This is pretty interesting.
Rightwing group offers students $100 to spy on professors
· Republican graduate's site prompts witch-hunt fears
· 31 academics listed as 'worthy of scrutiny'
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Saturday January 21, 2006
Guardian
It is the sort of invitation any poverty-stricken student would find hard to resist. "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? If you help ... expose the professor, we'll pay you for your work."
For full notes, a tape recording and a copy of all teaching materials, students at the University of California Los Angeles are being offered $100 (£57) - the tape recorder is provided free of charge - by an alumni group.
Lecture notes without a tape recording net $50, and even non-attendance at the class while providing copies of the teaching materials is worth $10.
But the initiative has prompted concerns that the group, the brainchild of a former leader of the college's Republicans, is a witch-hunt. Several targeted professors have complained, figures associated with the group have distanced themselves from the project and the college is studying whether the sale of notes infringes copyright and contravenes regulations.
The Bruin Alumni Association's single registered member is Andrew Jones, a 24-year-old former student who gained some notoriety while at the university for staging an "affirmative action bake sale" at which ethnic minority students were offered discounts on pastries.
His latest project has academics worrying about moves by rightwing groups to counter what they perceive to be a leftist bias at many colleges.
The group's website, uclaprofs.com, lists 31 professors whose classes it considers worthy of scrutiny. The professors teach classes in history, African-American studies, politics, and Chicano studies. Their supposed radicalism is indicated on the site by a rating system of black fists. The organisation denies on the website that it is conducting a vendetta against those with differing political views. "We are concerned solely with indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies and unprofessional classroom behaviour, no matter where it falls on the ideological spectrum."
But in another posting, it is clear just where on the spectrum the group thinks the bias might fall. "One aspect of this radicalisation, outlined here, is an unholy alliance between anti-war professors, radical Muslim students and a pliant administration. Working together, they have made UCLA a major organising centre for opposition to the war on terror."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
And from the LA Times
Advisor Quits UCLA Alumni Group
# Ex-GOP Rep. James E. Rogan resigns from the fledgling conservative organization, which has offered to pay students to report on instructors.
By Peter Y. Hong, Times Staff Writer
Former U.S. Rep. James E. Rogan has resigned from the advisory board of a conservative UCLA alumni group after learning that the group's founder had offered students $100 payments to record professors' "non-pertinent ideological comments."
Rogan, a Republican who represented Glendale and Pasadena for two terms and was a manager in the impeachment trial of President Clinton, said he did not want his name linked to the controversial effort to record professors in their classrooms.
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Rogan, now a lawyer in Irvine, on Wednesday sent an e-mail tendering his resignation to Andrew Jones, head of the Bruin Alumni Assn. and its one full-time employee. The year-old group, supported by donations, has no formal connection to UCLA.
In his e-mail, Rogan wrote, "I am uncomfortable to say the least with this tactic. It places students in jeopardy of violating myriad regulations and laws."
Jones had offered to pay UCLA students $100 for recordings and lecture notes of professors caught in "indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies and unprofessional classroom behavior." Jones said one student, whom he declined to identify, had taken up the offer thus far.
While saying that he was interested in monitoring professors who inject any sort of inappropriate ideology into courses, Jones has identified mainly instructors with liberal and leftist views as potential monitoring targets.
Rogan said that when he agreed to serve on the alumni group's advisory board, he believed its role would be to mentor Republican students and student groups. He said he did not recall any discussion of faculty monitoring, which he does not support.
"I went to Berkeley as an undergraduate and UCLA law school. I don't need to go to a website to learn there is an overabundance of liberal faculty," Rogan said.
Being taught by liberal professors is a simple fact of life when attending an elite university, Rogan said. "You should not go to Harvard and be surprised to find an over-abundance of liberals," he said.
Of his own education, Rogan said the faculty's ideology "doesn't seem to have hurt me."
Rogan's resignation follows that of Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom and UCLA professor emeritus Jascha Kessler, who also quit the board after the plan to record professors was announced.
