Sherry Chandler

from Cindy Chang at the NYTimes this morning:

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 23 - A 24-year-old conservative alumnus who announced earlier this month that he planned to pay students at the University of California, Los Angeles, to tape-record the lectures of left-leaning professors backed down after U.C.L.A. officials informed him on Monday that he would be violating school policy.

The alumnus, Andrew Jones, said he abandoned the plan to save his student supporters from possible legal action by the university, even though he believed they would be engaged in a “newsgathering” effort protected by the First Amendment.

Mr. Jones says he is confident that students will volunteer to tape lectures or take detailed notes in an effort to expose their professors as liberal partisans who do not tolerate dissent in their classrooms.

…

Mr. Jones worked briefly during and after college for the conservative activist David Horowitz, who has been lobbying state legislatures to pass an “Academic Bill of Rights” to protect students with minority viewpoints from partisan professors.

Mr. Horowitz says he fired Mr. Jones, accusing him of pressing U.C.L.A. students to file false reports that they had been physically attacked by leftist activists.

…We seem to grant to our high-speed roads and our airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported. That, as my own experience keeps proving to me, is not true. … The landscape has been subdued so that one may drive over it at seventy miles per hour without any concession whatsoever to one’s whereabouts. … Though one is in Kentucky one is not experiencing Kentucky; one is experiencing the highway, which might be in nearly any hill country east of the Mississippi.

— from Wendell Berry, “An Entrance to the Woods” in Of Woods and Waters, originally from Recollected Essays 1965-1980 (Northpoint Press, 1981)