Vinay Lal
        History

            The challenge in properly exposing the poison-pen radicalism of UCLA professor Vinay Lal certainly does not lie in a lack of proof.  The problem arises instead in parsing Lal’s incredibly complex, lengthy writing style.  What one writer might say in two lines and basic language, Lal will (in true academic style) state in two paragraphs filled with six-line sentences.  This style utterly defies the compact excerpting necessary to briefly convey the vitriol that Lal pours on the United States, white Americans, capitalism, consumerism, large vehicles, the military, and on a dozen other phenomenon.  We will not, however, shrink from the challenge of portraying Lal in all his gross verbosity.  We will parse his wild accusations as we have never parsed before.

            Much like comic book superheroes, Vinay Lal leads a double life.  During the day he is a mild-mannered Southeast Asian history professor, but in his office, safely behind his keyboard, Lal assumes his double identity as a radical ideological warrior of the broadest stripe.  His personal webpage provides only the most indirect clue to this schizophrenic existence, mentioning in passing that he has written for the journals Patterns of Prejudice, Radical History Review, and Third Text. 

            Further research on Lal is much more lucrative, yielding two venomous articles he penned for the South Asia-focused journal The Little Magazine.  The first, putatively about the Taliban’s destruction of the world-famous Buddha of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, turns into a rant about the United States, its military, and its supposed imperialism.  Like the regular at your local bar who insists on choosing country music when he’s drunk, Vinay Lal only wants to play one tune in life. 

            In this instance, Lal makes the argument that the real problem with the destruction of these giant, millennia-old stone carvings was that it gave Islam’s critics another chance to dredge up that supposedly specious myth of “Islamic medievalism.”  Lal sings a sad song of justification for these destructive acts, arguing, essentially, that it’s not like the Taliban is all bad.  After all, “Mullah Omar is credited with having helped to destroy the poppy crop…whose eradication was sought as a precondition for the restoration of normal relations between the Taliban and the West.”  As Lal tells it, “the destruction of the statues is construed as an expression not only of the Taliban’s anger but of its sense of betrayal, its feeling of isolation and its profound disappointment” at not having been properly rewarded. 

Lal is mostly flabbergasted at the suggestion that others in the Islamic faith should denounce the destructive acts of their Muslim brethren.  After all, he points out, Christians didn’t feel the need to disclaim against the Serb massacre of Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s.  Yet Lal must know how shoddy this argument is.  The Serbian massacres are almost unique as an instance of Christian-on-Muslim violence in a world marked by almost limitless Muslim-on-Christian or Muslim-on-anyone violence.  Trying to shore up this weakness, Lal throws a few more vague grievances on the fire, complaining about the “representation of war victims as collateral damage, the exceedingly modern massacres in Rwanda…[and] the genocidal elimination of Iraqis through the purported non-violence of a sanctions regime…”  Note that Lal drifted from shoring up the main weakness in his complaint (that Muslims shouldn’t have to denounce instances that reinforce the international perception of medievalism) into a familiar litany of extraneous and spurious concerns.  The apparent point of this digression is to show that Muslims aren’t the only people doing bad things in the world.  That’s not exactly groundbreaking analysis.  Worse yet, it does nothing to prove that non-Taliban Muslims shouldn’t have condemned the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas at full throat.  As for the Iraqi genocide allegation – well, we can let that sit for a while.  Lal is sure to revive that topic elsewhere.   

            Lal’s second piece for The Little Magazine, titled “Terrorism Inc, or the Family of Fundamentalisms,” is so rabid the reader can practically hear Lal’s spittle flying.  The article is also such an incredible piece of work that merely summarizing it would be a crime.  Lal begins the article by gleefully mocking President George W. Bush’s absence from the nation’s capital in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as though contingency plans that necessitate the secret bunkering of top leaders during military or terrorist attack are a sign of Bush’s personal weakness.  Lal then adds toxic rhetoric to his mere derision of Bush, snarling that the President’s “entire deportment [is] marred by an offensive smirk, the vocabulary of a high school student and painfully evident difficulties in thinking beyond the limited briefings devised for him by his equally mediocre advisers.”  Warming to his theme of an “outlaw president gone into hiding,” Lal then compares Bush to Bin Laden, cleverly noting that Bush’s “Either you are with us or you are against us,” philosophy is similar to the black-and-white rhetoric of Bin Laden.  In Lal’s view, “fanatical conviction knows no boundaries; rogues do understand each other.”