The group's monitoring effort has outraged several faculty members listed as potential targets; they likened it to a witch hunt that could harm the classroom atmosphere.
But advisory board member Shawn Steel, a lawyer who was recently chairman of the California Republican Party, called the effort to record professors "a great idea…. I can't see anything controversial about recording a professor speaking in an open class."
Steel said recording professors could "expose the nasty secrets of the university. Most parents assume students get a square education at a public university, when in fact, there is no real intellectual diversity. If a student says anything positive about Bush, he'll get bashed."
Jones, 24, who graduated in June 2003 and was chairman of UCLA's Bruin Republicans student group, said of Rogan, "I wish him well. It was a pleasure to have worked with him."
Since news reports of his financial offer to students appeared, Jones said he had received about 200 e-mails, both supportive and critical, on Wednesday. Rogan is the only board member who resigned following a Times story about the offer, he said.
UCLA officials said paying students to record professors would probably violate university policies.
The university dictates that students cannot give or sell notes or other records of course presentations without the written consent of the instructor and the chancellor.
Officials said they intend to notify Jones of that policy but are not taking any other action at this point.
Link to the group: http://uclaprofs.com/
The goal of academic pursuit is to advance knowledge in any given discipline. By nature, hence, it is progressive. Conservatism, on the other hand, stresses the maintenance of the status quo. So to rid of the 'abundant liberals' is a disservice to knowledge.
Gosh. The day I can't talk smack about the administration or any powers that be is the day I quit and do something else...
kasia
01-25-2006, 03:26 PM
i'm currently drafting a letter to ucla in support of prof. kang.
this has nothing to do with my letter but my opinion is - by nature, academia is liberal. learning the facts naturally leads one to understand the flaws in our current system and to think progressively. the more you learn, the more difficult it is to stay republican or conservative. i don't think these professors are per se injecting their political beliefs into the classroom. i think the facts speak for themselves and that these professors are merely presenting the facts.
here's what they write about prof kang. not just insulting and racist - but stupid to the point that i wonder why the media or our community is paying any attention to it.
Jerry Kang
Anyone reviewing the academic research of UCLA law professor Jerry Kang can’t help but be impressed by the density of the output. One study, “Trojan Horses of Race,” weighs in at 105 pages, while the “Beyond Self-Interest: Asian Pacific Americans Toward A Community of Justice” paper he co-authored runs 53 pages.
Kang’s academic resume is similarly impressive; he graduated magna cum laude in physics from Harvard University, and magna cum laude (again!) from Harvard Law School. Coming from South Korea at the age of six, Kang managed to scale educational heights in one generation that many white families, even the very rich, have not approached in multiple generations. But don’t accuse Kang of being an all-American success story, much less use the dread phrase “model minority.” Kang’s doing it all for the people, you see. No, not his people (who suffered from the affirmative action he favors), but the nebulous proletarian entity known as the people.
Kang’s political stance begs one question. Why would this Korean-American, who managed stunning educational achievements in spite of 1980’s-era racial preferences, favor a system that so manifestly harms his own ethnic group? Kang has offered two public reasons, both of them rather inane.
In both an interview with the Journal of Asian American Studies and his own article titled “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby,” Kang inadvertently reveals that self-interest, ironically enough, is the biggest factor in his love for affirmative action. It all starts in 1993 when UCLA’s only Asian American law professor of the time, Mari Matsuda, left to take a position at Georgetown. Typical for UCLA, this was viewed as a tragedy not because the school had lost a (presumably) strong scholar and teacher, but because the law faculty had been left intolerably bereft of Asian faculty. In Kang’s artful phrase, there was “a vacuum to be filled.” Immediately, an all-points bulletin went out: find us an Asian! It was at this juncture that Kang, still serving a judicial clerkship, was recruited for this faculty position. Not because, by his own admission, he was the best applicant, and not because his scholarship or promise thereof was eye-catching. In fact, Kang was not even seeking a law professorship when he got the call.
