Last week I read a front-page story in the Daily Bruin about a
student’s campaign to expose the left-wing bias of UCLA
faculty. He wanted these “radicals” investigated for
turning the university into “a base for a political
fanaticism” that sought “student recruits.” They
questioned the president’s claims that the war was spreading
democracy, and fighting the enemy there so we wouldn’t have
to fight them here; they wanted the troops brought home.
It was a Daily Bruin from Nov. 18, 1965. The war was Vietnam.
(“Young Republican charges: Red literature offered,”
Nov. 18, 1965)
So the follies of the Bruin Alumni Association are nothing new.
The right wing has a habit of punishing intellectuals who
won’t join the fight-song sing-along for bombing countries
that are not actually threatening us.
Looking at the 1,000-year fight of the Vietnamese for
independence and the grim record of the U.S. in imposing unpopular
puppet governments under the rationale of the Cold War, many UCLA
professors warned that the Vietnam War would prove a tragic
mistake.
Eventually most Americans came to the same conclusion, but most
of the U.S. casualties, and presumably a similar proportion of the
Vietnamese, could have been averted (and the outcome could hardly
have been worse) if these scholars ““ labeled fools, traitors
and cowards by the government and the mainstream ““ had been
heeded.
This past autumn, another right-wing organization at UCLA
published a newspaper whose lead story condemned the faculty as
obviously a left-wing cabal. It cited that 95 percent of the
Academic Senate believed that invading Iraq was a bad idea, at a
time when 75 percent of the American public believed it a good
idea.
Would we have better political science, history, and Near
Eastern studies departments if the legislature were to mandate (as
these groups seem to advocate) that most of these professors be
replaced by ones ignorant enough of the region’s political
and cultural history to have believed the assurances of the neocons
and the Bush administration that our soldiers would be showered
only with flowers on a “cakewalk” to a shining
pro-western secular democracy?
My point is certainly not that professors are always correct;
but they are not wrong just because their scholarly perspective is
temporarily unpopular.
Nor am I saying the professors’ political opinions should
be immune from criticism, but such opinions must never be the
grounds for punishment by the university, or the pretext for
government interference.
Nor would I claim that leftists are always the victims;
communist governments assaulted academic freedom brutally from the
other side.
A university’s job is to challenge rather than
congratulate the conventional wisdom. It’s therefore not
surprising that some people find us annoyingly
“radical,” nor that governments periodically try to
exploit that annoyance to rein in these havens of independent
thinking.
Even if they don’t gain direct control, those in power
like to generate hysteria about “tenured radicals”
because it predisposes people to assume that any dissent emerging
from academia ““ like any inconvenient fact emerging through
the news media ““ is merely a symptom of liberal bias, rather
than a flaw in the official story.
To whatever embattled UCLA professor stumbles on this piece in
the Daily Bruin archives 40 years from now: Greetings, you are not
alone.
Watson is a professor in the English department.