The problem is that Lal’s argument is hardly a new one.  In fact, the entire “point” made by Lal (such as it is), namely that Bush and Bin Laden both view the world in stark terms, is hardly the stuff of front-page news.  Nor does this commonality mean anything.  There are no doubt many ideas and convictions expressed in Lal’s owned published writings that are similar or identical to those of Hitler, Pol Pot, or Bin Laden.  What of it?  It is the underlying truth of an idea, not the specific rhetorical style used to express it, which matters.  Viewed in that light, few would contest the idea that Bin Laden’s plans for worldwide jihad and the establishment of Islamofascist theocracy, is a bad thing.  Likewise, all but radicals would agree that Bush’s advocacy for capitalist Western democracy is certainly a good thing.  Among those few dissidents, apparently, would be Vinay Lal.

            Just as pizza goes better with beer, so do anti-U.S. rants go better with anti-Israeli sentiments.  Thus, in his Little Magazine column focused on the alleged evils of America, Lal makes sure to take a swipe at Israel, writing, “If Palestinians could be locked away, doubtless Israel would be entitled to declare success in its war on the aspirations of a people.”  A war on the aspirations of a people?  Like the ravings of Robert Watson, the one-sided formulation of Lal’s hypothetical presupposes its own answer.  As alleged proof of Israel’s perfidy, Lal astonishingly offers up the “scores of United Nations Resolutions critical of Israel,” allegedly for its “grave[] political transgressions,” and “brutalisation [sic]” of the Palestinian people.  Israel, Lal claims, was able to get away with this completely unjustified scapegoating, through the clever stratagem of dismissing all Palestinians as “terrorists.”  The suicide belts, the bus bombings, and pizzeria attacks?  Lal would seem to argue that those were all part of a wider U.N.-friendly campaign for Palestinian freedom.  In Lal’s eyes, Palestinians have not been guilty of brutality, or grave political transgressions.  Otherwise, the U.N. would have passed a resolution about it.

Continuing in regretfully un-alphabetized fashion down Lal’s usual list of targets, the topic changes from “Israel” to “guns.”  Given free reign on this topic, Lal slams America’s supposed gun-centered culture, characterized by an “immense [] laxity in gun ownership laws and such a gun-ridden political climate that presidents openly declare their membership in the National Rifle Association.”  In Lal’s mind, membership in the NRA should be viewed as a terrible mark of shame, as though supporting 2^nd Amendment rights were akin to announcing ‘I have genital warts.’  Lal would do well to remember that simply because he believes something to be absolutely mystifying (say, open declaration of NRA membership) doesn’t mean more than a negligible number of others feel the same way.

In Lal’s mind, American gun ownership has created a militaristic culture.  He argues that “Politicians and the much-feted ‘American public,’ whose ‘compassion’ and ‘values’ are tirelessly trotted out at every turn, recognise [sic] that war is good for America.”  See those ‘quote’ marks Lal uses?  They’re meant to declare that Lal doesn’t himself believe the words contained within them.  Try it at home for yourself: Vinay Lal is a ‘writer,’ a ‘thinker,’ and an ‘entirely respectable human being.’  Now, wasn’t that fun?

The overarching thesis of Lal’s second piece for Little Magazine is that, for reasons of timidity, or simply a insufficient amount of radical faith, fringe stalwarts like Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy have been unwilling to conclude (as has Lal) that the American people are co-conspirators in the alleged depredations the United States visits upon the world.  As Lal points out, the public supported by great majorities both the Desert Storm intervention of 1991, and the invasion and military defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Venturing where even committed radicals fear to tread, Lal argues that, as evidenced by our willingness to attack other countries rather than be attacked on our home turf, it is the American way of life “to lace terror with a tinge of kindness.”  All praise to Lal for his forthrightness in denouncing this supposed American hypocrisy.  The only shame is that Lal doesn’t take the logical next step by refusing to live with the contemptible lot of us.    

Lal concludes his Little Magazine argument by lapsing into an anti-consumer, anti-SUV rant.  He bemoans both America’s “criminal levels of waste,” and even more vociferously, our alleged success “in exporting the ideology of consumerism to the entire world.”  Because as we all know, without American brainwashing, nobody in this world would want to drive instead of walk, live in a house instead of a brush lean-to, or eat from a plentiful, reliable food supply instead of scavenged roots and berries.  The reader is left to wonder if Lal slipped in the anti-consumer line purely as a source of comic relief.  Certainly he couldn’t believe anybody would accept that howler at face value. 

