workers, cab drivers, miners, and other workers embrace and display their intellectual and creative talents. Adrienne Rich praised Nowak for "regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature." Here we discuss AGAIN, his photo-text commentary on MAGA, touching on mass incarceration, school shootings, environmental collapse, white nationalism, and war.

    …AGAIN with Mark Nowak
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4.9
out of 5
80 Ratings

About

“Under the Tree” is a new podcast that focuses on freedom—a complex, layered, dynamic, and often contradictory idea—and takes you on a journey each week to fundamentally reimagine how we can bring freedom and liberation to life in relation to schools and schooling, equality and justice, and learning to live together in peace. Our podcast opens a crawl-space, a fugitive field and firmament where we can both explore our wildest freedom dreams, and organize for a liberating insurgency. "Under the Tree" is a seminar, and it runs the gamut from current events to the arts, from history lessons to scientific inquiries, and from essential readings to frequent guest speakers. We’re in the midst of the largest social uprising in US history—and what better time to dive headfirst into the wreckage, figuring out as we go how to support the rebellion, name it, and work together to realize its most radical possibilities—and to reach its farthest horizons?

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