LAT op-ed: Witch hunt at UCLA (a targeted professor speaks)

[DeepModem Mom]

COMMENTARY
Witch hunt at UCLA
By Saree Makdisi

"UCLA STUDENTS: Do you have a professor who just can't stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican Party, or any other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject matter? It doesn't matter whether this is a past class, or your class from this coming winter quarter. If you help expose the professor, we'll pay you for your work."

This grotesque offer appeared last week on a new website taking aim at members of the UCLA faculty. The site, created by the Bruin Alumni Assn., a group founded by 2003 UCLA graduate Andrew Jones, offers differing bounties for class notes, handouts and illicit recordings of lectures ($100 for all three).

A glance at the profiles of the "targeted professors," however, reveals that they have been singled out, in most cases, not for what goes on in their courses, but for the positions they have taken outside the classroom — and outside the university.

I earned my own inaccurate and defamatory "profile," for example, not for what I have said in my classes on English poets such as Wordsworth and Blake — my academic specialty, which the website pointedly avoids mentioning — but rather for what I have written in newspapers about Middle Eastern politics.

My colleagues and I are being targeted for speaking out on the kinds of urgent social matters and universal principles that it has always — in every society and every age — been the task of intellectuals to address....


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-makdisi22jan22,0,2020503.story?coll=la-home-sunday-opinion

[Wind Dancer]

1. This is right out of the David Horowitz playbook.

http://www.uclaprofs.com/

[Surya Gayatri]

2. Expect the hard drive trashings & book burnings to commence

shortly. The thought-terror police will be authorized to enter your premises at will to verify the contents of your archives.

This stuff is really frightening if you've read anything about Communist China during the Cultural Revolution. Family members ratting on each other, cowed cadres publicly confessing to their "thought crimes".

The whole nation was so profoundly traumtized by this episode that they willingly practice self-censorship today. :scared:

[Jeffersons Ghost]

3. I'm a history buff

In the early days of the Third Reich, Nazis were particularly interested in discrediting the highly educated before rounding scholars up with several other groups and shipping them off to camp. If you act now, you can win a thrill-filled sabbatical in Cuba and it will not cost you a single sky mile.

[Surya Gayatri]

7. Yes, destroy their credibility

& reputation. They represent a danger to the state as long as the public retains any sentiment of deference for their erudition. SG

[tularetom]

4. I'm sure that when "Young Conservative" Andrew Jones

enlists in the Army and goes to Iraq, this witchhunt will be forgotten. Oh he's not gonna do that? Nevermind.

[Stephanie]

5. Bruin Alumni Assn. - BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP

[Strawman]

6. They're not going to go away

So there's only one thing to do: Let 'em tape classes or whatever they want and keep speaking out. They aren't interested in "balance." They're a bunch of thugs who want profs and instructors to be intimidated and shut up. They think most profs will want to avoid the hassle. Especially those without tenure.

Conservative students already have a say and a forum to make right wing arguments in the classroom. And they should be encouraged to do so. But that doesn't mean they should be crybabies about criticism that is constructive. The problem with alot of these students is probably the same thing that led them to their RW political opinions: namely, that they don't reason well and just parrot the mainstream viewpoint. If you can make a clever, well reasoned argument in your writing or in classroom discussion, you're going to get a good grade. If you make an unreasoned assertion, liberal or conservative, you're usually not going to get a good grade. I'm sure there are exceptions on both sides, but this is a disgusting intimidation campaign. Smart conservatives can handle themselves just fine in the classroom. I've seen a few, and I've seen some dumb poseur liberals get challenged. This is mostly about dumb frat boys who think they can get their way all the time (because they do) bullying the intellectuals in order to get their way. Some rich RW asshole has a grudge against a prof because he was made to look silly once, so he pays little weasels like him to be his little brownshirts.