Intentionally funny or not, Lal is deadly serious about the reasoning which neatly concludes his article.  From his personal Mount Olympus, Lal thunders, “Oil flows through the veins of George Bush and Osama Bin Laden: this is the happy marriage of the “American way of life” and terrorism as a way of life.”  In fact,

“the United States…has never had the courage to admit that it purchased its long night of peace with a long night of terror abroad.  If there is to be any “enduring freedom” arising from the terrorist acts of September 11 and the events in the midst of which we are placed, it must reside both in the acknowledgement that terrorism has been incubating and flourishing in the “American way of life” and in the commitment to ensure that peace shall henceforth not be purchased with terror abroad.” 

This, in less artful terms, was the caustic “chickens coming home to roost” thesis advanced by tenured University of Colorado radical Ward Churchill.  Would that Vinay Lal were to face the same scrutiny and criticism at UCLA.

Divining the source of the opprobrium which Lal heaps upon the very concept and existence of America today would be a fascinating case for a professional psychologist.  However, we can do much the same thing on an amateur basis, reading between the lines of what appears to be Lal’s self-authored biography, available on the Multiworld.org website.  The pathos is almost palpable when it states, in his adolescence, Lal

“was to be repeatedly reminded, in the words of one immensely popular lyric, that “short people got not reason to live.” These taunts were delivered by beefy-looking American boys at the school (or what passed for a school) in Arlington, Virginia where in part he was educated.” 

It seems safe to infer that some, if not much, of Lal’s seething anger at America, and specifically white America, comes from the schoolyard taunts of those unnamed “beefy-looking American boys.”  Note in particular the phrase “American boys”: not white boys, not black boys, not Hispanic boys, but “American boys.”  There are two possibilities present in this phrase – either Lal was picked on by a virtual United Nations of adolescent bullies, or to Lal, white people are by definition “American.”  In either case, Lal makes clear that, then as now, he is not “American,” but something else.

Lal has earned particular attention from the conservative website FrontPageMag.com and its affiliate, DiscovertheNetworks.com.  Profiled (not surprisingly) as a leading radical at UCLA, the site criticized the content of Lal’s Fiat Lux Seminar (one of a raft of 1-credit courses created, cynics might say, as both an academic knee-jerk and a UCLA publicity stunt following the attacks of 9/11).  The class, titled “Reading Democracy in America: Politics Before and After 9/11,” called for students to make a 10-minute in-class presentation accompanied by a handout, on a subject related to the course matter.  For students left to scrounge for ideas, Lal helpfully suggested that “a presentation might focus on what the election to California’s governorship of a movie star who has been charged by a dozen women with sexual molestation, drives perhaps the environmentally unfriendly vehicle in the world, and appeared not to have a single idea about governance says about American ‘democracy.’”  All will bow before the awesome power of Lal’s run-on sentences! 

If that editorializing wasn’t enough mental grist for choosing student project topics, Lal also suggested looking at “corporate ownership of the media, the rise of Fox News, the MTA and grocery chain strikes in Los Angeles, the trade union movements, the presence of African-American and Latinos in the US army, the film ‘Bowling in [sic] Columbine,’ the assault on civil liberties, the indefinite detention of hundreds of Muslims without any accountability to notions of justice, or thousands of such phenomenon.”  Radical phenomenon, that is.  Just as remarkable as the breadth of these suggestions is that Lal completely forgot to mention Israel (he must have been having an off day).  This inexplicable omission aside, the syllabus reads like a Counterpunch op-ed.  All the usual suspects are lined up for ritual abuse, but it seems like there’s barely room for them all.  Ultimately, as clunky as the list was, you have to grant Vinay Lal at least one thing: he’s very much upfront about his views, noxious as they may be.

