Guess who’s coming to dinner.
Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson has bid on and won a dinner with controversial Vietnam-era radical Bill Ayers in a fundraiser for the Illinois Humanities Council, the group confirmed Friday.
As part of the auction item, Carlson, of Fox News and The Daily Caller, will have dinner with the former college professor who has written about helping with bombings at the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and other government sites.
There are no plans to record the dinner, which will include up to six people and cost Carlson $2,500, said Kristina Valaitis, executive director of the humanities council.
“I bought the auction dinner because I support the important work of the Illinois Humanities Council,” Carlson said in an email. “Anything I can do to help.”
The dinner is among several items the council is offering as part of an anniversary fundraising auction. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, volunteered to cook a meal and offer conversation to help the council raise money, Valaitis said. Among the other items offered in the auctions, scheduled to run through Monday, is the chance to attend a Chicago Cubs game with Dohrn, also a former Vietnam-era radical. The dinner auction ended early when Carlson met the maximum required bid.
“We were very pleased that they would do that,” Valaitis said. “It’s wonderful when someone wants to make an in-kind contribution to support the work we do.”
The auction item was prominently displayed on the council’s website and upset some former members who did not support having such a polarizing figure raise money for the organization.
“Here’s a guy who is a terrorist, he’s blown up buildings,” said John Fascia, a former humanities council board member who opposed offering the dinner with Ayers. Fascia said he called council administrators to tell them he found the move distasteful. “I think there was an error in judgment on this. … This is really off the deep end.”
The dinner also divided some members of the council’s current board, prompting several to lobby for its removal from the fundraiser, according to a board member who did not want to be identified. After a debate Friday, the board narrowly voted to keep the item, the board member said.
Ayers is a retired University of Illinois at Chicago professor and co-founder of the Weather Underground, a radical anti-war group responsible for bombings in 1969 and the 1970s. He has written extensively about his past and was denied emeritus status at UIC in part because he dedicated one of his books to Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
The humanities council is an educational nonprofit group that organizes lectures, presentations, performances, exhibits and cultural events. The group is funded in part by state grants. In fiscal year 2011, the organization received $558,000 from the Illinois Arts Council to support its programs. In fiscal year 2010, the council received $507,300, an official with the state comptroller’s office said.
As for scheduling, the auction listing for the dinner contained the following: “Dinner will be arranged on a mutually agreed upon date before September 30, 2012. All sales are final.”
Ayers and Dohrn did not return calls seeking comment.
