“Dangerous” is an unarmed man facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square.

“Dangerous” is a suicide bomber flying a plane into the World Trade Center.

“Dangerous” is a government sending young Americans to their deaths in the searing deserts of Iraq without cause.

“Dangerous” is a Supreme Court justice who makes an obscene gesture in the hallowed halls of the United States Supreme Court regarding a case where he has the power of life and death.

But to call professors dangerous because they are doing what we are paid to do—think, reflect, discuss, profess, enlighten—is ludicrous. We in the academic profession are endangered by a government that only respects the powers of the wealthy while pontificating to the world about its commitment to freedom; by passive citizens who want a president they can have a beer with and isn’t any smarter than they are; and by anti-intellectual vigilantes who think they can stamp out free thought and want to start by silencing professors with whom they disagree.

Thirty professors at UCLA, my alma mater, have been named on the so-called “Dirty Thirty: Ranking the Worst of the Worst” by the “Bruin Alumni” (no relation to the real UCLA Alumni Association). I suppose that since several of those professors were my teachers and mentors I am marked as one of their intellectual offspring. I am proud to carry on a tradition of discomfiting the too-comfortable.

We professors have a sacred calling: we must teach our students to think because theirs is the future. It is that simple. Along the way, we hope that we disturb their preconceptions, stir their hearts and perhaps inspire in them the passion to pursue truth. Our students are our sacred trusts: They are our children, and when they leave our classrooms, they may espouse their lessons wholeheartedly or they may take the opposite point of view in reaction to what they learned just as our biological children do. The best result is when they take what they have learned, work it creatively, and end up with something that is uniquely their own. As I often tell my students, if you agree with everything I say, one of us isn’t thinking.

Reading the profiles of the UCLA “Worst of the Worst,” I was struck by the sinister disregard for their privacy. One of the links leads to a listing of all the petitions that my major professor, Ellen DuBois, had signed. Since when is signing a petition a violation of the Constitution? And what gives anyone the right to catalog those actions, perhaps for later use? Do I hear the ghost of Roy Cohn? Senator Joseph McCarthy? Hasn’t anyone told these pinheaded snoops that the Cold War ended in the last century? And that McCarthy was exposed as a fraud and drank himself to death at 49?

If anyone has done wrong it is those who ignore the lessons of history; who fail to recognize the link between the activities of the “Bruin Alumni” responsible for the rankings and the roadmap that led to Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938, “the night of broken glass,” when the windows of Jewish businesses were broken and the stores looted; and their synagogues and books were burned. I’m not talking about the holocaust which began a couple of years later with the deportations of the Jews to the concentration camps. First, the German government legally destroyed their livelihoods and burned their books; then it changed laws to exclude them from the professions, fired the professors, and eventually, deprived them of their property. Inevitably, the Nazis had to destroy the evidence of their venality and evil; that’s when the deportations started and the ovens began their nefarious work.

We are in the grip of one of the oldest struggles, one that we thought the Bill of Rights would insulate us from, the struggle between freedom and authority. Even the recently-retired Justice of the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor, has warned that we are dangerously close to a dictatorship.

The “Bruin Alumni” website says “Feminist history professor Ellen DuBois is in every way the modern female academic: militant, impatient, accusatory, and radical – very radical.” Yes, she is. So what? I could list a number of conservative male professors who could be described in similar terms. I’d add that she was a major pain in the neck to me as a graduate student. But she taught me that historians have a sacred duty to the truth, to historical record. As a historian, she has documented the treatment of women in the suffrage era. She has exposed the lies and manipulations that the politicians and other leaders used to keep women from being full members of society. She has overturned rocks and uprooted trees to find the truth. That is what a radical does; s/he goes to the root of a problem. That is Ellen DuBois’ vocation

In Bertolt Brecht’s play of the same name, Galileo says “Truth is the daughter of time not authority.” Maybe truth doesn’t matter to the “Bruin Alumni,” but it matters to us and it matters to Ellen DuBois.

Rosa Maria Pegueros, Associate Professor of Latin American History and Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island, can be reached at pegueros@uri.edu

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