Spotlights have shined recently on faculty of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center for good reasons and very disturbing ones

Spotlights have shined recently on faculty of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center for good reasons and very disturbing ones.

On the one hand, Professor Mitchell Chang has been recognized as one of the nation's top ten emerging scholars by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, a well-established journal in the field of higher education. See the article about Mitch at:

http://www.diverseeducation.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/search.cgi?cat=10&start=16&perpage=15&template=index/default.html

On the other hand, two of our professors (Law Professor Jerry Kang and Historian Vinay Lal) and one of our long-time lecturers (Kent Wong, who is also the director of UCLA's Labor Center) are among 30 faculty members that have been targeted and profiled in a web site run by a very conservative UCLA alumnus, Andrew Jones, and his organization, the Bruin Alumni Association (which is not affiliated with the university's official alumni association). The LA Times and other media have done articles about this web site and group. You can view these articles at:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ucla18jan18,0,4943877.story?coll=la-home-headlines (LA Times Archives)

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/01/18/ucla

http://www.capitolweekly.net/news/article.html?article_id=434

Please look at the extraordinary response by Professor Jerry Kang. A professor of law, Jerry discusses the broader academic freedom, legal, and policy issues involved in the blacklisting by this conservative group:

http://www.law.ucla.edu/kang/Teaching/Blacklist/blacklist.html

The controversial web site is located at:

http://www.uclaprofs.com/profs/profsindex.html

All those "targeted" are seeking to formulate a collective response. Steps have also been taken to ask professional organizations to write to the UC academic senate and Deans to urge them to take action and make a definitive policy statement.