Letters from the National Campus Director

Bruin Alumni Association: How Not to Run An Academic Freedom Campaign · 26 January 2006

This is exactly how not to run an academic freedom campaign. By targeting individual professors for their political views, the Bruin Alumni Association opened itself up to charges of McCarthyism and played right into the hands of its detractors. A genuine academic freedom campaign has to be viewpoint neutral. It is about process. It is about protecting the rights of students from indoctrination by any professor no matter what their political views.

The Bruin Alumni Association was started by Andrew Jones, a graduate of UCLA who worked briefly for SAF about two years ago but was fired for unethical conduct. Jones deliberately concealed from his donors and supporters that he was fired by David Horowitz and that SAF had nothing to do with his campaign; several prominent members of his board have already resigned, stating that Jones hid from them the true mission and tactics of his organization.

The Bruin Alumni campaign affords us an opportunity to highlight how the organization differs in its essential purposes and strategy from SAF.

Whereas SAF aims to promote intellectual diversity and to protect all strains of scholarly thought in academia from political persecution, the Bruin Alumni Association specifically targets left-wing professors and ideas, aiming to purge them from the academy. The group's website, www.BruinAlumni.com, singles out professors solely for their beliefs and groups them under the heading "The Dirty Thirty."

As our members and supporters know, Students for Academic Freedom does not target professors, either on the left or the right. Our concern is unprofessional behavior and violations of academic freedom in the classroom and we have publicized professorial transgressions at both ends of the political spectrum. We defended a liberal student at Foothill College whose philosophy professor railed against abortion in class and criticized a university in Arkansas when it cancelled a planned speech by Nation editor David Corn because of anti-Bush advertisements on his personal website.

"We do not care whether a professor is a liberal or a conservative," stated David Horowitz in a blog highlighting the differences between SAF and the Bruin Alumni Association. "We care that a professor is professional; that he or she does not indoctrinate their students but educates them. This means exposing them 'to the spectrum of significant scholarly opinion' as the Academic Bill of Rights phrases it. It also means that professors do not introduce irrelevant issues into classrooms where they don't belong."

Students for Academic Freedom encourages universities to promote greater intellectual diversity on their campuses---and this means hiring faculty of all political views, left, right, center and otherwise. As we like to say, "You can't get a good education if they're only telling you half the story." The Bruin Alumni Association would like to eliminate one side of that story from the academy, and thus deserves the condemnation of the academic freedom movement.

Yours in Freedom,

Sara Dogan
National Campus Director
Students for Academic Freedom

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