Monitoring faculty suspected of politicizing the classroom.

Listen to the NPR report on the Bruin Alumni Association, a group that is offering money to UCLA students who record professors who it thinks are bringing too much left-wing politics to the classroom.

Here's the group's website, courtesy of Stephen Bainbridge, who is a UCLA professor and has a thing or two to say about the project.

The group defends itself here:

UCLAProfs.com is not conducting a witch-hunt, engaging in police-state surveillance, or targeting privately-held political beliefs. We are concerned solely with indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies, and unprofessional classroom behavior, no matter where it falls on the ideological spectrum. As an illustrative example of egregious behavior with which UCLAProfs is concerned, please review the article BAA President Andrew Jones wrote about his experience in a 2002 political science class. Occasional political remarks, jokes, or the like are generally harmless behavior. We are concerned with a class which in full any reasonable observer would agree was taught in an unacceptable or unprofessional manner...

Accusing a professor of unprofessional behavior is in essence an accusation of professional malfeasance. UCLAProfs.com will air such charges only after extended reviews of a professor’s record. The taping of lectures leaves no room for a vengeful student to take questionable statements out of context, to (deliberately or inadvertently) misquote a professor, or to otherwise give a false portrait of the class. As such, we find the current hysteria, and the many intemperate accusations that the UCLAProfs.com program is a “blacklist,” “ratting out” professors, or other contemptible phenomenon, to be a severe distortion.

Eugene Volokh, also a UCLA professor, also has commentary:

I ... think the offering of money to students is a bit unsavory, though I'm not positive how bad it is; much information-gathering, after all, is done by people who get paid, and sometimes get paid in rough correlation to the stuff they unearth...

Nonetheless, I do think we need to put all this in perspective. My colleagues and I are public servants. We have a certain degree of influence over public affairs, both through our public commentary and through our teaching. Others disagree with us, and think we're doing a public disservice rather than a public service. They're entitled to criticize us, and to monitor our public performance of our duties to see whether that performance is, in their view, lacking. I try to imagine what I would think if someone from the Left set up a site to criticize Prof. Bainbridge, me, and my (rather few) conservative colleagues, and to solicit concrete evidence of our supposed misdeeds; I would like to think that I would recognize that this was their right, both legally and ethically.

Putting their right to do it to the side, there is something awfully disturbing about displaying a list of names like this. It just looks ugly and intended to intimidate. I don't see why an organization that purports to be concerned about fairness would want to operate in this fashion. It's self-defeating. And their current complaint that people are reacting to them in an "intemperate" way is rather amusing. What did they expect?