Friends and associates familiar with the Morgan Hubbard-Ward Churchill fraud controversy will know that I have written previously about the right-wing witch hunt in academia and have been personally involved by such accusations.
Well, a new group called the Bruin Alumni (not to be confused with the UCLA Alumni Association) has stepped up McCarthyist activities in West Los Angeles and have "targeted" my aunt Ellen Carol DuBois. She is being "targeted" for being a "radical" "feminist" and a model of the "modern female academic" according to the groups profile of her available online. This profile of professor DuBois is one of many available on the group's website UCLAprofs.com, designed as a blacklist created at the end of December 2005.
They are however, advertising that they will pay UCLA students to tape record the "targeted" professors, take notes on them, and pass classroom materials to the organization in an attempt to "expose" the teachers talking about "President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican Party or about any other ideological issue" where they come out to the left of right wing ideology.
I have written a letter to the group asking for the identity of the author of the piece on DuBois, for what it is worth. It would be more interesting to find out the source of their funding. Are the books of non-profits required to be open? Who is paying for this operation? What are their ties to the Republican Party or the College Republicans? How many other schools is this going on in?
Another interesting side-note is that of the 23 professors specially targeted by the group, the most common department is Chicano Studies (followed by Sociology and History. One wonders why more Labor Studies professors are not mentioned, as this is a favorite target of California McCarthyists. It must be a small department). This fact reinforces Emma Perez's argument that the attack on Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado was merely the beginning of a nationwide campaign to attack academics as "radicals" especially those in "Ethnic Studies."
_______________
A version of this piece is available on the Blogger News Network.
No comments :
Post a Comment