University of Illinois at Chicago releases papers with Barack Obama-William Ayers link

CHICAGO — The University of Illinois at Chicago released documents Tuesday about Barack Obama’s service to a school reform group linked to former 1960s radical William Ayers, but details about their interactions were scant in minutes from some early board meetings.

Ayers, who teaches at the university, has a controversial past that some supporters of Republican John McCain want to highlight because of his past work with Obama. Ayers helped found the Weather Underground organization that took credit for a series of bombings, including nonfatal blasts at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol four decades ago.

Obama and Ayers both attended some 1995 board meetings of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers was instrumental in starting and Obama chaired in the 1990s.

Ayers was part of the group’s operational arm, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, which reviewed proposals for Challenge grants and made recommendations to the board, according to the organization’s early documents.

During a June 1995 meeting, Ayers was credited with having ‘‘worked diligently’’ to support the board and the collaborative, according to meeting minutes.

But more than a year later, Obama pushed the group to be bolder in its reforms. Minutes from an October 1996 gathering show Obama, a guest at a meeting of the collaborative, raised questions about what the group should be doing.

The minutes characterized Obama’s concerns as twofold: Whether the group was raising additional money and whether money was being used ‘‘to prop up existing organizations as opposed to creating fresh educational practices in the schools?’’

‘‘At the end of five years, will we have broken the mold? Not much seems to be bubbling up that is inspiring or substantive,’’ the minutes say, paraphrasing Obama.

The Associated Press was among several news organizations reviewing the records released by the university. UIC set up appointments for more than a dozen journalists who wanted to review them.

The records have been in the university’s collection since late 2001, but had garnered virtually no attention or interest, said UIC spokesman Mark Rosati. UIC reopened them Tuesday after being briefly restricted earlier this month while the school resolved a question over their availability, Rosati said.

The university posted an index of the records online Monday, but only one entry included Obama’s name.

It was a 1995 memo to Obama from a woman who worked in the Chicago School Reform Collaborative about work she was doing, such as lining up a lawyer and talking to a search firm.

Chicago Annenberg Challenge was awarded nearly $50 million in the 1990s. The money was part of Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg’s $500 million ‘‘Challenge to the Nation’’ whereby public-private partnerships tried to improve public schools, according to the Annenberg Institute’s Web site.

Obama has said he ‘‘deplored’’ what Ayers did in the 1960s and that ‘‘by the time I met him, he is a professor of education at the University of Illinois. We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education.’’