Without putting too fine a point on it, Kang got his job because he is Asian. But rather than skulking shamefully around the point, Kang is quite open about it. As he notes, “when I was actually interviewing for the job, there was some interest in whether I would be able to teach a course that would talk about Asian Americans.” In short, Kang’s race was made a proxy for his expected academic focus and intellectual contributions. Kang evidently found UCLA’s racial pigeonholing to be copasetic, and took the job when it was offered. This completed Kang's rather severe and sudden moral descent from the heights of hard-working model minority success to the depths of racial set-aside hell.
Turning the old saying around to fit Kang, there’s no sinner like the debauched religious man. Like that sinner, Kang is determined to prove that the immoral standard by which he lives his life is somehow a boon for all mankind. And as noted, Kang doesn’t fail for lack of trying, much less for lack of academic output on the topic. It’s just that the academic arguments don’t hold up. Consider the central argument behind his “Trojan Horses” paper:
“[During discussion on the 2003 Media Ownership Order] the FCC repeatedly justified relaxing [local] ownership rules by explaining how it would increase, of all things, local news. But local news is replete with violent crime stories prominently featuring racial minorities. Consumption of these images, the social cognition research suggests, exacerbates our implicit biases. In other words, as we consume local news, we download a sort of Trojan Horse virus that increases our implicit bias. Unwittingly, the FCC linked the “public interest” to racism.”
Anyone seeking quickly to dismiss Kang’s claims is bound to fail. The research is dense, layered, and slams home its conclusion: repeatedly viewing reports of an individual’s involvement in criminal activities will cause the viewers of those reports later to discriminate, albeit usually on a subconscious level, against the entire race of the featured wrongdoers. Kang, unfortunately, has to concede two resonant facts. First, all racial groups, when tested, react negatively to the race of the reported wrongdoer portrayed in the news report, even when the viewer is of the same race as the reported criminal. To emphasize that point: this alleged subconscious racism from which whites suffer s also an affliction for black and Hispanic people. Thus, if a murderer featured in the news is black, even a black viewer will internalize negative associations about black people.
An equally important aspect of Kang’s report is the highly theoretical impact of this subconscious racism. The only significant real-world consequence Kang can name involves snap decisions of police officers involved in tense confrontations with criminal suspects. The evidence in question comes from a test that placed subjects into the role of a police officer. With little time for conscious decision-making, the subject was tasked with firing or not firing a gun based on his perceived level of endangerment. The test (again, making no judgment on the methodology) purported to show that all test subjects, black or white, more often shot the innocent black suspect holding a wallet versus an innocent white suspect doing the same. If we take Kang’s research at face value then, implicit racism (created and reinforced via, among other sources, crime-obsessed local news) can result in an indeterminate higher number of innocent black Americans being shot by cops who are overly quick on the trigger.
Helpfully enough, Kang himself has previously passed judgment on a similar highly abstract chain-of-consequences style controversy. In an op-ed discussing racial profiling of Arab-Americans in airline security procedures, Kang noted its high unlikelihood of catching a would-be terrorist. Observing that it was a mere 19 hijackers who executed the combined World Trade Center, Pentagon and Pennsylvania attacks (out of a U.S. population of approximately 3.5 million Arab-Americans), Kang delivers the flippant line that 1/100th of 1 percent is still virtually zero. In other words, from a mathematical standpoint, the sheer unlikelihood of catching an Arab terrorist through racial profiling in airport checkpoints meant that the practice should simply be abandoned. Kang, however, accepts no such cost-benefit analysis on the question of eliminating the implicit racism of police officers, or the entire public at large, assuming that such elimination would even be possible.
Not that his proposed measures for ending implicit bias are any less massively invasive, in their own way, than racial profiling. Under the banner of regulation “in the public interest,” Kang would call for a Big Brother-esque set of ideological standards and goals for local television news, all with the end-game of less coverage on violent crime committed by minorities. Were this done, Kang’s logic chain argues, the level of implicit bias among whites would drop, finally resulting in the concrete outcome that a white police officer would be less likely (how much is never quantified) to shoot an unarmed black criminal suspect.
