UCLA warns group targeting faculty
BY Cynthia Lee
Today staff writer
It’s not right to give or sell professors’ lecture notes and course materials to somebody else. That’s the message UCLA’s legal counsel delivered to students and a conservative group that’s offered to pay them for material from the classes of “radical” professors.
Campus Counsel Patricia Jasper said Jan. 19 that her office alerted Andrew Jones, the president and founder of the Bruin Alumni Association (BAA), that he may be “encouraging students to do something that might get them into a disciplinary situation.”
Jones, a former leader of the UCLA Bruin Republicans, ex-Daily Bruin columnist and a 2003 UCLA graduate in political science, has kicked up a small firestorm of controversy — and national media attention — with his offer to pay students from $10 to $100 to “collect information about abusive, one-sided or off-topic classroom behavior,” according to the group’s Web site. The site, dedicated to “exposing UCLA’s most radical professors,” already carries highly critical profiles of 31 UCLA faculty members. Jones’ group has no affiliation with UCLA or with the UCLA Alumni Association. Jones has since rescinded his offer, but said students may voluntarily submit the information.
However, university policy prohibits anyone from giving, selling or distributing course materials or any recording made during any course presentation without the consent of the instructor, who holds the copyright to course materials, and Chancellor Albert Carnesale. This applies to “any recording in any medium,” including handwritten or typed notes.
In a statement, the chancellor said that “the UCLA community embraces free speech as an essential value of our university,” but that “the UCLA community, too, finds his [Jones’] methods reprehensible, even as we support every critic’s right freely to express his or her views.”
BAA claims on the site that the group “is not conducting a witch-hunt, engaging in police-state surveillance, or targeting privately held political beliefs. We are concerned solely with indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies, and unprofessional classroom behavior, no matter where it falls on the ideological spectrum.”
Academic Senate chair Adrienne Lavine, however, said, “The way [Jones] presents the material on his Web site is snide and sarcastic, and I don’t think it contributes to a healthy discussion of the issues that he purports to raise.”
There are more productive ways of addressing students’ concerns if they believe a professor is acting inappropriately in class, Lavine contended.
“If a student feels that his or her grade has been affected because the faculty member disagrees with the student’s political views, that is not allowed by the faculty code of conduct,” the Senate chair said. “A student could bring the matter either to the Ombuds Office or the Senate.”
Many UCLA Alumni Association members also objected to what Jones’ group stands for and what it is trying to do, said Assistant Vice Chancellor Keith Brant, the executive director of the UCLA Alumni Association. In addition, there’s concern that Jones’ group may be misidentified as UCLA’s official alumni association. “If you read it in the newspapers and on the Web, it’s made pretty clear that this group is not affiliated with the university,” Brant said. “But if you hear it on the radio as a sound byte, then it’s not quite as clear.”
The controversy has brought the resignations of several members of BAA’s advisory board, including UCLA English Professor Emeritus Jascha Kessler, the author of many books of fiction and poetry.
“As soon as I was informed by another professor that Mr. Jones had undertaken this kind of ‘monitoring’ campaign, and when I found him using such a dangerous term as ‘targeting’ individuals to be recorded,” said Kessler, “I wrote him an e-mail in which I requested my name and person to be immediately disassociated from the BAA.
“I told him in that e-mail that he was certainly stepping into the unacceptable — vigilantism,”
Kessler said. |
