WHILE the Bush administration fights off charges of illegal wiretapping of citizens, a group called the Bruin Alumni Association has made headlines for offering to pay students at UCLA for audio recordings of professors suspected of holding radical left-wing views. Students can earn as much as $100 for spying on their professors and reporting back to the association, in what is either a sloppy academic freedom campaign or a brilliant scheme to secure the attention of students in lecture.
While recent years have seen similar accusations against faculty, this association preys on students' major weakness: Students always need money and, honestly, there isn't much that the typical college student wouldn't do for $100. Nevertheless, the demands of the Bruin Alumni Association might make participating students wonder if $100 is enough. Students are expected to attend every single class and to provide "full, detailed lecture notes, all professor-distributed materials, and full tape recordings" of each session. It's a lot to ask of any student, especially in the service of a baseless witch hunt.
On its Web site, "UCLAProfs.com," the Bruin Alumni Association documents its complaints against a list of UCLA professors with more snide insults and playground taunts than evidence of misconduct in the classroom. The site claims that one professor was "beaten up as a child for his slight stature" while another is described as a "self-hating Jew." Their list of the top offenders is constructed with the hilarious joke that the lower-ranked professors might strive to move up in the rankings.
Critics of the alumni group have charged that the call to spy on professors is Orwellian, or reminiscent of Stalin's police state. UCLA Education Prof. Peter McLaren told The Los Angeles Times that the association's Web site was "a reactionary form of McCarthyism." But in truth, this comparison is an insult to Joe McCarthy, who managed to haul his targets before the United States Congress. The Bruin Alumni Association has succeeded only in launching a shoddy Web site that offers little more than petty insults. Joe McCarthy would probably think that "UCLAProfs.com" was lame.
Even the reigning leader of academic witch hunts, David Horowitz, has distanced himself from the UCLA group. Horowitz told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the group's leader, Andrew Jones, was fired from his "academic freedom" campaign because he encouraged students to fabricate reports against liberal professors. When even David Horowitz doesn't take you seriously, it might be time to step gracefully from the public eye.
If the group has succeeded in anything, it has managed to spark conversation about the right-wing accusation of ideological bias among university professors, including, as some reader will no doubt point out, this very column. The problem is that while few mainstream newspapers would endorse the idea of students getting paid to spy on their professors, the larger concern behind the group has enjoyed unwarranted credibility in the press.
The myth of the oppressive liberal professor has lived on in the media, bolstered by surveys that have nothing to do with classroom conduct. In their coverage of the UCLA campaign, The Los Angeles Times noted that "some studies show" more professors identifying themselves as liberal than conservative, yet these statistics fail to address the claim of right-wing groups that left-leaning professors are somehow harmful to students who disagree with their political views. If anything is hurting conservative students, it is right-wing pity parties that encourage young Republicans to think of themselves as victims, coming to class armed with tape recorders instead of their own ideas and arguments.
I encourage the students of UCLA to respond with the appropriate degree of seriousness. See if you can get $100 for drunken recordings in your best mock-lecture voice, with your friends snickering in the background. You can get $10 simply for providing the name of a "problem professor," even if you don't have the recordings or the notes to back up the accusation. Would submitting the entire faculty roster yield that many payments? Let's find out. Beyond that, the charges of radicalism warrant no further investigation, except perhaps into the tormented psyches of the group's creators.
Cari Lynn Hennessy's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at chennessy@cavalierdaily.com.
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