An article which details the fallout from the implicit bias issue delivers some unintended laughs. One academic who took the Harvard University implicit bias test was so horrified by her poor showing that she took to placing within close eyesight postcards and other photographic representations of African-Americans famous in arts, literature, sports, politics, and other fields. Her motivation for doing so points up the comically theoretical nature of the implicit bias tests upon which Kang’s research rests. As it turns out, the test is masterable for disciplined individuals who temporarily internalize mental “counter-stereotypes” before test-time. The test results are similarly affected if the subject is, before testing, shown clips of widely respected African-Americans like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or comedian Bill Cosby. But worse than the pliability of the test, or the highly abstract consequences of this implicit racism, is that it distracts from the real work of addressing overt racism. Kang would do himself, his scholarship, and his political movement a great favor if he were to focus less on white psychological guilt and more on the actual people responsible for clear racial division, no matter what their skin color.
Kang’s other notable academic paper, co-authored with three other Asian-American academics, is “Beyond Self-Interest: Asian Pacific Americans Toward A Community of Justice.” Kang’s op-ed of the same period, titled “Proposition 209: Its Meaning for the Future,” provides a passable summary of the “Self-Interest” paper. In it, Kang and his co-authors purport to show that Asian-Americans, by voting 76% against Proposition 209 (which ended affirmative action in all California state business), had made an intentional declaration in favor of racial minority solidarity. The vote, Kang posited, was a clear rebuke of those dastardly conservatives who had attempted to use affirmative action as a wedge issue between Asian-Americans and their fellow (albeit lesser-achieving) minority brethren. In the voice of Asian Californians addressing white Californians, Kang declares, “I am willing to bear the same burden that you bear caused by affirmative action [sic]. I am willing to share this burden to help us get beyond racism, to reach a fairer society. I am willing to go beyond my self-interest in order to strive for a community of justice.” Kang then finishes this imaginary conversation with white Californians with the blunt question, “Are you?”
As rhetoric goes, Kang’s work is skillful, but the meaning and logic of the statements continually recede from view as you move forward for a closer look. Take Kang’s challenge for white California to move beyond self-interest. Kang presents no valid reason why this question could not as easily be asked of the Hispanic and black beneficiaries of affirmative action. The only real point of Kang’s argument, if there is one, is that all this division over racial preferences could end if only the whites who are harmed by it would just clam up. Again taking the converse, we could as easily point out that this debate would also not exist if those who benefit from the system would give up their fight to preserve it. But the worst aspect of Kang’s argumentation is that he tosses around loaded terms as if he was the winner of an international strongman competition. Notably, Kang uses the terms “justice” and “self-interest” as if they were settled points of reference. Kang characterizes justice as resulting in an equality of outcome rather than an equality of opportunity – a very much disputed understanding of the concept. Kang has a similarly warped view of self-interest, which he portrays as a bad thing when exercised by the victims of a discriminatory system, but praiseworthy when practiced by those who unjustly benefit from a preferential schema.
Kang’s claim to speak for all Asian Californians would be a lot more plausible were his argumentation not marred by statements that wouldn’t pass muster in the lower division classes of a political science department. Kang opened his “Proposition 209” op-ed by stating that, because the measure passed by a mere 54.5%, “there was no overwhelming mandate in its favor.” For that matter, Kang reminded readers, “the final tally was so close that a mere 5% shift in votes would have changed the outcome.” Let’s all take a deep breath and remember that Kang is superbly educated in the disciplines of both physics and the law, and, with shabby analysis like this, clearly not conversant in political science.
In electoral politics, 50.1%, 51%, and perhaps even 52% majorities, are what can rightly be termed ‘narrow victories,’ though they are victories nonetheless. But even the cautious sort of political scientist would be hard-pressed to view a 54.5% majority as anything less than a near-landslide. Moreover, the victory came despite a significant Democrat Party edge in California voter affiliation. In fact, since 1930, the Democratic Party has never led the Republican Party in affiliation percentage by less than 7%. In the election in question, California Democrats boasted 6.8 million registered affiliates, while Republicans could only claim 5.3 million registrants. This massive edge in Democrat affiliation makes the 54.5% margin that much more impressive, and makes Kang’s “no overwhelming mandate” thesis look that much more foolish.
