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Joseph Guth is the kind of alumnus UCLA could put on its brochures. A retired professor who lives in Virginia, he has been a loyal supporter of the university for 45 years, and he even included UCLA as a beneficiary in his will.

But now, he says he’s considering cutting ties.

What changed Guth’s mind was an article he read about an alumni group that is going after radical liberal professors at his beloved alma mater.

Upset, he wrote an e-mail to the UCLA Alumni Association saying he was “deeply offended” that the association would be so partisan. He said the upstanding image he had of UCLA was “corroded,” and that he was striking UCLA from his will. He ended by saying, “I feel a deep sense of loss.”

What Guth didn’t know then – and what he knows now – is that it is the Bruin Alumni Association, not the UCLA Alumni Association, behind the attacks. The Bruin Alumni Association – whose founder and lone employee is Andrew Jones, a 2003 UCLA alumnus – is a conservative organization with no university affiliation that seeks to expose “the crisis of political radicalism” at UCLA, according to its Web site.

“This story (I read) was written in a way that allowed me to conclude that this was being done by the official alumni association,” Guth said in a phone interview.

Guth is not the only one who has been thrown off by the names. The UCLA Alumni Association, which represents nearly 350,000 alumni worldwide, has received over 60 calls and e-mails since last Tuesday, when media outlets around the country began reporting on the Bruin Alumni Association.

At first, many people were simply confused as to which alumni association was doing what, said Keith Brant, the association’s executive director. His staff has been explaining that the UCLA Alumni Association is not attached to the Bruin Alumni Association.

“One call even came to the main desk where one person said ‘(Jones) is right on’ and ‘Where can I sign up?’” Brant said.

The mix-ups are ironic, considering that, save for the similarity in their names, the groups are very different.

The UCLA Alumni Association is apolitical and has over 86,000 members and chapters as far away as Hong Kong. It is also part of UCLA’s vast fundraising network, which brought in over $262 million in donations last year.

The Bruin Alumni Association is, by contrast, a “shoestring operation,” in Jones’ words. It has an advisory board of 20 conservative politicians and scholars, and has raised $22,000 to date.

The UCLA Alumni Association started receiving concerned calls from people about eight months ago, when the BAA went public, Brant said. But they really started to come in when Jones’ group launched its latest campaign three weeks ago – a Web site that features profiles of some of the most liberal professors at UCLA according to Jones.

The site, UCLAProfs.com, also offers students cash in exchange for information on other professors that Jones can parlay into more profiles.

Jones and UCLA were catapulted into the national spotlight last week when media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, wire services and national TV stations, began reporting on the site. Soon after, Internet blogs picked up the story. And with the media reports came the confusion.

“When you get a sound bite or a quote and you hear ‘UCLA’ and ‘alumni,’ you don’t always make the connection” that there are two groups, Brant said.

For example, when three prominent members of the BAA’s advisory board resigned over the launch of UCLAProfs.com, the online edition of the United Kingdom’s Guardian carried a headline that read “Three UCLA Board Members Resign.” (The article later said the group was not affiliated with UCLA).

The storm of publicity will have an inevitable downside for UCLA – and even the BAA, said Jerry Swerling, a professor of public relations at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism.

“It’s not like the days of P.T. Barnum where they thought: ‘Any coverage is good so long as they spell your name right,’” he said.

It’s a lesson Jones is learning first-hand: In addition to losing at least three board members, he said he’s had to cope with an exhausting 25 interviews a day, taking time away from his work with the site. And while Jones’ organization is being plastered across Web sites and newspapers everywhere, he said it hasn’t yet translated into donations.

Jones said anyone who has seen his site can tell he is not affiliated with UCLA, and there is a disclaimer stating so on his home page.

Some of the confusion likely arises from Jones’ use of the words “Bruin” and “UCLA.”

While the university does not own the rights to “Bruin,” it does own “UCLA.” As of last week, the university had not decided whether it will sue Jones for using “UCLA” in the URL of the site UCLAProfs.com, said Patricia Jasper, university counsel.

Jones denies that he is trying to mislead people by using the UCLA name and image. But Brant said after looking at the BAA Web site that he feels “there is some intent to mislead,” though he was quick to add, “Obviously they’re not trying to create an alumni association in the shadow of ours.”

Jones said he’s surprised alumni mix up the two groups. “These are UCLA graduates, and yet they can’t figure out the difference?” he asked. “Are they confused by K-Mart and Wal-Mart because they both have ‘Mart’ in the name?”

As for Guth (who said he had not seen the BAA’s site when he e-mailed UCLA), he received a form e-mail from the UCLA Alumni Association explaining things. But Guth is still unhappy with UCLA – just for a different reason.

“I think UCLA needs to do its job to distance itself from (Jones) and this group,” he said. “In the next several weeks, I would like to see or read that they’ve done something to excise these people out from under the university’s umbrella,” such as filing a lawsuit.

Until then, he’s holding on to the option of leaving UCLA out of his will.

And while Jones’ recent move has generated a lot of buzz, it doesn’t compare to the response Brant said he got from alumni when 19 UCLA football players were implicated in a handicapped-parking scandal in 1999, or when UCLA named politically outspoken actor Tim Robbins its “Alumnus of the Year” in 2003.

At least, Brant said, “Not yet.”