ONLINE ONLY: Giving bad Marx

"Liberal professors" is a typically stereotyped idea. But, as I always say, stereotypes would not exist if there were no pattern of behavior on which to base them. Yes, many, if not most, professors are liberal, and many of them pose a threat to freedom of education.\nLet me make a clear distinction between liberal professors and professors who happen to be liberal. A professor can be as liberal as he wants, but as long as his personal political views do not affect the material being taught, he isn't a liberal professor -- just an ordinary professor who holds his own views on the side.\nLiberal professors, on the other hand, use their position to indoctrinate, not educate, and threaten with academic or disciplinary consequences anyone who is of a different political opinion. And these liberal professors are not liberal in the sense that they support unions or a "progressive" tax system. No, they are the Ward Churchill types: radical, neo-positivist, feminazi, reverse-racist, pinko-commie 60's burnouts who are card-carrying members of the Green party. Or, put more simply, quite insane.\nThe insanity at UCLA has reached epic proportions, apparently -- enough so that some concerned alumni have put together an organization that pays students to tape-record liberal professors. Along with the tape, the student submits notes and course materials and the organization uses these to judge whether the professor is violating academic freedom.\nUCLA's reaction? Threats. They warned that professors' lectures are copyrighted material and that distribution is illegal.\nMy question to this: if the liberal professors are imaginary -- if UCLA has nothing to hide -- why must they resort to threatening legal action against lecture recorders? The university knows exactly what goes on in the lecture halls, and its efforts to keep the dirt out of the public eye shows the university's silent support of these loons.\nAnd yes, they are very much loons. Take, for example, UCLA professor Douglas Kellner, who refers to the "Bush Reich." And that's only scratching the surface: dozens of such profiles exist on www.uclaprofs.com, the alumni group's website.\nIn my four years at IU, I have been fortunate enough never to have a UCLA-grade professor. I have had ones who were clearly liberal, but they never let their views affect the way the material was taught or the grades of those who did not share their opinions (at least as far as I'm aware).\nI'm not sure -- but I'd like to verify it -- that this holds true for other IU students. Considering English programs have a reputation for being notoriously liberal, I'm willing to bet IU as a whole has not succumbed to the liberal professor disease.\nIf any readers are running into issues with liberal (or, less likely, conservative) professors throwing academic objectivity and intelligent debate out the window and setting their own views down as the indisputable truth, I remind them that this educational ivory tower is best overturned by the students themselves. Exposure to the public eye is like daylight to a vampire for these professors -- let everyone know how totalitarian these supposed "voices of intelligent discourse" actually are.