However, consistency has never been Kang’s strong suit. In 2003, the Supreme Court’s upheld, after a fashion, the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions process. Despite the one-vote margin of 5-4, and the muddled, narrowly drawn precedent which resulted, the decision sent Kang out to the verbal balconies, throwing beads and sucking down yard-long margaritas, wildly predicting that the possibility for an electoral reverse of his bete noire, Proposition 209, had increased “substantially.” Indeed, if you can believe that Proposition 209 did not represent a mandate, then it’s only a few more steps to believing that a bitterly divided 5-4 Supreme Court decision did.
In a further example of his consistent inconsistency, Kang took a slap at authority in ending his op-ed against the racial profiling of Arab-Americans at airport checkpoints. Kang noted,
“Isn’t this [concern about equal justice] precisely what the U.S. Supreme court claimed to be doing when it struck down useful affirmative-action programs because they allegedly violated the rights of innocent Whites? Let's hold the conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to his word: “In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.”
To Kang’s way of thinking, merely pointing out your opponent’s arguable inconsistency on the issue at hand constitutes logical victory for your side. In this case, the supposed mote of inconsistency in Scalia’s eye arises from his approval of racial profiling and rejection of affirmative action. As they say on the elementary school playground: so what? Kang is equally inconsistent in reverse, given his clear love for affirmative action and hatred of racial profiling. Ultimately, Kang’s seemingly strong rhetorical point is nothing more than a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
As already noted, Kang seems prepared to spend the rest of his academic career putting a rationalist gloss on the history of his profoundly irrational, race-centric recruitment and hiring as a UCLA law professor. Little surprise then, that besides being one of its leading apologists in California, Kang got dirty in both the Proposition 209 campaign, and the subsequent legal campaign against it. During the electoral campaign, Kang defended affirmative action on the grounds that it brought together students of various races in common social interaction, thereby teaching these students that “people are people, that individuals are individuals, that we each have faults and virtues, and that none of this has to do with the color of our skin.” This admission comes in Kang’s declaration filed in the anti-209 ACLU lawsuit that sought to defend affirmative action. Such a line of argumentation would be entirely appropriate for a Dinesh D’Souza or a Ward Connerly. Admitting that “individuals are individuals” and that race has nothing to do with who we are as a person, well, it’s not exactly a point you want to concede when you’re arguing in favor of racial preferences. To point out the obvious, affirmative action doesn’t treat applicants as individuals, but rather as members of a collective group, with some groups designated as winners and some groups as losers. As a piece of political spin, though, Kang’s declaration is quite masterful, almost Clintonian in its bold willingness to appropriate the arguments of one side in defense of its opposite.
Like Clinton, Kang is the sort of fellow who feels people’s pain. Or at least has internalized the historical tragedies of one group as though they were his own. Thus, we find Kang waving the bloody shirt of Japanese internment every chance he gets. In an op-ed that rumbled ominously about the laughable prospect of Arab-American internment camps, Kang glowered,
“we overestimate the threat posed by racial “others” (in WWII, Japanese Americans; today, Arab Americans, Muslims, Middle Easterners, immigrants, and anyone who looks like “them”). Simultaneously, we underestimate how our response to those threats burden those “others” (in WWII, shattering lives through the internment; today, intimidation and violence by individuals, and racial profiling by the state).”
