A mix-up of associations

Joseph Guth is the kind of alumnus UCLA could put on its
brochures. A retired professor who lives in Virginia, he has been a
loyal supporter of the university for 45 years, and he even
included UCLA as a beneficiary in his will.

But now, he says he’s considering cutting ties.

What changed Guth’s mind was an article he read about an
alumni group that is going after radical liberal professors at his
beloved alma mater.

Upset, he wrote an e-mail to the UCLA Alumni Association saying
he was “deeply offended” that the association would be
so partisan. He said the upstanding image he had of UCLA was
“corroded,” and that he was striking UCLA from his
will. He ended by saying, “I feel a deep sense of
loss.”

What Guth didn’t know then ““ and what he knows now
““ is that it is the Bruin Alumni Association, not the UCLA
Alumni Association, behind the attacks. The Bruin Alumni
Association ““ whose founder and lone employee is Andrew
Jones, a 2003 UCLA alumnus ““ is a conservative organization
with no university affiliation that seeks to expose “the
crisis of political radicalism” at UCLA, according to its Web
site.

“This story (I read) was written in a way that allowed me
to conclude that this was being done by the official alumni
association,” Guth said in a phone interview.

Guth is not the only one who has been thrown off by the names.
The UCLA Alumni Association, which represents nearly 350,000 alumni
worldwide, has received over 60 calls and e-mails since last
Tuesday, when media outlets around the country began reporting on
the Bruin Alumni Association.

At first, many people were simply confused as to which alumni
association was doing what, said Keith Brant, the
association’s executive director. His staff has been
explaining that the UCLA Alumni Association is not attached to the
Bruin Alumni Association.

“One call even came to the main desk where one person said
“˜(Jones) is right on’ and “˜Where can I sign
up?'” Brant said.

The mix-ups are ironic, considering that, save for the
similarity in their names, the groups are very different.

The UCLA Alumni Association is apolitical and has over 86,000
members and chapters as far away as Hong Kong. It is also part of
UCLA’s vast fundraising network, which brought in over $262
million in donations last year.

The Bruin Alumni Association is, by contrast, a
“shoestring operation,” in Jones’ words. It has
an advisory board of 20 conservative politicians and scholars, and
has raised $22,000 to date.

The UCLA Alumni Association started receiving concerned calls
from people about eight months ago, when the BAA went public, Brant
said. But they really started to come in when Jones’ group
launched its latest campaign three weeks ago ““ a Web site
that features profiles of some of the most liberal professors at
UCLA according to Jones.

The site, UCLAProfs.com, also offers students cash in exchange
for information on other professors that Jones can parlay into more
profiles.

Jones and UCLA were catapulted into the national spotlight last
week when media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, wire
services and national TV stations, began reporting on the site.
Soon after, Internet blogs picked up the story. And with the media
reports came the confusion.

“When you get a sound bite or a quote and you hear
“˜UCLA’ and “˜alumni,’ you don’t always
make the connection” that there are two groups, Brant
said.

For example, when three prominent members of the BAA’s
advisory board resigned over the launch of UCLAProfs.com, the
online edition of the United Kingdom’s Guardian carried a
headline that read “Three UCLA Board Members Resign.”
(The article later said the group was not affiliated with
UCLA).

The storm of publicity will have an inevitable downside for UCLA
““ and even the BAA, said Jerry Swerling, a professor of
public relations at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism.

“It’s not like the days of P.T. Barnum where they
thought: “˜Any coverage is good so long as they spell your
name right,'” he said.

It’s a lesson Jones is learning first-hand: In addition to
losing at least three board members, he said he’s had to cope
with an exhausting 25 interviews a day, taking time away from his
work with the site. And while Jones’ organization is being
plastered across Web sites and newspapers everywhere, he said it
hasn’t yet translated into donations.

Jones said anyone who has seen his site can tell he is not
affiliated with UCLA, and there is a disclaimer stating so on his
home page.

Some of the confusion likely arises from Jones’ use of the
words “Bruin” and “UCLA.”

While the university does not own the rights to
“Bruin,” it does own “UCLA.” As of last
week, the university had not decided whether it will sue Jones for
using “UCLA” in the URL of the site UCLAProfs.com, said
Patricia Jasper, university counsel.

Jones denies that he is trying to mislead people by using the
UCLA name and image. But Brant said after looking at the BAA Web
site that he feels “there is some intent to mislead,”
though he was quick to add, “Obviously they’re not
trying to create an alumni association in the shadow of
ours.”

Jones said he’s surprised alumni mix up the two groups.
“These are UCLA graduates, and yet they can’t figure
out the difference?” he asked. “Are they confused by
K-Mart and Wal-Mart because they both have “˜Mart’ in
the name?”

As for Guth (who said he had not seen the BAA’s site when
he e-mailed UCLA), he received a form e-mail from the UCLA Alumni
Association explaining things. But Guth is still unhappy with UCLA
““ just for a different reason.

“I think UCLA needs to do its job to distance itself from
(Jones) and this group,” he said. “In the next several
weeks, I would like to see or read that they’ve done
something to excise these people out from under the
university’s umbrella,” such as filing a lawsuit.

Until then, he’s holding on to the option of leaving UCLA
out of his will.

And while Jones’ recent move has generated a lot of buzz,
it doesn’t compare to the response Brant said he got from
alumni when 19 UCLA football players were implicated in a
handicapped-parking scandal in 1999, or when UCLA named politically
outspoken actor Tim Robbins its “Alumnus of the Year”
in 2003.

At least, Brant said, “Not yet.”