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Comments on RJ’s CNN comment.




Greetings,

I have just finished reading RJ’s post about the CNN reports about a conservative man offering money to students in exchange for class notes and lectures of teachers who push liberal agendas. The CNN articles are here and here.

I must agree with you RJ over having discomfort over this whole mess. I don’t think that offering money to students so that they will break the regulations of UCLA (as taping the lectures of professors without their permission is) is a good idea. I would also claim that it is a bad tactic altogether. I would also agree with you that we must provide good role models to our students because they will probably still be looking for that one person they would like to be like.

I, for one, plan on doing this by keeping my political beliefs to myself, and not push them on any of my students. I would even go so far as to contend that this guy is actually doing the rest of the population a favor by drawing attention to certain teachers who push their political agendas. It is my belief that teachers shouldn’t push their ideas onto other students, but rather educate each student in the different ideologies, and give them the skills to sift through the different ideologies to find one that makes the most sense to the individual student.

I also don’t believe that this has anything to do with President Bush and his wiretapping scandal. I think it is just some coincidence that some guy in California got enough money scraped together to further his own political agenda. Although I would agree that unethical dealings at the political acme will trickle down to form a corrupt whole eventually, I don’t see this happening at the moment.

Websites:

Ryan Vella. Published 25 January, 2006.
http://vellarya.edublogs.org/2006/01/25/cnn-comment/> 31 January, 2006.

Expose ‘radical’ UCLA teacher, get $100. CNN. Published 19 January, 2006. http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/01/19/ucla.radicals.reut/index.html> 31 January, 2006.

Activist drops reward for info on ‘radical’ professors. CNN. Published 25 January, 2006.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/01/25/professors.targeted.ap/index.html> 31 January, 2006.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Personal Comments and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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One Response to “Comments on RJ’s CNN comment.”

  1.    Grewer Blog » Response to Chris Bauer’s response to RJ’s CNN article Says:
    February 6th, 2006 at 6:30 pm

    [...]  After reading Chris and RJ’s posts regarding the CNN article on the UCLA man paying students for information on liberal agendas, I found that I agreed with both of them in their statements that we teachers have a responsibility to model civility for our students and to teach them the skills they need to evaluate ideologies for themselves rather than pushing our ideologies on them.  However, I believe that in certain subjects it can be difficult to maintain one’s objectivity.  This is especially a problem in English and Social Studies classes where often current events come under discussion in the classroom. [...]