Michael Capel

Imagine the frustration of tuition-paying "John Q. Student" when he shows up at a class and finds a note on the door saying, "class canceled today: professor out protesting."

That’s exactly what happened to thousands of UC students on October 21-22 when faculty staged a system-wide walk-out in protest of California’s Proposition 209, which ended racial preferences and quotas in public universities.

Contrary, perhaps, to popular perception, the vast majority of students at UC Berkeley would rather spend their class time in class than out in Sproul plaza protesting. The few who are seemingly always engaged in some sort of demonstration, protest, rally, sit-in, teach-in, flaunt-in, or love-in choose to waste their own—or, more likely, their parents’—tuition dollars in so doing. On October 21 and 22, though, faculty decided to waste students’ tuition dollars for them when they spent class time promoting the political cause du jour rather than lecturing students in the subject for which they signed up.

Not only did some of the professors involved in the walkout at the various UC campuses not object to proselytizing their political agendas during class time, many welcomed the opportunity to do so. On October 21 and 22, "classes will be outside the classroom," UC- Santa Barbara professor Constance Penley told Campus Report prior to the event, "and for that day the topic will be this situation in the University of California . . . Many of the students don’t quite understand what affirmative action is, how it works, how it has worked for the University of California. . . . I think they also may not know how and why the professors are so upset." Penley has dedicated those two days to bringing the students in her film studies course up to speed.

Indeed, university education in the 1990s has experienced an insidious trend—leftist professors using their classroom lecterns as bully pulpits for their favorite political causes.

Political activism and other extracurricular activities add much to the college experience of many students. Many believe that it becomes dangerous, however, when faculty members use their positions to try to indoctrinate students with political stands under the guise of education.

Peter McLaren, a professor in UCLA’s school of education, sees the teacher’s role as just that. "I really believe that all education is political," he says. "The notion that education is a neutral endeavor or neutral practice is absurd. . . . Education has never been about that."

"I believe in a militant form of advocacy," he proclaims. "Pedagogy is a form of political advocacy."

The walkout was organized by the Michigan- and California-based Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). The group tried to spread the "days of action" to Michigan, where a Center for Individual Rights (CIR) lawsuit, which seems quite likely to be successful, threatens the racial preferences scheme in that state’s public university system. Students in Texas—where a Federal appeals court invalidated that state university system’s racial preferences scheme—and elsewhere also participated, to various degrees. Only in California and, on a lesser scale, in Michigan, did faculty walk out.

A petition signed by faculty throughout the UC-system who pledged to participate in the walkout began, ironically enough, with the phrase "We are educators." It went on to say, "As tenured UC faculty, we cannot stand idly by while our students risk so much in order to undo the error that the Regents have committed."

McLaren said that he would have been concerned about the effect of the cancellation of classes "if it’s an issue that students raise," but that the cause at hand was too important: "Part of any curriculum should be taking a stand on social and political issues."

UC Berkeley Asian American studies professor Ronald Takaki agreed: "It could be a problem, unless faculty explain the reasons for their actions. It’s really important for my colleagues to let students know very clearly why they’re walking out, and to ask them to join them, actually."

This orientation toward trying to indoctrinate students in their political causes is seemingly epidemic among UC professors. Whereas cases in the past have appeared anecdotally, this valuation of political proselytizing over education has become widespread within the UC faculty. Every one of the professors contacted by Campus Report expressed an indifference to the classroom education that students involuntarily sacrificed on October 21 and 22.

"Professors need to respond to the passing of 209 and make clear that the decision to remove affirmative action was wrong," UCLA professor and walkout planner Rafael Perez-Torres told the Daily Californian. Lapsing into the most extreme irony, he added, "Politicizing the issue has harmed the educational mission we are responsible for."