Kang’s strange preoccupation with this historical footnote is in defiance of all reasonable history. Kang was born in South Korea, a country that (in its original undivided form) suffered for 50 years under a harsh imperial Japanese occupation. Moreover, South Korea was a country saved from Communist despotry by the United States not less than a decade after our brief use of Japanese internment camps. Yet when Kang came to America, and against serious odds became an almost instant success, he latched on to the peaceful four-year internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans as conclusive proof of America’s perfidy, taking up the internee cause as though he had suffered personally. In all likelihood, Kang’s passion for the issue did not arise from concern for the actual victims. Rather, their travails present, as they do for many other radicals, a convenient excuse for attacking the American experiment as a racist, imperialist sham. Never mind that Americans fought and died to keep his native country free, allowing immigrants just like him to become wealthy and successful. Kang is in love with an idealized, infinitely just America; reality will never quite measure up to the fantasy. Thus, every day that Kang rises and sees a country still pocked with income inequality, homelessness and squandered opportunities, he is angry afresh. Unlike most people, however, Kang has channeled that rage into a specious brand of political activism and wrongheaded academic research that every day pushes us farther away what we can be in the direction of a utopian future we will never reach.here's prof. kang's very civil response:
Jan 18, 2005 (original post) :: with minor updates since then
Recently, there’s been substantial media (Capitol Weekly where I’m misquoted [update: as of Wednesday, the 18th afternoon, my misquotations were removed], LA Times, Inside Higher Education, the Chronicle) and blog coverage (Daily KOs) of the “Bruin Alumni Association” (not affiliated with the official UCLA alumni association) and it’s targeting “radical” faculty on a blacklist.
I somehow made the list of “dirty thirty.” Besides noting the communicative power that the Internet has given to each of us, I didn’t bother to investigate further even as faculty around the country started e-mailing me that I had made the list. But then I found out that there were cash solicitations for students to record lectures, and the like. Then reporters started contacting me, so it wasn’t quite possible to leave it be as a tempest in a teapot. Since reporters often quote out of context, here’s my view on this affair.
Academic and First Amendment Freedoms
First, The BAA has extraordinary freedom to say what it thinks is right. Sure there are defamation laws, trademark (confusion with the official alum association), as well as some tort and criminal laws that may be relevant, but the first presumption should be freedom of speech. More power to them to engage in that freedom of speech. This goes without saying.
Student Surveillance
But soliciting recordings of classes with cash payments raises three sets of issues.
First, legal. Various state statutes and common law torts are potentially relevant. From some quick research, here’s my back-of-the-envelope legal analysis. CA Pen § 632 does not apply because it focuses on confidential communications, which a classroom discussion is not likely to be. CA Education codes §§ 51512 and 78907, which prevent recording without instructor consent, apply only to elementary and secondary schools, or community colleges, respectively. But CA Education code § 66450 is on point and makes clear that one cannot prepare or distribute class recordings for commercial purposes (payment here makes it commercial). The penalty under § 66451 includes both injunctions and fines, but not against current enrolled students. Also, there are various UC policies and UCLA student conduct code (§ 102.23a) that prohibit such recording. (Full text of statutes at the bottom of this page.)
Second, policy. A University must be about free, robust exchange of ideas and arguments on the merits. But paying students to make covert recordings encourages a surveillance environment for teachers and fellow students. Under surveillance, intellectual freedom and creativity languish.
Third, irony. For a while the BAA pulled off its web page soliciting recordings after realizing that they might be breaking the law. (Now it’s back on line with some caveats.) But the Internet rarely forgets, and it is easy to produce a cached copy of the original page, which may be useful evidence in any legal proceedings. The BAA has unexpectedly experienced what it means to be the object of ubiquitous recording and surveillance.
The Reckless Scope and Inconsistency
Most folks who read about this affair will think that where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire. Maybe the BAA is exaggerating, but those professors must be a bunch of crazy lefties. I want to convey, however, a sense of how broadly the BAA cast its net.
Often, folks complain that I’m too moderate, not too radical (look at my scholarship). Neither accusation bothers me much. But here’s a telling comparison. The person who’s running the BAA is, by news accounts, a former official of the Bruin Republicans student organization. That organization organized a debate between me and Dinesh D’Souza when proposition 209 was on the ballot. Here’s how that debate was characterized to a letter to the editor by the President of the Bruin Republicans to the Daily Bruin (in 1996):
[O]ne week ago, the Bruin Republicans sponsored a debate which featured Dinesh D'Souza, a nationally recognized leader against racial preferences and set asides. He is the author of two books, "Illiberal Education" and "The End of Racism." His debate partner was UCLA Law professor Jerry Kang. Kang skillfully argued against Proposition 209 without resorting to hollow political double talk. The debate was balanced, and informative, AND it attracted an audience which filled Dickson 2160E to standing room only.
