Thursday, Sept. 27, 2007 | So Steve Erie, a UCSD political science professor, believes that a biased or incomplete university research study results in “contaminating the brand name” of a university? (“Fellow Academics Question Validity of Illegal Immigration Study,” Sept. 26) Does Professor Erie feels the same way about university studies that promote the views of the Left as well as the Right? Would he urge the University of California Board of Regents to shut down the University of California’s Miguel Contreras Labor Institute?
The UC Labor Institute is a pseudo-academic propaganda mill for labor unions, created in 2000 by the state legislature at the behest of the California Labor Federation. Since then $34.8 million in taxpayer funding has been funneled to this program. The amateurish policy reports and cynical media quotations that come out of the Labor Institute are “contaminating” the reputation of a University of California degree or professorship.
Perhaps someday professors and administrators will take up the cause of trying to bring California’s state universities into a state of honest intellectual inquiry, free of ideological presuppositions and slipshod, uncritical “research.” The U.C. Labor Institute is a culprit whose brazen bias far exceeds that of one puny immigration study.
Kevin Dayton is the government affairs director for the Associated Builders and Contractors of California.