A separate concern enumerated in the DiscovertheNetworks.org profile takes issue with the assignment of the book, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, authored by one H. Bruce Franklin.  At various points in his checkered career, Franklin was the head of a violent radical group by the name of Venceremos (his leadership of which lead to his ouster at Stanford), and the author of a positive introduction for a collection of Joseph Stalin’s writings.  In a voice very similar to that of his op-eds for The Little Magazine, Lal editorializes in the class syllabus that Franklin’s “relatively recent inquiry into the meaning of the Vietnam War in American life suggests that nothing has changed, insofar as the US remains on course in exercising its ruthless dominance over the rest of the world.”  The anonymous author of the DiscovertheNetworks.org profile finds the line shocking enough to italicize for emphasis.  We might have done the same, had our investigation not already turned up a dozen other equally execrable quotes.

Perhaps due to the special attention lavished on his record of radicalism, Lal soared to new heights of indignation in condemning the supposed “Witch Hunts in the Academy,” (the title of his opinion piece in Economic and Political Weekly.)  Like his radical History department colleague Russell Jacoby, Lal blames his exceedingly mild troubles on the alleged “pervasiveness of anti-intellectualism in American life,” epitomized by the (small) movement in the ‘90s against the works of “victimised [sic] indigenous women such as Rigoberta Menchu.”  Truth be told, there was a far more serious concern in play with Menchu, namely, that her book was a fabrication, concocted by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, wife of Marxist foco theorist Regis Debray.  Regardless of Lal’s specific ignorance, it is a documented fact that “I, Rigoberta Menchu” is a literary fraud.  With this kind of evidence, Lal does not make a strong start in convincing anyone of his allegations of an academic witch-hunt.

Lal then digs himself a deeper hole (a task you might assume would be impossible) by discussing the case of Ward Churchill.  Lal views him not as an aberration within an otherwise flawless system (though that would also be false).  No, Lal frames Churchill as a victim of a proto-McCarthyite reign of ideological terror.  Most striking about the entire piece is that Lal dances around the actual choice of endorsing or condemning Churchill’s noxious views and history.  It’s safe to assume, given Lal’s other published commitments, that he finds no fault with Churchill, but Lal’s publicly declared non-judgmentalism is nonetheless illuminating.  Lal notes that while “Churchill is scarcely the only one to have suggested that America has been paid back in its own coin…he is among the very few to have argued that victims are not always entirely unimpeachable.”  Lal then argues that Churchill’s only real crime was “having chosen his words well – much too well.”  Better for Lal’s career, but worse for UCLA, that this commentary is the closest Lal comes to outright endorsing Churchill’s noxious “little Eichmanns” thesis.  Ideally, Lal would be open in his approval, allowing the public to understand him, and the university that would employ him, as they really are.

Having aired his specious contention of an anti-academic witch-hunt, Lal picks up the topic of Israel and its Jewish supporters in America.  His tone is one of disbelief: how can they attack we poor anti-Israel academics when our ideological opponents have so much power?  Take that self-delusion a little farther, and Lal could be huddled in a shack in Montana, self-publishing black-and-white pamphlets raving about the ZOG machine.  Just listen to Lal vent:

“the Palestinian suicide bombers, when viewed in retaliation to Israel’s massively disproportionate exercise of military force against Palestinian civilians, can perhaps legitimately be viewed with compassion and sadness as much as anger and hatred.” 

Lal would have Israelis strive to understand the suicide bomber, take him by the hand as he attempts to kill them, and do their best to soothe his troubled mind.  The assertion is so deluded it almost defies response.  How would Lal propose the Israeli army avoid incidents of “massively disproportionate” retaliation against Palestinian terrorist attacks?  The mind reels.  Shall the two sides fight mano-a-mano, an IDF soldier facing off Old-West style against a Palestinian gunmen?  Or better yet, suicide belts at dawn?

Lal then turns to the supposed crushing of pro-Palestinian academic dissent here in America.  While this is one of the most serious accusations in the entire piece, Lal simply presents as settled fact that several pro-Palestinian professors have been “falsely charged” with abusing their authority, then claims that as a result, “the space for critical reflection and dissenting views has shrunk in one of the last bastions of American freedom, the university.”  De-contextualized, Lal’s latter claim is actually true.  At the American university, the opportunity for “dissenting views” from conservative academics has indeed been greatly curtailed, primarily due to their utter absence from the faculty. 

Of course, Lal actually bemoans something very different, a supposed crackdown on political radicals.  Now, there’s two ways of approaching this idea.  The easiest is incredulity: is he kidding?  Every survey of the social sciences and humanities faculties confirms that liberals and radicals have never been more populous in university faculties.  Academic fads like deconstructionism, post-post-modernism, Foucaultism, gender feminism, ad infinitum, announce the complete victory of radical ideology over academics. 