On the one hand, back in 1996, I was praised for being substantive, on the merits, without “hollow political double talk.” On the other hand, in 2006, I am put on a blacklist, characterized as beyond reason principally because of my work on affirmative action. Both statements come from individuals who ran the Bruin Republicans.
Bottom line is that we want substantive engagement on the merits, with an open mind, in the University. Even with that, folks are being classified as lunatic radical.
Journalists and their Soundbites
A final point about journalists. In covering a story that sensationalizes the radicalness of professors, one should be careful not to try to do precisely that in the story (if one cares about the truth and the merits). I gave an interview to Malcolm Maclachlan of the Capitol Weekly after he contacted me. [Update: As of Wednesday afternoon, Jan 18, my quotations were simply removed from the article after my complaint. Since there was no correction or formal retraction, my response will stay online since some will have read the original version.] He quotes me as likening this to the Nuremberg Files. I am a communications law scholar, and by any assessment, such a comparison would be a radical stretch. He informed me that in various profiles, personal information about family members including children were noted. I replied that if that were true, and if the site provided home addresses and there were solicitations to commit torts or break the law, that would recall the facts of the Nuremberg case. These qualifications never made it into the story, and only an inflammatory, indeed “radical,” comparison is provided.
Further, a quotation is made up about my creating some “side project” to “find[] out everything [I] can about Andrew Jones and the Bruin Alumni Association.” I’m sure I didn’t use the name since I didn’t recall it at the time. Further, I don’t have nearly that much time on my hands. Maclachlan specifically asked me whether I had a copy of the page that asked for recordings since the link had been pulled down. Knowing something about the Internet, I knew to check Google cache, which had a copy, which I downloaded and forwarded. I noted the irony regarding surveillance. But that’s hardly a “mission” to dig up dirt on the BAA. Again, arguably this is a tempest in a teapot--although the story now has legs.
Full text of most relevant statutes
Education Code 66450. (a) Except as authorized by policies developed in accordance with subdivision (a) of Section 66452, no business, agency, or person, including, but not necessarily limited to, an enrolled student, shall prepare, cause to be prepared, give, sell, transfer, or otherwise distribute or publish, for any commercial purpose, any contemporaneous recording of an academic presentation in a classroom or equivalent site of instruction by an instructor of record. This prohibition applies to a recording made in any medium, including, but not necessarily limited to, handwritten or typewritten class notes. (b) Nothing in this section shall be construed to interfere with the rights of disabled students under law. (c) As used in this section: (1) "Academic presentation" means any lecture, speech, performance, exhibit, or other form of academic or aesthetic presentation, made by an instructor of record as part of an authorized course of instruction that is not fixed in a tangible medium of expression. (2) "Commercial purpose" means any purpose that has financial or economic gain as an objective. (3) "Instructor of record" means any teacher or staff member employed to teach courses and authorize credit for the successful completion of courses.
Education Code 66451. (a) Any court of competent jurisdiction may grant relief that it finds necessary to enforce this chapter, including the issuance of an injunction. Any person injured by a violation of this chapter, in addition to actual damages, may recover court costs, attorney's fees, and a civil penalty from any person who is not a student enrolled in the institution at which the instructor of record
makes his or her academic presentation and who seeks to obtain financial or economic gain through the unauthorized dissemination of the academic presentation. The amount of the civil penalty shall not exceed one thousand dollars ($1,000) for the first offense, five thousand dollars ($5,000) for the second offense, and for any subsequent offense, a penalty of not less than ten thousand dollars ($10,000) or more than twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000).
