A Closer Look: Online criticism of outspoken professors not a new concept

A conservative group at a major public university posts a
“watch list” of the school’s most politically
outspoken professors on a Web site. National media attention
follows. Professors worry their academic freedom is under fire.

It happened at UCLA in early January. But it also happened at
the University of Texas, Austin two years ago, in an incident that
may hint at where the controversy at UCLA will end.

The two Web sites aren’t exact parallels. The UCLA site,
www.uclaprofs.com, is run by a single alumnus who is not affiliated
with UCLA. The UT Austin site, which was launched in 2003, was run
by the Young Conservatives of Texas, a student group at UT. The UT
site only has 10 professor profiles of about a paragraph in length.
The UCLA one, meanwhile, has 31, and some go on for pages.

But both sites were founded with the same intent: to protest
““ some say to silence ““ professors whom the site
founders allege push their politics on students. Both sites caused
a stir, on and off campus, and landed in newspapers and on TV shows
around the country.

And a little more than two years after its founding, the
controversy over the UT watch list has died off. The site
wasn’t even updated after the first time.

“We live in an age where these opinions, as soon as they
appear on the Web, can go around the world,” said Jonathan
Knight, the program director on academic freedom at the American
Association of University Professors in Washington, D.C. “And
there certainly have been many professors who have been subject to
outrageous kinds of threats because of a Web page.”

But the outrage seems short-lived.

Austin Kinghorn, the founder of the UT site, had the idea to
start his watch list the day after the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11, 2001. That day, Kinghorn said he showed up to his journalism
class only to hear his professor, Robert Jensen, “launch a
diatribe against American foreign policy.”

“He really took advantage of the situation to talk about
his political views,” Kinghorn said.

It was the first of what Kinghorn alleges were a series of
incidents in which professors used their position as a bully pulpit
to push politics.

In October 2003, when Kinghorn was president of the Young
Conservatives chapter at UT, he started up the watch list and an
“Honor List” of four professors whom the YCT felt
presented balanced views in lecture.

Jensen’s profile, which was first on the list, said the
journalism professor turned his lectures into “a crash course
in socialism (and) white privilege.”

Clement Henry, a Middle Eastern Studies professor, was called
out for the way he “consistently employs a negative tone when
talking about the U.S. or Israel, and attempts to belittle students
who disagree with him.”

Not all the profiles are entirely bad. Henry Clear from the
economic department was called a “former 1960s and ’70s
Marxist radical,” but, the profile’s writer conceded,
he’s “a great lecturer and is well-informed.”

Jensen, who still teaches journalism at UT, said he
doesn’t remember what he said on Sept. 12, 2001 that would
have touched a raw nerve in Kinghorn.

“Obviously, they have a First Amendment right to do what
they did,” Jensen said, referring to the YCT. “But I
took issue with the way they characterized my class.”

Though Kinghorn said he was open to profiling professors of any
ideology, only one of the 10 is conservative.

But he insists a professor’s political slant had nothing
to do with whether they made the list.

“What the watch list was intended to address was
professors who used the classroom to indoctrinate students and who
designed the classroom in such a way so that opposing viewpoints
are not presented,” he said.

Kinghorn said the group would send at least two YCT members to
audit the class of a professor whom they expected of preaching
politics for a few days. Sometimes, they would try to get class
materials, like a syllabus.

In addition to the watch list, Kinghorn posted a form on which
students could identify a professor they thought the YCT should
investigate. Some students who submitted forms also wrote the
professor profiles, but most were written by YCT members. Kinghorn
said he edited all the profiles.

Henry, who was second on the list behind Jensen, said from what
he knew of the list, it seemed like a “pretty ad hoc
thing.” He said he hadn’t even read his own profile,
and he laughed when told of its contents.

“(Criticism) comes with the turf when you teach (about
the) Middle East,” he said.

Some students appreciated having the watch list as a source of
professor reviews, but a “sizeable contingent of folks”
who felt the list infringed on academic freedom “thought what
we were doing was entirely inappropriate,” Kinghorn
recalled.

Aside from the student newspaper, the Daily Texan, the list
didn’t get much play in the media ““ that is, until late
November when the Washington Post ran a feature on it.

Kinghorn said, “It just snowballed.”

“We just had all these outlets, talk radio, TV news, other
newspapers, political magazines. … Anyone and everyone was coming
out of the woodwork just to ask us about it,” Kinghorn
said.

For about three weeks, the watch list was big news. Kinghorn
said he appeared on shows like MTV News, The O’Reilly Factor
and ABC Nightline. A camera crew filmed part of Jensen’s
class for a news segment.

But many professors said the list would not change their
teaching. UT administrators did not investigate or censure
professors. And within a few weeks, the media furor died down.

Now, people at UT seem to have lost interest. And the current
YCT leadership has no plans to update the list again, said Curtis
Waldo, the campus group’s secretary.

Even if the list didn’t have much staying power, Kinghorn
““ who is now a reporter for the Baytown Sun ““ said he
feels it did get a message out.

“It’s not just about liberal professors because
we’re okay with that,” he said. “It’s about
professors using their classroom as a vehicle to proliferate their
political ideology, and not simply as an avenue to education for
the sake of education,” Kinghorn said.

But Henry thought the list was more of a stunt.

“Frankly, I can’t take it seriously,” he said.
“I mean, it basically boomerangs and gives me favorable
publicity.”

As for Jensen, he believes that, if anything, tenured professors
should be bolder and take political stances on issues more often,
so long as it doesn’t come at the cost of educating their
students fairly.

“If there’s anything I would criticize my faculty
colleagues of ““ regardless of their politics, left, right or
center ““ it’s that they’re far too willing to
step back from a public role,” he said. “I’m at a
public university. Why would the public not want a professor at a
public university to share his point of view?”