The perils of targeting faculty
By Vinay LaL
The recent launch of a Web site dedicated to exposing “UCLA’s most radical professors” opens a new front in an ongoing war waged by the American right against the allegedly liberal American academy.
The Web site, www.uclaprofs.com, is the work of a UCLA alumnus who views the “Dirty Thirty” (as the targeted faculty members, myself included, are dubbed) as having entered into an “unholy alliance” with “radical Muslim students and a pliant administration” to turn UCLA into “a major organizing center for opposition to the War on Terror.”
The blacklisted faculty are charged with having debased education, politicized the classroom, indoctrinated students into accepting vociferously anti-American and anti-Semitic views, and poisoned the entire learning environment. The Web site would probably not have attracted much attention had students not been offered $100 to submit tape recordings and other course materials, an offer that, owing to potential legal difficulties, was subsequently retracted.
The incitement to students to spy on professors has outraged people of all political stripes, and the encouragement to bounty hunters is faintly reminiscent of an earlier era when money was paid for American Indian scalps. As an Indian American, I am tempted to dismiss the whole affair as an extraordinarily distasteful joke: one “Indian” is as good as any other.
But it would be an egregious mistake to overlook the affair as a minor irritant, given that it is part of a burgeoning movement, initiated by conservative activist David Horowitz and his acolytes, to help in the passage of legislative measures, so far introduced in 16 states. These bills, if passed, would make professors intellectually accountable to students, thereby diminishing their autonomy in the classroom.
There are three profound issues at stake. First, increased attacks on progressive or liberal professors have become necessary because the academy is the only remaining institutional site of dissent in American society. Every branch of government has been captured by Republicans. Labor unions are nearly toothless, the vast majority of media outlets are owned by a few profit-driven conglomerates, and the university itself is increasingly becoming corporatized.
Second, as American commentators have themselves pointed out, there is a long streak of anti-intellectualism in the American political tradition. More Americans go to college than do people anywhere else in the world, but, nonetheless, among Americans there is an abiding suspicion about cerebral activities and the intellectual work of the university.
Third, the attacks stem in part from a failure to recognize that one of the supreme tasks of the intellectual is to be an oppositional figure. Far from becoming an advocate of the nation-state, much less a national security state, the intellectual must question the state at every turn, probe received truths and afflict those who are hugely privileged.
One can debate whether vigilantism has long been a part of the American way of life, or whether it is un-American. The Minutemen now patrolling some of America’s borders, turning over illegal migrants to law enforcement authorities, suggest that vigilantism has a fresh lease on life.
Another name for what we are witnessing in the academic world is certainly vigilantism. Once again, it has been proven that those who act in the name of being true patriots not only discredit themselves but confirm that patriotism is generally the true refuge of scoundrels.
Lal is associate professor of history.
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