Witch-hunt against US professors denounced
The leading target of an organised witch-hunt by pro-Bush fanatics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has denounced his accusers for their authoritarian views and vowed to continue his work in America and other countries.
Peter McLaren, is one of the world’s leading critical educational theorists and practitioners. His groundbreaking work constantly challenges the status quo of global capitalism. McLaren is named top of a list of the “dirty thirty” by a website dedicated to “exposing UCLA’s radical professors” and which offers cash to students for information supplied.
The site is run by a former student under the guise of the Bruin Alumni Association (BNA). The explicit aim is to force UCLA to get rid of teachers like McLaren. Justifying their attack, the site claims:
“Very simply, we’re facing an exploding crisis of political radicalism on campus. It’s endangering the very core of UCLA – the undergraduate experience. One aspect of this radicalisation, is an unholy alliance between anti-war professors, radical Muslim students, and a pliant administration. Working together, they have made UCLA a major organizing center for opposition to the War on Terror.”
McLaren’s work covers a wide range of topics, from film criticism, to hip-hop, to Che Guevara. His writings have been translated into eleven languages. A professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, McLaren wrote the foreword to A World to Win – A rough guide to a future without global capitalism, published by Lupus Books. Repudiating the witch-hunt, he commented:
“I am sending this from Bogota, Colombia, having just given talks at the World Social Forum and the World Educational Forum. Luis Bonilla, an advisor to President Hugo Chavez, issued a statement during the opening of the World Educational Forum, condemning the attacks on me, and on other professors at UCLA, and I have received messages of solidarity from around the world.
“Being labelled enemy number one of the ‘dirty thirty’ has done nothing to deter me from continuing to write and teach as I have been doing for the past 20 years. The United States has entered a dangerous period in its history, and while I consider being red baited as ‘the worst of’ the dirty thirty to be a relatively minor political affair, these actions speak to larger tendencies within the United States, tendencies that betray an uneasy affinity with authoritarian populism and fascism.
“The international attention given to the attacks on me and other members of the dirty thirty have helped to shed a spotlight not only on the antics of the pro-Bush fanatics, but on the inherent logic of reactionary neoliberalism.”
The BNA encourages current students to snoop on their teachers in methods reminiscent of the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the 1950s organised by Senator McCarthy, which targeted the entertainment industry. The BNA website says:
“Do you have a professor who just can’t stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican Party, or any other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject matter? It doesn’t matter whether this is a past class, or your class for this coming winter quarter. If you help UCLAProfs.com expose the professor, we’ll pay you for your work.” Students are offered $100 for secret tape recordings of lectures and $50 for comprehensive notes.
Singling out McLaren – described as the most highly regarded social science scholar in all of UCLA - the website declares: “When considering the threat represented by McLaren and his radical ilk, we must realise that in the field of education, unlike almost any other field, political indoctrination doesn’t end with the first transmission, but survives to threaten the next generation.”
Italian newspaper, La Corriere della Sera, published a story about the witch-hunt on January 19. Quoting McLaren’s reference to the hounding of intellectuals and artists in the McCarthy era, it drew attention to the many victims of McCarthy’s House Committee On Un-American Activities.