(b) Actions for any relief pursuant to this chapter may be
prosecuted in a court of competent jurisdiction by the Attorney General or any district attorney or by any county counsel authorized by agreement with the district attorney in actions involving violation of a county ordinance, or any city attorney of a city, or city and county, having a population in excess of 750,000, and, with the consent of the district attorney, by a city prosecutor in any city having a full-time city prosecutor or, with the consent of the district attorney, by a city attorney in any city, or city and county, in the name of the people of the State of California upon their own complaint or upon the complaint of any board, officer,
person, corporation, or association or by any person acting for the interests of itself, its members, or the general public.
(c) It does not constitute a violation of this chapter for a
business, agency, or person solely to provide access or connection to or from a facility, system, or network over which that business, agency, or person has no control, including related capabilities that are incidental to providing access or connection. This subdivision does not apply to a business or agency that is owned by, or to a business, agency, or person that is controlled by, or a conspirator
with, a business, agency, or person actively involved in the
creation, editing, or knowing distribution of a contemporaneous recording that violates this chapter.
just as a side note: professor jerry kang had given us a bit of advice before and passed our name on to his students during our work on anna guo's case & the remove coble campaign.
haplesshobo
01-29-2006, 03:57 PM
perhaps, but if you read their critique of Prof. Kang, it interestingly mentions 0 about his actions inside the classroom. so if their concern is diversity within the classroom...
Like I said, I disagree with the way this group is going about it. But, I do think they have a legitimate complaint which should be addressed.
To me, there seems to be two distinct, legitimate complaints which are not necessairly the same, but which have been tied together due to the dynamics of the first complaint. And, unfortunatley, this group is not differentiating the two.
The first complaint is that while universities extoll racial diversity, they don't make the same effort for idealogy where you have a overwhelming majority of liberal profs compared to more moderate or conservative profs. Anybody who's gone to a university knows this.
I must your disagree with your reasoning why its only natural that academia is liberal. To me, that seems to be post facto justification for why we see such large numbers of liberal faculty. It seems to imply that the more one learns, one will naturally became a liberal since that is the correct truth. Yet, there are also learned scholars out there who are conservative. And, I happened to be more liberal when I was younger. But, the more I learned about the imminent failure of the Europen social model, the more I rejected that. So, I don't necessairly believe in the correlation between the more one learns, the more one becomes progressive. Indeed, I've seen ignorance from both the left and the right. I've read several threads here where people from the left discounted any facts or figures, so I don't see how that's evidence of learning.
From what my friend, who taught at uni before but was rejected for tenure, told me, a lot of this idealogical imbalance has more to do with internal politics than any correlation between learning and progressivism. Since the faculty is liberal, they're less inclined to support somebody more conservative for tenure. There may have been a reason why academia was liberal once upon a time, but now its ossified into a clubhouse where there's a sign that essentially says 'no conservatives allowed' since the liberals control the university and decide who gets tenure.
But, there's nothing innately wrong with being a liberal or conservative professor. The second, more serious complaint is where a professor crosses the line, and interjects his partianship into the classroom as fact and when it doesn't belong. Unfortunately, the two complaints are tied together because you're more likely to run into the second problem from liberal profs simply because of the imbalance of the faculty, where most of them are going to be liberals.
But, the group didn't differentiate the two, and singled out Kang for being liberal, when there's nothing wrong with that. Its only when he inappropriately brought his liberalism into the classroom that I would have taken issuse with.
I've seen it enough to know what they're talking about. You have a liberal prof, who interjects his liberal commentary when its simply not appropriate to what he's teaching. For example, he might be teaching physics, and proceeds to go on a rant for 5 or 10 minutes saying why the republicans are so bad. I had a high school history teacher who would do that the entire period, but wouldn't even tie into what we were supposed to be learning. He simply flat out refused to teach or prepare us for the AP test, and it wasn't a surprise when most students didn't pass it. And, I witnessed it in a summer community college class. First of all, its a waste of class time, and irrelevant to the course topic. And, pretty soon, the students subtly feel that they must agree with the prof in order to get a higher grade on their essays.
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