LOS ANGELES, Jan. 24 (UPI) -- The founder of a conservative alumni group at UCLA has dropped a plan to pay students to monitor left-wing professors at the Los Angeles school.
Andrew Jones, a 2003 UCLA graduate, is also the only full-time staff member of the Bruin Alumni Association. He recently offered to pay $100 per class for tape-recordings or notes documenting abuses by a group of professors he called "the dirty 30."
Jones told the Los Angeles Times that the university's threats to take legal action led him to drop the offer of payment.
"We don't want to add to the problems of UCLA students who are already being abused in many of these cases by professors," he said.
Jones said that he would still accept notes or recordings from volunteers. The university said that pay is not the major issue, that anyone who disseminates copyrighted materials without permission could be in trouble.
David Horowitz, a right-wing activist and crusader for academic freedom, told the New York Times that he fired Jones because he believed Jones had been encouraging conservative UCLA students to file false reports of physical assaults by leftists.
