kittywhumpus

According to Reuters (January 19, 2006), a UCLA alumni group, not affiliated with the University, is offering a reward to students for exposing “radical” professors. Now, unlike the bounties for coyotes, mountain lions, and wolves that were all the rage in late 19th and early 20th century America, in order to claim the money, students do not have to provide pelts of the professors, just a recording. This means that we, the public, won’t be subjected to pictures like this:

that show rows of tweed sports jackets with frayed leather elbow patches, stained and bloody, with smoking bits of American flag melting the thin snow below them.

This all sounds so familiar. These “suspect faculty” are on a list called the "Dirty Thirty". Those who are “considered by the group to be the most extreme left-wing” and it includes a profiles of their “political activities and writings.” So familiar. Where have I heard of things like this before?

I am sure it will come to me.

To be fair, the Chancellor of UCLA has denounced the campaign and warned students that to present recordings of lectures would be a violation of university policy, and many members of the board’s advisory group have resigned. The founder of the group, Andrew Jones, says he wants to "restore an atmosphere of respectful political discourse on campus." But he seems to only be picking on lefties. Strange.

Seriously, this sounds so bloody familiar.

This is part of on ongoing recent campaign to purge liberals from college campuses in the United States. This is presumably also part of the general disdain preached from all corners of the land against “that intellectual elite from the blue states.” Did you know that liberals are responsible for the decline in the sales of American automobiles? I had no idea that I had so much power. It is probably way past time that I started using it for good instead of evil. Or is it the other way around?

I guess, on the bright side, this backlash against progressive ideals that started, well, when Bill Clinton helped move the Democratic party to the middle, continued with the “election” of George Bush, the death of Paul Wellstone, the re-election of George Bush, and the avalanche of books like “Bias” and “Treason” and my favorite “Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism” (If there were not so many people in American taking this sort of tripe seriously, it would make me laugh), shows that us liberals really are a scary bunch, if we need this much vitriol in order to keep us down. I guess it’s fine to attack a bunch of snotty smarties who vote “(D)” with books, if they are poorly researched and written books. Anything else would fly in the face of their own anti-academic, anti-intellectual rhetoric.

In the meantime, we truly must get our fresh-faced, impressionable, would-be-conservative-if-not-for-those-commie-teachers away from any new ideas, or history of ideas, or study of ideas, or teaching of critical skills to formulate ideas, or independent thinking ideas of any type.

Snotty liberal remark:
Has anyone else noticed that King George’s accent is getting even hickier?