Cease fire, aid progress

When an alumni group names itself the Bruin Alumni Association (BAA), you wouldn't hesitate to think it was working to promote and support the UCLA.

Yet it was this non-profit organization that made headlines this past week for tempting university students with promises of money if they "exposed" the most "radical" professors on campus by recording their lectures.

Though their tease of $100 bills has since been dropped due to the UCLA's threats of legal action, the message had already been sent: as BAA founder Andrew Jones put it, there was a supposed "cancer of political radicalism" on campus.

Jones' argument isn't a new one, however. In fact, in the post-Sept. 11 world, it has become disturbingly clear that our education system -- and those in our institutions of higher learning in particular -- are under fire from certain conservative detractors of racial and gender progress and equality. Purporting to be respectful political discourse, groups like the BAA feign American values and tradition with intolerant diatribes against progressive academic programs and departments.

In the case of the BAA, the group has compiled a "Dirty Thirty" list, ranking UCLA professors by the severity of the their "liberal offenses." One professor is labeled "the prototypical Hispanic irredentist," and attacked for involvement in MEChA, a student group meant to promote Chicano history through political activism and education. Another class on African-American studies is critiqued as "the penultimate example of the peculiarly UCLA propensity toward navel gazing."

Though Jones argues that his organization's purpose is to "restore an atmosphere of respectful political discourse on campus," the thinly veiled message of Eurocentrism comes clear in such attacks.

But again, this isn't the first time such an outcry has been made.

Perhaps the BAA got its inspiration from a College Republican group at the University of Texas that, in 2003, created and spread a liberal teacher "watch list" before students registered for classes.

What where they afraid of? A class called "Critical Issues In Journalism" that -- now hold onto your seats -- teaches people to actually be critical about society and the media through "radical" ideas like "white privilege." And like a knee-jerk reaction, the backlash is against minority groups, from the GLBT to the Taiwanese and the Chicano communities.

Three years ago, the U.S. Senate even devoted a hearing committee to the topic and tried to make it an issue of "intellectual diversity on college campuses." In Sen. Judd Gregg's opening statement, the question of whether "intellectual diversity" was being maintained was just a nice way to say that the old hegemonic traditions of education were losing their footing.

"What is replacing such traditional and educationally sound courses?" asked Gregg. "The answer is a proliferation of classes focused on race, class and gender, with little intellectual substance."

As a new year comes underway, it is even more important to be vigilant in protection of those in academia who will push and challenge your beliefs. It is my hope the UW does not become a place that welcomes finger-pointing witch trials or lecture policing, or cowers under the fear of a conservative administration or groups while jettisoning departments and programs that examine the very structures of power and oppression in our society.

And there's nothing radical -- or liberal -- about hoping for that.