Subject: Witch Hunt @ UCLA Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 13:20:03 -0600 Message-ID: <FEBBF51AFF7B8B4B8A2F32F6E63092AE0339C283@COKE.uwec.edu> From: "Drumm, Daniel L." <DRUMM@uwec.edu>
Published on Sunday, January 22, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
<http://www.latimes.com/>
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.
The website assumes that any professor who speaks out in a public forum
must at the same time be indulging in ideological abuse of his or her
students - proselytizing them, indoctrinating them. And it's actually
not just any professor; it's only the supposedly "liberal" ones, since
"conservative" faculty are not targeted on the website.
Naturally, a professor who speaks out in public expects to receive
criticism in public. Criticism is one thing; a farrago of misquotations,
misrepresentations and utter falsehoods, dragging in one's family and
stretching back to one's high school days, is something else entirely.
This is no way to assess someone's classroom conduct.
Ultimately, of course, this has nothing to do with me or my colleagues,
or our teaching. A method for assessing how professors treat their
students is already built into how universities work. Every course at
UCLA gives students the opportunity to anonymously evaluate their
professors, and those evaluations are used in hiring, promotion and
tenure decisions; abusive professors don't get very far in their
careers.
So the point of the website is not really to produce genuine
"evaluations" of classroom dynamics - a cause that would hardly be
well-served by a tiny group of politically motivated zealots accountable
to no one and trying to use the cash nexus to break the sacrosanct bond
between teacher and student. The point, rather, is to silence voices
that go against the zealots' right-wing orthodoxy, and to subject the
classroom to outside political surveillance, not simply by vigilante
groups like this one, but ultimately by the state itself.
Jones, who created the website, is a former leader of UCLA's campus
Republican organization. He explicitly aligns himself with the "student
academic freedom movement" begun by conservative activist David Horowitz
(although Horowitz last week criticized Jones, whom he said he'd once
fired for pressuring students to file false reports about their
professors).
The two distinguishing features of the academic freedom movement are the
total absence of any significant student involvement and its use of
Orwellian language - in which slogans such as "academic freedom"
actually mean their opposite.
One member of the website's advisory board is state Sen. Bill Morrow
(R-Oceanside), who has introduced a bill creating a "student bill of
rights" - written not by students but by their paternalistic "friends"
who assume they aren't up to the task of thinking critically for
themselves.
Morrow's bill, which failed to pass last year but will be reconsidered
this year, would wreak havoc. It could impose unprecedented state
monitoring of classrooms and compel professors to teach discredited
materials. It asserts, for example, that "curricula and reading lists in
the humanities and social sciences shall respect the uncertainty and
unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas, and provide
students with dissenting sources and viewpoints."
The intention is presumably to force "liberal" faculty to teach
"conservative" materials, as though a university education functions
according to the same degraded logic as the Bill O'Reilly show. But the
bill could also force a professor teaching the Holocaust to teach the
views of Holocaust deniers ("dissenting sources").
Such subtleties don't keep the conservative crusaders up at night.
Irrespective of the damage their campaign inflicts, members of the hard
right - who currently control all three branches of government and yet
seem irrationally convinced of their own disempowerment - are seeking to
impose their worldview on our university system through crude
intimidation and "big government" intervention that reactionaries
normally grumble about when it's taking care of the poor, the ill or the
elderly.
Their success would almost certainly guarantee that what gets taught
would be determined not according to scholarly criteria but according to
political pressure. I'd hate to be mistaken for a "conservative," but
the barbarians really are at the gates.
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at
UCLA.
(c) 2006 The Los Angeles Times
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