The second way to approach this “shrinking dissent” thesis is to consider the strong possibility that Lal may actually consider the typical Democrat-voting, Prius-driving, abortion-loving, eco-feminist gender theorist to simply be not radical enough.  His faith is pure, Lal declares, but that of others may be corrupted by American citizenship, militarism, religion, or a dozen other conservative temptations.  This is not the overbroad mischaracterization it may seem.  On the contrary, there is much evidence of Lal’s self-perception as a radical of pure faith.  Consider his angry blast aimed at the 2004 re-election of President Bush.  Presented in the general-audience (and university-published) UCLA Today periodical, Lal turns his scrutiny (again) on the American public and system.  Sarcasm, as usual, is his weapon, as Lal lashes the “sheer mockery that electoral democracy has become in America,” while praising the supposed prescience of radical theorist Paul Goodman who, four decades ago, argued that American democracy is pointless because it only helps citizens choose between “indistinguishable candidates.”  Lal then supports his “two parties, one mind” condemnation with his contention that “Both parties are utterly beholden to the culture of the corporation and what used to be called “monied interests,” and both have contributed to bloated military budgets.”

After steeping his rage at the American system for not delivering unto his ballot a suitably radical candidate (say, Chairman Mao?), Lal pours abuse on President Bush and his “ambition for power [which] is just as ruthless as his ignorance and arrogance are colossal.”  Channeling MoveOn.org, Lal revives the old charge that “Jeb Bush and the Supreme Court [handed] over the White House” to Bush.  Bush’s alleged ambition for power aside, Lal believes that Kerry’s loss stemmed from also being willing to call for the elimination of terrorists.  It’s a Vinay Lal Newsflash: Kerry was saying just what President Bush was saying!  And to Lal’s way of thinking, this was a mistake, because it denied voters a choice between Bush’s War on Terror and (what would evidently have to be) Kerry’s Surrender to Terror.

Continuing in the MoveOn theme, Lal recounts Bush’s supposed crimes: “an illegal war of aggression against Iraq, the occupation of a sovereign nation, the strident embrace of militarism, the reckless disregard for the environment, the shameless pandering to the wealthy, the transformation of a 5-trillion dollar surplus into a 400-billion dollar deficit, the erosion of civil liberties, and much else.”  Worse yet, “the English language has not been spared by the Butcher of Crawford.”  Zing!  Having properly taken Bush out to the woodshed, Lal then argues that re-election of Bush serves as an indictment of the American people.  In consideration of Bush’s re-election despite his terrible track record, Lal says, “one cannot but conclude that the American people have given Bush carte blanche to do more of the same.”  In fact, “The success of Bush points…to something much more ominous, namely the sheer inability of Americans to comprehend complexity and retain some degree of moral ambivalence.” 

One imagines Vinay Lal as a latter-day Charles Whitman, firing verbal bullets of outrage down at terrified passers-by: “You’re so stupid!  Your political views disagree with mine, which tells me just one thing: you’re so stupid!”  Then, as if cribbing from Michael Moore, Lal states that Bush’s supposed “exhortations to simplicity and unadorned moral fervor…have in the past unfailingly furnished the recipe for transition to anti-democratic, even totalitarian regimes.”  Even if we (for the sake of argument) accept Lal’s entire thesis, where is his anger for Bin Laden?  If America is always teetering on the brink of militarism and an authoritarian takeover, you might figure Lal would be a little peeved at Osama Bin Laden for being the spark that led to this terrible blaze of anti-democracy.  But while Lal has plenty of angry words for Bush, he delivers not a peep of condemnation for Bin Laden.

If the thesis of this third, and perhaps most gaseous, emission of Lal’s were not wild enough, consider his solution to the matter.  Because “the American elections impact every person in the world…there are clearly compelling reasons why every adult in the world should be allowed to vote in an American presidential election.”  Boy, that Vinay Lal sure has some hilarious ideas, right?  Except that Lal is dead serious.  Of course, this brave proposal for a worldwide vote represents an interesting ideological reversal for a man who, in the self-same opinion piece, rails about the “sovereign” rights of Iraq.  In short, America is accountable to the entire world, while Iraq is accountable only to its citizens.  As they say in a court of law, duly noted.

