"Radical" UCLA professors targeted by alumni group
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Wednesday, January 18, 2006
(01-18) 05:19 PST Los Angeles (AP) --
An alumni group is offering students up to $100 per class to supply tapes and notes exposing University of California, Los Angeles professors who allegedly express extreme left-wing political views.
The year-old Bruin Alumni Association on its Web site says it is concerned about professors who use lecture time to press positions against President Bush, the military and multinational corporations, among other things.
The site includes a list of what the group calls the college's 30 most radical professors.
"We're just trying to get people back on a professional level of things," said the group's president and founder, Andrew Jones, a 2003 UCLA graduate and former chairman of the student Bruin Republicans.
"Having been a student myself up until 2003, and then watching what other students like myself have gone through, I'm very concerned about the level of professional teaching at UCLA."
Some of the group's targets accuse it of conducting a witch-hunt.
"Any sober, concerned citizen would look at this and see right through it as a reactionary form of McCarthyism," said education professor Peter McLaren, whom the associated named as No. 1 on its "The Dirty Thirty: Ranking the Worst of the Worst."
"Any decent American is going to see through this kind of right-wing propaganda. I just find it has no credibility."
The association's decision to name targets and pay students for information led to the resignation of at least one of its 20-plus advisory board members.
"That just seems to me way too intrusive," said Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, an affirmative action opponent and former UCLA professor. "It seems to me a kind of vigilantism that I very much object to."
Other advisory board members, according to the association Web site, include Linda Chavez, a former federal civil rights commissioner in the Reagan administration and head of a Virginia-based anti-affirmative action group; former Republican Rep. Jim Rogan; KABC-AM (790) radio host Al Rantel; and activist Joe Hicks.
UCLA officials said they will warn the association that selling copies of professors' lectures would violate campus rules and raise copyright issues.
The nonprofit association has raised $22,000 from 100 donors, said Jones, 24.
Here is a sample from their racist flogging of Prof. Doug Kellner:
Kellner tells tales of alleged Republican conspiracy and crime with such obvious relish. And why not? Conspiracy theories are like the theory of institutional racism: they aren’t based on empirical evidence, so they can’t actually be disproved. And, like institutional racism, conspiracy theories serve to confirm fervently-held but essentially unprovable suspicions. It’s no surprise, then, that conspiracy theories work with everyone: from an angry ghetto youth convinced that someone else is responsible for his bad grades and inability to attend a good school, to the sophisticated white college professor nursing an unnamed grudge against Texas conservatives. And never mind if there’s no evidence. This is an article of faith. As such, even a lack of evidence is proof of a cover-up.
"As such, even a lack of evidence is *proof* of a cover-up."
ReplyDeletewOw
I have occasionally enjoyed Al Rantel on the air and the fact that he was part of this is pretty ridiculous.
Maybe there's a reason higher education has what they call a 'liberal' bias...could it be that once you study history and learn context, you come to conclusions that politicians who like to hand out bags of money to already wealthy contituents, like to call Liberal.
just sayin.