Ayers and Dohrn both should NOT be teaching, nor defending any American citizen, let alone children. They should be on the inside of Gitmo looking out!

Bernadine Dohrn in 1969, was a leader of the Weathermen who set off four "Days of Rage" in Chicago, smashing downtown store windows to strike at capitalist oppressors. Now, director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University School of Law. There she has won a place and a public role after years of searching for ways to channel her still-radical ideals into action. She helps represent parents charged with child abuse or neglect and children accused of delinquency, researches children's experiences in the legal system, and works to improve Chicago's juvenile court system. It has been 34 years since the Days of Rage, when members of the Weathermen, the radical antiwar group, battled police with pipes and sticks in downtown Chicago. It has been 23 years since Ms. Dohrn emerged from more than a decade underground, a time when her face was plastered on posters as one of the 10 most-wanted fugitives sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and 16 years since she returned to the city of her birth and notoriety.

Dohrn has struggled to carve out a new role and purpose as she and society move on. When she surfaced in 1980, along with William C. Ayers, a fellow Weathermen leader, and their two children, she pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and jumping bail, and was fined $1,500 and placed on three years' probation. Charges against Mr. Ayers were dropped.

In 1982, the year she married Mr. Ayers, she served seven months in jail for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the Brink's robbery in Nanuet, N.Y. Those months, she said, were the hardest on her children, who were too young to remember the years in hiding.

A 1967 graduate of the University of Chicago law school, Dohrn passed the New York bar examination in 1984 and joined the New York office of Sidley & Austin, a Chicago firm. But in 1985, the bar judged her unfit for admission, questioning her commitment to the rule of law.
But a hint of what that rejection cost her emerged as she marveled at how raw the divisions of that time remain, both in her case and most recently in the furor over Katherine Ann Power, who surrendered in September 1993, 23 years as a fugitive for her role in a 1970 Boston bank robbery that ended in a policeman's death.

Dohrn cast about, moving back to Chicago with her husband. "I floundered around for a very long time," she said, "and finally decided I did want to stay involved with kids."

Her interest in children's issues began during her years underground, when she gave birth to her two sons and while Mr. Ayers taught at a day-care center. She rallied parents at the center behind the cause of scholarships for minority students, amid stints as a waitress and a clerk in a baby-clothing store.

In 1988, she went to work in the office of the Cook County Public Guardian, which represents abused and neglected children. But frustrated with what she believed was a tendency to demonize the mothers in these cases, she moved to the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern in 1991.

Dohrn works on a wide array of issues, bringing ideas culled from her politics and from her years as a mother. She deplores the way the law cuts children off from their parents when they are deemed unfit. "We rip children out of the family very quickly," she said. "There are plenty of mothers who should not be allowed to raise their children. But that doesn't tell you termination needs to mean no contact or no relationship."

She reeled off proposals for Chicago's overburdened juvenile court, among them an effort to convince more first-class lawyers that working on children's and family issues is intellectually engrossing as well as altruistic. And she argued that many of the cases could be diverted to social programs or mediation, so that judges no longer have a caseload 10 times the American Bar Association standard.

To Dohrn, her work in juvenile justice represents a change in tactics, not substance. "It's a lens to see the whole world," she said, "all the issues of justice and equality and peace, all the issues I care about."

These are ideals she and her husband, now an assistant professor of education, who is working to improve public schools, are trying to pass on to their children. Their sons talk about their years on the run in the manner of any child reciting a well-worn family story ("I was born underground and I was called Z . . ."). But for a real-life taste of what Mr. Ayers calls "movement culture," each summer the couple send the children to a camp where they stay in bunks named after Harriet Tubman and Eugene V. Debs and study subjects like South Africa and the campaign against nuclear power.

They named their children after some of their heroes. Their older son, Zayd Osceola Ayers Dohrn, was named in honor of Zayd Shakur, the Black Panther killed in New Jersey during a shootout with police in 1973, and Osceola, the Seminole chief who sheltered runaway slaves. Malik Cochise, takes his names from Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and the 19th-century Apache chief who fought settlers encroaching on his land.

The couple are also the legal guardians of Chesa Jackson, whose mother, Kathy Boudin, and father, David Gilbert, are in jail for their roles in the 1981 Brink's robbery, in which a Brink's guard and two police officers were killed.

But even with political namesakes and summer camp, Dohrn said it isn't easy to raise children in a world hostile to many of their parents' ideals. "Over all, many of society's values are a cesspool," she said. "It's a crisis faced by any parent.

What she thinks has remained consistent, but the thornier problem has been how to stay true to her ideals in a different age. It is not so simple as saying that once she fought the system and now she works within it. She still seeks radical change, but with different methods.

"I don't know if it's possible to change a single thing like juvenile justice or schools without fundamental equity and equality issues being changed," she said. "You try even if you don't have a great strategy. That's how you live your life. One thing I've definitely changed about: I don't feel like creating an elaborate strategy. It's much more raggedy and improvisational."

She has traveled far from -- but still not left behind -- the woman who was caught up in the Days of Rage.

"Some things are not justifiable and not logical, Lots of inappropriate things and things regretted later get said and done. That is partly a self-criticism and partly an explanation. These kinds of movements are very human."