Fear of indoctrination by one's professors is absurd

Rat on your professor, get $100.

Tape his lecture, copy her notes, hang on to every last handout distributed in all of your classes and you could make a killing.

Up until about a month ago, that was the deal for UCLA students who believed their teachers were too liberal. Turn them in to Andrew Jones, the alumnus behind UCLAProfs.com, and wait for your paycheck.

Jones recently withdrew his cash offer because UCLA lawyers offered him a little lesson in university policy. But he didn't withdraw his online list of the 30 most dangerous professors at UCLA (the "Dirty Thirty") or the rabid propaganda he wrote about them.

What's still there is another story in itself.

By now, enough rational people have read his bull to dismiss it. But this guy isn't the only one on the witch hunt.

Open David Horowitz's new book "The Professors," chronicling the 101 "most dangerous" professors in America, and you'll find Truman's own associate professor of history Marc Becker on Page 50. Again, what's written is whole new story, but the emerging theme here is that these so-called "liberal" professors must be stopped.

Are we supposed to be afraid? Are today's impressionable young college students, who have no ability to think for themselves or debate material presented in class, under attack? Are we being indoctrinated every time we step into the wrong teacher's classroom or office? If we wear aluminum foil on our heads, are we safe?

It's just another example of immature and nutty blabbering by egotistical jackasses with specific agendas. It's also an example of why so many people today hate politics, and I don't blame them. I might even be one of them.

Screw it, I am one of them. I hate writing the words "liberal" and "conservative" because they don't mean anything anymore, not to me and not to anyone who reads them. If anyone reads them.

And that's a big if.

In my experience at Truman, I have never been at the mercy of a proselytizing professor, regardless of his or her politics. While this liberal arts capital of the world is (if you ask certain critics) guilty of some kind of political bias, I've never felt I was helpless to resist it. Here, you can take a Missouri statute course with the College Republicans' faculty adviser or an English course with a self-proclaimed feminist. And you can come away from both relatively unscathed.

In fact, based on what I've seen, students often use professors with opposing viewpoints to sharpen their own arguments. I doubt any dastardly professors somehow convert a sound student conservative into a wacky liberal within a matter of weeks or even semesters. To try that would probably be a waste of breath.

I don't doubt, however, that listening to enough propaganda from either side can send someone into an irrational frenzy intense enough to spawn a Web site or a book. It could even make a person crazy enough to spend hundreds of dollars on old notes and lectures.

And even as poor as I am, the free exchange of ideas is one thing I'm not willing to sell. Andrew Gant is a senior communication major from Montgomery County, Mo.