LOS ANGELES, Jan. 19 (UPI) -- A conservative alumni group at UCLA has offered to pay students for notes or audiotapes demonstrating "abusive, one-sided or off-topic" teaching.
The students could get as much as $100 per class, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The Bruin Alumni Association, founded by Andrew Jones, class of 2003, launched UCLAProfs.com with the avowed purpose of "exposing UCLA's most radical professors."
The project has cost the group two members of its board. Stephen Thernstrom, a history professor at Harvard, told the Times that both he and Jascha Kessler, a retired UCLA English professor, had resigned from the board.
"I felt it was extremely unwise, one, to put out a list of targets of investigation and to agree to pay students to provide information about what was going on in the classroom of those students," Thernstrom said. "That just seems to me way too intrusive. It seems to me a kind of vigilantism that I very much object to."
The university has warned the group that it could violate copyright by releasing the contents of classroom lectures without permission.
