The right-wing attack on higher education hit a new low last week when a conservative association of UCLA alumni offered college students money to report UCLA professors expressing liberal views. The organization, the Bruin Alumni Association, said it would pay up to $100 for information about "abusive, one-sided or off-topic classroom behavior."

After faculty groups--including the California Federation of Teachers, the university and even a rival conservative group--raised a hue and cry, BAA backed off the remuneration part of the offer but not the appeal for students to serve as informants on their professors.

On its Web site (http://www.bruinalumni.com), BAA says it is especially worried about professors who "can't stop talking about President Bush, Howard Dean, the War in Iraq…or any other ideological issue."

BAA, less than a year old, has approximately 1,750 members, its 24-year-old founder and sole employee Andrew Jones told the Daily Bruin, UCLA's student newspaper. Until last week, when four people resigned, it had 20 board members, including conservative scholars, commentators and politicians such as Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, State Sen. Bill Morrow and Shawn Steel, past president of the state Republican Party. Sen. Morrow is the legislator who introduced SB 5, the Student Bill of Rights, in the California Senate December 2004.

BAA's Web site says it is " dedicated to exposing UCLA’s most radical professors" and it directs people to www.uclaprofs.com and a compilation called  the "Dirty Thirty"—its list of the "worst of the worst" professors at UCLA. Close inspection of the BAA profiles of those professors shows the professors are being targeted for their public activities, not what happens in the classroom.

For example, one of those on the list is Katherine King, a professor of comparative literature and classics and vice president of the UC-AFT local. King "doesn’t seem to involve her personal politics in her classroom teaching," Jones writes, and he complains about the "uniformly bland, apolitical titles of her courses in classics and in comparative literature." She's on the list, though, for the convictions she holds outside of class: her support for affirmative action programs, her opposition to the war, her support of a "Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace."

"Although Andrew Jones claims to be defending the rights of students subjected to one-sided indoctrination by radical professors, Jones has no idea what those professors do in the classroom," King notes. "His profiles castigate me and my colleagues for signing petitions, publishing articles and books, attending anti-war protests, supporting affirmative action, and contributing money to causes. In other words, he is attacking us for doing what all citizens should: participating in the political life of the campus, city, state and nation."

The California Federation of Teachers denounced the group and its tactics and noted the inescapable comparisons between it and its model, Students for Academic Freedom. SAF is  the national Web-based faculty attack vehicle created by David Horowitz, the conservative author of the Academic Bill of Rights, model legislation that purports to protect academic freedom by imposing ideological diversity—kind of a form of conservative affirmative action for the college teaching corps.

"Although few people who have been paying attention are fooled by this campaign, we can't let any effort to erode academic freedom pass unchallenged," said Mary Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers, which represents thousands of college faculty and staff in the state. "If allowed to gain traction, the neo-McCarthyite effort represented by the 'Student Bill of Rights' and spin-offs like this tiny UCLA group represent a threat to open academic inquiry and debate."

UCLA lecturer Bob Samuels, who is also the president of the University Council-AFT, notes the corrosive effect of unrefuted attacks on higher education. "This cultural war is coming at a time when an increasing number of faculty in America no longer have tenure, and therefore they do not have their academic freedom protected in the first place. Ultimately this conservative attack functions to obscure the changing political realities of higher education: the loss of tenured faculty, the defunding of instruction, the corporatization of the administration, and spiraling student fees in what was set up to be a free public higher education system."

For its part, UCLA had a legal response to BAA. Its campus counsel warned Jones that his proposal violates UCLA school policy and could subject students to charges of copyright infringement. 

Also, in a brief statement affirming the general free speech rights of those who would support or criticize the university, UCLA chancellor Albert Carnesale said the UCLA community finds the methods of its recent graduate to be "reprehensible."

"We sympathize with and support our faculty colleagues who have been targeted in this way, and we share their anger and frustration," Carnesale concluded. [Barbara McKenna]

January 25, 2006