II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 77control of the public schools would offer vast potential for mobilizing the black ghetto against the
largely Jewish teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers or UFT.
The result was a sinister triumph of foundation-funded social engineering and political
manipulation. The idea was to give the newly created community control apparatus the right to hire
and fire teachers, in flagrant violation of the legally binding contract the UFT had fought so hard to
obtain from the city only a few years before. Bundy was no doubt gleeful as he contemplated the
potential for busting a union in the short run, using duped black parents, egged on by foundation-
funded poverty pimps:
The most notorious Bundy endeavor, the school decentralization experiment in the Ocean Hill-
Brownsville section of Brooklyn, changed the course of liberalism by fracturing the black-
Jewish civil rights coalition and souring race relations in New York for years afterward. Bundy
had led a mayoral panel under John Lindsay that recommended giving “community control”
over local public school districts to parents. The panel’s report, written by a Ford staffer,
claimed that New York’s huge centralized school system was not sufficiently accountable to
minority populations. Black and Puerto Rican children could not learn or even behave, the
report maintained, unless their parents were granted “meaningful participation” in their
education. Translation: parents should hire and fire local teachers and school administrators.
(Heather Mac Donald)
Bundy launched the program with characteristic energy and dispatch. The very month he
arrived in New York, he secured the board’s formal blessing to make race the top priority. Then
he got down to studying the issue in earnest. He read everything he could get his hands on and
spared no effort to get to know “Negro leaders.” He reached out to individuals and heads of
organizations, meeting them individually and in small groups. There were Sunday lunches at his
home and dinner meetings at the elite, all-male Century Club. The Century round-tables became
a kind of an institution in themselves: a dozen or more black and white men, from government,
social work and academia, would gather on the club’s musty top floor and take turns around the
table, each speaking his piece, then removing their jackets and arguing late into the night.’
(Tamar Jacoby)
‘The Bundy Report on decentralization contains one inexcusable folly – inexcusable because ...
Bundy ... recognized it as folly ... that communities can ‘unite’ around the issue of education. In
fact, communities inevitably divide about the issue of education.’ (Salandria)
If this was folly on the part of Bundy, it was very willful folly. Later Obama would repeat the
same divisive tactics as head of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
RACIST RHODY MCCOY, FORD OPERATIVE AND ROLE MODEL FOR OBAMA
The success of the community control gambit for purposes of counterinsurgency and political
manipulation depended in large part on the personal qualities of the boss of the new experimental
community control school district. As could be expected, the Ford Foundation selected for this post
the most incendiary and outrageous racist provocateur in sight:
Ford chose as the head of its $1.4 million decentralization experiment in three Brooklyn school
districts a longtime white-hater, Rhody McCoy, who dreamed of creating an all-black school
system, right up through college, within the public schools. McCoy was a moderate, however,
compared to the people he tapped as deputies. Although the school board blocked his
appointment of a militant under indictment for conspiracy to murder, he did manage to hire Les