As bad as Lal’s personal politics are, he could blunt a lot of criticism by keeping his classroom behavior non-partisan.  Unfortunately, like most professors, Lal is unable to check his politics at the door.  The relevant article in the Winter 2004 issue of UCLA Magazine opens thusly:

“Vinay Lal was preparing to leave his office in Bunche Hall one recent evening when a young man stepped into the doorway. “I’m looking for some Republican students,” he told the associate professor of history. “Do you know any?” Lal was so startled by the question that he let out a short laugh. “Republicans are not part of my life,” he responded. “You knocked on the wrong door.”

The story then continued to reveal that posing such a question to Lal should have hardly been necessary, given the partisan “cartoons, postcards and clippings on Lal’s office door.”

One wonders how Ajay Singh, the article’s author, came into this anecdote.  Did a student make a recorded complaint to the department chair, or some other authority figure?  Did the student himself seek out Singh and urge him to cover this topic?  Or, most likely, did Lal recite this anecdote during his interview, completely unconcerned (and, at UCLA, justifiably so) that no reprimand, no punishment, not even a raised eyebrow would result from his shabby treatment of this unsuspecting student?  More monstrous yet is that UCLA felt free to publish, with apparent impunity, a clear-cut example of the attitude and practice of rampant radicalism polluting the campus - and send this news to their own alumni.  It’s not unusual to find examples in which UCLA covered up a negative story, but it’s also becoming less unusual to find instances in which UCLA brazenly admits its outrageous lapses in enforcing standards of basic professionalism.

The article doesn’t stop there.  Confirming earlier indications that Lal views his particular set of political beliefs as representing the “true faith” of radicalism, Lal notes that “The possibility of dissent [in views expressed by college faculty] is so narrow that the definition of liberalism itself has also become considerably more narrow.”  In fact, Lal claims, “The [conservative] side of the story has been told ad nauseam.  Students who come to a university like UCLA have heard endlessly about America’s Founding Fathers…such [mythic] narratives are not only overrepresented, but often indefensible.”  Lal’s blithe assurance about the existence of solid teaching of our country’s basic history betrays a staggering ignorance of reality.  The average graduating California high school student can tell you ten times more about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks than he can about Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton – and those are students coming out of “good” high schools with “good programs.”  Students out of inferior high schools often escape knowing nothing at all, or knowing things that simply aren’t true.  Certainly the history of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks is relevant, but no more so than the Founding Fathers which Lal so eagerly maligns. 

But while Lal’s concerns simply aren’t grounded in reality, they do work toward a specific ideological goal: reforming the minds of college students.  Note Lal’s certitude that students have been fed a diet of (conservative) intellectual slops during their primary education.  To the mind of radicals like Lal, it’s their sworn duty to convince students to abandon all that they have previously known, and adopt completely diametrical beliefs.  In essence, Lal and his fellow radicals want to ensure a dead brain to receive brain-dead ideas.

Having established Lal’s capacity for crass treatment of students outside the classroom, we can turn to the matter of his in-class teaching practice.  A look at the student reviews on Bruinwalk.com yields no surprises.  One student notes that “you can definitely tell he is very liberal in his views about society,” while another concedes “some of his views may be a bit radical.”  The first reviewer, in trying to soften the blow, only reveals more about the impact of Lal’s biased teaching, noting that Lal “tries to tell both sides,” but then confesses “many times he will demonize the other side…which honestly is well deserved.”  So if this can be understood correctly, Lal is a radical who tells both sides, but demonizes one side…but that’s only fair because that side deserves it.  No doubt this is just how Lal teaches, and no doubt this is his and many other UCLA professors’ perverted conception of balance. 

That same student’s other comments are apt: Lal does not “respectfully disagree,” or “dismiss after careful consideration.”  Rather, like many UCLA professors, he demonizes.  Lal thinks America made the wrong choice for president.  To Lal, this means those with whom he disagrees are bad people.  Now perhaps the student who mentioned Lal’s “balanced” teaching already believed that one side deserved demonization.  Even if that case, a professor truly deserving of tenure would have tempered this ardor by fairly presenting the other side, challenging students with whom he essentially agrees.  Alternately, if this student came in with no opinion on the matter at hand, Lal did what so many of his colleagues do for a living: prosecute a set of facts rather than present them, and indoctrinate students instead of educate them. In either case, the student’s comments exposed Lal for the classroom failure he is.