UCLA Faculty Group Votes to Protest War

Even as fighting wound down in Iraq, some UCLA faculty members registered a protest Monday against the U.S. invasion and issued a plea for establishing a representative government there answerable to the United Nations.

But, not surprising on a campus, there was also a small protest against the faculty protest, with some Republican students mocking both its substance and timing.

The university’s academic senate, in a special meeting, overwhelmingly approved a resolution to “deplore the administration’s doctrine of preventive war and the U.S. invasion of Iraq that is the first application of this doctrine.”

It also opposed “the establishment of an American protectorate in Iraq.” Instead, the resolution called for the United Nations to have a lead role in development of a new Iraqi government that would guarantee “inalienable personal, political and civil rights.”

The resolution passed with 180 votes in favor, 7 against, and 9 abstentions. That represented a small slice of the 3,300 faculty members eligible to vote.

The UCLA academic senate’s action dovetails with a shift in recent days by antiwar activists around the country to focus on the problems of postwar Iraq and other foreign policy issues.

Some critics questioned the purpose and value of the resolution. A professor of public policy, Mark Kleiman, said the resolution could be misconstrued as an academic expert opinion. He also said such votes put unfair pressure on junior, untenured professors not to challenge the views of senior faculty members, who eventually will decide whether they receive tenure.

“I don’t think it’s very interesting that 200 UCLA faculty members voted this way. It’s about as interesting as 200 cabdrivers, 200 factory workers or 200 radio talk show hosts,” Kleiman said.

The line in the resolution condemning a war in which the United States already appears to have achieved its main military aims drew barbs from a student group, the UCLA Bruin Republicans, which assembled outside the meeting.

“It’s a war that’s already over. It’s as if we’re passing a resolution against the Spanish-American War. This is absolutely absurd,” said Andrew Jones, a fourth-year political science major and chairman of the UCLA Bruin Republicans, whose members held U.S. flags and posters of President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Jones also fumed that students were barred from speaking at the academic senate meeting.

Proponents of the resolution said they had wanted to approve the measure shortly before fighting began in Iraq, but that they had needed time to collect the necessary 200 signatures to force a special meeting for that purpose.

Maurice Zeitlin, a sociology professor who was a leader of the campaign for the resolution, said the declaration still is a necessary act of conscience because the administration of postwar Iraq is just beginning. “The occupation isn’t going to end tomorrow,” Zeitlin said.

He added that he and other resolution supporters do not believe that the United States, acting by itself, would establish a “free, constitutional representative government” in Iraq.

Zeitlin said the resolution supporters are “all vehemently opposed to the Saddam Hussein regime, and considered it a murderous tyranny.”

But he said U.S. policy in launching the war reflects “the imperial reach that the United States has now proclaimed as its new strategic doctrine.”