So everyone remember
MissLaura's excellent entry about the rightwing group trying to intimidate and collect information on liberal professors at UCLA?
Well, the story about them ran in the L.A. Times, became the most e-mailed story on the Times website, and whaddaya know, in less than 24 hours, one of the Bruin Alumni Association's key advisors has resigned suddenly from his role on the advisory board.
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.
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."
Anyone think Andrew Jones may have gone a bit too far this time? (For those from UCLA, you know what I mean by "this time". He has a history of doing this kind of shit. He actually stood outside the Hammer Museum and protested Tim Robbins receiving the 2003 UCLA Alumnus of the Year Award, because of his anti-war comments before the invasion of Iraq. Guess what, Andrew, Robbins was right. Of course, UCLA then gave the award to Ted Stevens the following year. Gah.)
Rogan does provide a nice smackdown of what Jones' website was supposed to be all about.
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.
That board's getting awfully small, Andrew. Pity. So who's left on the board still? Why, none other than the former chairman of the California Republican Party!
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."
No, Mr. Steel, you don't get it. A student won't get bashed for simply saying anything positive about Bush. They'll get bashed when they're exposed as idiotic sheep that mindlessly follow whatever Bush and the Republicans tell them to think, with nary a thought of actually doing critical thinking on an issue. Here at UCLA, one of the top universities in the country, critical thinking is actually valued.