Friday, January 20, 2006

Hundred Bucks Per Head



A good hunting fee. This is not for some vermin but for leftist professors in California, though the wingnuts surely think of such creatures as vermin:

An alumni group dedicated to "exposing the most radical professors" at the University of California at Los Angeles is offering to pay students $100 to record classroom lectures of suspect faculty.

The Web site of the Bruin Alumni Association also includes a "Dirty Thirty" list of professors considered by the group to be the most extreme left-wing members of the UCLA faculty, as well as profiles on their political activities and writings.

UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale on Thursday denounced the campaign as "reprehensible," and school officials warned that selling or distributing recordings of classroom lectures without an instructor's consent violates university policy.

News of the campaign prompted former Republican congressman James Rogan, who helped lead impeachment proceedings against former President Bill Clinton in the U.S. House of Representatives, to resign from the group's advisory board.

Nice to see the market incentives being used for doing good! I really don't like this, because it brings to my mind echoes of past eras when fascism was on the rise.

But if we are going to start paying hunting fees for finding something that professors say we don't like how about some of these comments that I or my friends heard during our university education: "Women should not take seats from men in college." "Women should be educated but not in specialist fields. They need general education to bring up their children but they don't need to know law or medicine." "No knitting allowed in this classroom. I have to teach women but it's a waste of time and money." "Why aren't you at home having children?"

The last one was a question my economics-of-banking professor asked me when I was serving as his teaching assistant. At this time I didn't even have a boyfriend.

And I haven't even mentioned the offers to spend a weekend in a hotel, with no mention to the little wife at home. I turned them all down, including the ones that came from students later on, and I soldiered on. Or soldered on.

But these wingnut alumni are little whiners, little victims, scared of the shadows on the wall. And hundred dollars is a disgustingly low price for being a mole.
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Link via Eschaton.