Apparently Doc Brown's flying DeLorean survived the horrific train crash at the end of “Back to the Future III,” as UCLA alum Andrew Jones has apparently found a working flux capacitor and harnessed 1.21 jigawatts of electricity to travel back to the year 1955.

Mr. Jones is attempting to bring back the glory days of McCarthyism through the Bruin Alumni Association, an organization dedicated to eradicating liberal professors from the UCLA campus. A $100 reward has been offered by Mr. Jones to any UCLA student able to show evidence suggesting a professor is not responsive to conservative talking points.

What Mr. Jones is proposing constitutes nothing short of a witch hunt. If this anti-opining movement gains momentum — as many have in the past — professors nationwide will soon fear to mention anything in lecture not taken directly out of the pleasantly neutral textbook, bringing back the dark ages from a few years ago when UW had a speech code in place that crippled professors' ability to pose thought-provoking questions.

While Americans today have the sifting and winnowing skills lacking from 17th-century Massachusetts, the allegations levied by Mr. Jones can originate from a single disgruntled student's notes from a single lecture. If other professions were to follow Mr. Jones' lead and treat such rough notes as canon, we would be surprised to learn the Senate only needs 60 votes to override a presidential veto, pi is exactly three and how Teddy Roosevelt defeated the Russians in WWII. As we are all painfully aware, in our haste to keep up with a professor, students tend to misinterpret facts from time to time.

In essence, this movement says individuals need to be sheltered from opposing points of view. Professors must not express their own opinions, Jones says, because they might offend someone. If, in the middle of a political science lecture, a professor momentarily deviates from the lesson plan on the limits of presidential power to crack a joke about President Bush, he or she risks running afoul of an overly sensitive conservative student and subsequently could find his or her name on the top of Mr. Jones' blacklist.

Many of these agitators subsequently claim the situation is much more dire than a joke here or there; they believe these professors grade conservative papers more harshly than they would grade a liberal one. The problem with this paranoid reasoning is that there really is no way to prove conservatives receive lower marks than their liberal counterparts based solely on their ideology. Simply because an individual received a grade of 70 percent for arguing a flat tax would not disproportionately benefit the wealthy in any way, shape or form does not suggest the grade was a result of their politics; the rotten grade could have been justly deserved. However, faced with that situation, it is much easier to blame the low grade on an unfriendly liberal professor rather than admit to oneself the all-night kegger on Monday was not such a great idea. "It's not my fault; it's that g-ddamn commie-pinko professor!"

Obviously, professors should not indoctrinate students with their own political bias.

But it is utterly amazing that the Bruin Alumni Association (not the official UCLA Alumni group, mind you) continues to hide under the guise of wishing to improve the university when such efforts are so blatantly political in nature.

If Mr. Jones and his ragtag team of followers truly cared about helping their alma mater, they could lobby the state to increase funding to the university or solicit donations for the college.

They have instead opted to publicly condemn university professors who fail to share their ideals in a move that could only hurt the university's reputation in the long run, possibly hurting both private donations and state aid. And nobody has to remind Wisconsin residents how a state Legislature can react to a major university being on the receiving end of a negative ad blitz, as the Paul Barrows affair (among other things) has caused the state to consistently slash UW's budget.

Rob Hunger ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science and journalism and is an at-large member of The Badger Herald Editorial Board.