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A conservative group at a major public university posts a “watch list” of the school’s most politically outspoken professors on a Web site. National media attention follows. Professors worry their academic freedom is under fire.

It happened at UCLA in early January. But it also happened at the University of Texas, Austin two years ago, in an incident that may hint at where the controversy at UCLA will end.

The two Web sites aren’t exact parallels. The UCLA site, www.uclaprofs.com, is run by a single alumnus who is not affiliated with UCLA. The UT Austin site, which was launched in 2003, was run by the Young Conservatives of Texas, a student group at UT. The UT site only has 10 professor profiles of about a paragraph in length. The UCLA one, meanwhile, has 31, and some go on for pages.

But both sites were founded with the same intent: to protest – some say to silence – professors whom the site founders allege push their politics on students. Both sites caused a stir, on and off campus, and landed in newspapers and on TV shows around the country.

And a little more than two years after its founding, the controversy over the UT watch list has died off. The site wasn’t even updated after the first time.

“We live in an age where these opinions, as soon as they appear on the Web, can go around the world,” said Jonathan Knight, the program director on academic freedom at the American Association of University Professors in Washington, D.C. “And there certainly have been many professors who have been subject to outrageous kinds of threats because of a Web page.”

But the outrage seems short-lived.

Austin Kinghorn, the founder of the UT site, had the idea to start his watch list the day after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That day, Kinghorn said he showed up to his journalism class only to hear his professor, Robert Jensen, “launch a diatribe against American foreign policy.”

“He really took advantage of the situation to talk about his political views,” Kinghorn said.

It was the first of what Kinghorn alleges were a series of incidents in which professors used their position as a bully pulpit to push politics.

In October 2003, when Kinghorn was president of the Young Conservatives chapter at UT, he started up the watch list and an “Honor List” of four professors whom the YCT felt presented balanced views in lecture.

Jensen’s profile, which was first on the list, said the journalism professor turned his lectures into “a crash course in socialism (and) white privilege.”

Clement Henry, a Middle Eastern Studies professor, was called out for the way he “consistently employs a negative tone when talking about the U.S. or Israel, and attempts to belittle students who disagree with him.”

Not all the profiles are entirely bad. Henry Clear from the economic department was called a “former 1960s and ’70s Marxist radical,” but, the profile’s writer conceded, he’s “a great lecturer and is well-informed.”

Jensen, who still teaches journalism at UT, said he doesn’t remember what he said on Sept. 12, 2001 that would have touched a raw nerve in Kinghorn.

“Obviously, they have a First Amendment right to do what they did,” Jensen said, referring to the YCT. “But I took issue with the way they characterized my class.”

Though Kinghorn said he was open to profiling professors of any ideology, only one of the 10 is conservative.

But he insists a professor’s political slant had nothing to do with whether they made the list.

“What the watch list was intended to address was professors who used the classroom to indoctrinate students and who designed the classroom in such a way so that opposing viewpoints are not presented,” he said.

Kinghorn said the group would send at least two YCT members to audit the class of a professor whom they expected of preaching politics for a few days. Sometimes, they would try to get class materials, like a syllabus.

In addition to the watch list, Kinghorn posted a form on which students could identify a professor they thought the YCT should investigate. Some students who submitted forms also wrote the professor profiles, but most were written by YCT members. Kinghorn said he edited all the profiles.

Henry, who was second on the list behind Jensen, said from what he knew of the list, it seemed like a “pretty ad hoc thing.” He said he hadn’t even read his own profile, and he laughed when told of its contents.

“(Criticism) comes with the turf when you teach (about the) Middle East,” he said.

Some students appreciated having the watch list as a source of professor reviews, but a “sizeable contingent of folks” who felt the list infringed on academic freedom “thought what we were doing was entirely inappropriate,” Kinghorn recalled.

Aside from the student newspaper, the Daily Texan, the list didn’t get much play in the media – that is, until late November when the Washington Post ran a feature on it.

Kinghorn said, “It just snowballed.”

“We just had all these outlets, talk radio, TV news, other newspapers, political magazines. ... Anyone and everyone was coming out of the woodwork just to ask us about it,” Kinghorn said.

For about three weeks, the watch list was big news. Kinghorn said he appeared on shows like MTV News, The O’Reilly Factor and ABC Nightline. A camera crew filmed part of Jensen’s class for a news segment.

But many professors said the list would not change their teaching. UT administrators did not investigate or censure professors. And within a few weeks, the media furor died down.

Now, people at UT seem to have lost interest. And the current YCT leadership has no plans to update the list again, said Curtis Waldo, the campus group’s secretary.

Even if the list didn’t have much staying power, Kinghorn – who is now a reporter for the Baytown Sun – said he feels it did get a message out.

“It’s not just about liberal professors because we’re okay with that,” he said. “It’s about professors using their classroom as a vehicle to proliferate their political ideology, and not simply as an avenue to education for the sake of education,” Kinghorn said.

But Henry thought the list was more of a stunt.

“Frankly, I can’t take it seriously,” he said. “I mean, it basically boomerangs and gives me favorable publicity.”

As for Jensen, he believes that, if anything, tenured professors should be bolder and take political stances on issues more often, so long as it doesn’t come at the cost of educating their students fairly.

“If there’s anything I would criticize my faculty colleagues of – regardless of their politics, left, right or center – it’s that they’re far too willing to step back from a public role,” he said. “I’m at a public university. Why would the public not want a professor at a public university to share his point of view?”