A Pilgrim’s Digression

Citing a Reuter’s article of a few days ago (January 19), Rush Limbaugh reported yesterday on his program that the UCLA Bruin Alumni Association says it will pay students $100.00 for tape recordings of classroom lectures.

Lest you think some of these aging alums merely wish to refresh their knowledge and appreciation of Philosophy, English, or History by listening to the lectures of professors, let me set you straight: according to the website, their mission is to “[expose] the most radical professors” in the school.

By “radical,” they of course mean Liberal.

The website for the association also includes a page on which one can read profiles of those professors the organization considers the most radical, called the “Dirty Thirty.” I rarely use such terms as “Nazi” or “McCarthy-like,” but I have to say, this “Dirty Thirty” list of names amply earns the appellative McCarthy-like.

The “profiles” of each professor are in fact personal attacks. The first one I clicked on, that of Law Professor Richard Abel, concludes that he is a “radical” (and an unintelligent one at that) based on the number of public petitions he has signed. He signed petitions opposing the judicial nominations of Miguel Estrada and Janice Rogers Brown, for example.

The screed against him does not even suggest that Abel’s classroom instruction is “radical”; rather it concludes with a hypothesis about what Abel’s teaching might include: “One truly pities his students if Abel’s classroom teaching reflects even a handful of the radical ideas enumerated in the petitions [he has signed].”

I clicked on a few other professor’s profiles, and all of them follow the same pattern: the professor’s private beliefs and private involvement with politics and activism somehow condemns them as “radical” and therefore unfit to teach. Carole Goldberg, for example, is a “radical” because as a lawyer she has represented Indian tribes in suits to allow gambling on Indian land.

No wonder this group wants tape recordings of Professors’ lectures: they have nothing else. People are free to believe what they believe, and participate in whatever political or professional activities they wish to outside the academy. So now the Bruin Alumni Association must nail them on what they say in class.

This movement to entrap and punish professors deemed Liberal is one of the must chilling developments I’ve read about in my years of paying attention to the news. If Sean Hannity and the Bruin Alumni Association never receive a single tape recording of a classroom lecture, I will breathe a sigh of relief that the whole affair was just more idiot wind from the Right.

Yet even if the UCLA “Dirty Thirty” do not become the Hollywood Ten of our day, it is nonetheless revealing of the paranoia of the Right that, not content to control the Government, the public schools and Universities must be purged of “radicals” as well.

One has to ask, what kind of professors does the right want? Do they really want merely to “restore an atmosphere of respectful discourse,” as the founder of the Bruin Alumni Association says?

No, what really seems to irritate Conservatives is what Limbaugh, in his usual garbled way, terms “the negativism [professors] believe the United States to be.”

Limbaugh refers to an LATimes opinion article, Ideologues at the Lectern, in which David Horowitz, a Conservative author, links academic freedom to expressing positive opinions and feelings about the United States.

Horowitz quotes a “politically moderate” English professor at Temple University as saying that though he had observed nearly a hundred classes over the course of his career, “I have rarely heard a kind word for the United States, for the riches of our marketplace, for the vast economic and creative opportunities made available for energetic and creative people (that is, for our students); for family life, for marriage, for love, or for religion.”

Apparently, because Horowtiz and Zelnick and Limbaugh believe Professors don’t act as forceful propagandists for America, they are therefore radical. Yet is not preaching only the good news of America from the lectern every bit as indoctrinating as preaching only bad news?

Why can’t a professor whose every spoken word sounds like the Battle Hymn of the Republic also be considered “radical?”

It’s difficult to see where this battle over academic freedom will end. I don’t think anyone understands clearly what “academic freedom” is, for one thing. If it means the freedom to praise America and all its bountiful goodness, it ought also to include the freedom to denounce America as a tyrannical empire of greed.

Furthermore, I am unconvinced of the harm supposedly done by professors who express “radical” ideas. I always put that word “radical” in quotes, because it can mean whatever the person using it wants it to mean. Traditionally, “radical” ideas are the heart and soul of college. Otherwise, you have institutions of higher learning such as existed in Nazi Germany whose purpose was to prop up the pet ideas of the ruling regime. I view it as a sign of the health of the country that our college campuses are infused with ideas that challenge the status quo.

Limbaugh, who in other situations professes deep trust for the wisdom of the American people, apparently does not trust young people. Four years of college can apparently cancel out the best parenting, in his view.

Says Limbaugh, “People send their kids away to school and they cross their fingers, we hope we have an American when he graduates and not some little Marxist running around thinking this is the worst country on the face of the earth and wanting to join people to help blow it up. But it’s a crapshoot depending on what university or institution of higher learning that you send your young skull full of mush to.”

It’s not a crapshoot at all. It’s called trusting people with freedom. We live in a society where there is a plethora of information with which to make judgments. No one can be easily indoctrinated with one point of view. However, the richness of our pool of ideas can be diluted by aggressive movements to squelch or defame those who profess unpopular beliefs.  Or who simply sign petitions.
Funny that someone like Limbaugh, who once was so controversial and maligned himself, should have to be told this.