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Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Cash Conflict

The University Entrepreneurs Club, a UCLA student group, has earned an astonishing $20,000 so far this semester through an ingenious scheme that many other such student groups at colleges around the country are watching.

“We noticed that a new alumni group is paying UCLA students one hundred dollars per class session to record professors’ comments, as long as the comments are politically ‘abusive, one-sided, or off topic,’ " explains Gustave Mercador, vice-president of the group. “Most students don’t want to be bothered with the technical side of this, or aren’t sure what content the group is going for, or whatever. We set ourselves up as a sort of management and consulting firm for the identification, collection, and distribution of the material. We’re in touch not only with students, but with professors, and everyone gets a cut.”

Mercador said that the UEC has gotten tremendous response to its general distribution email to students and faculty advertising its services. “The entire adjunct faculty is on board. The average salary among grad students and adjuncts has gone up, according to our study, by 33% each semester, as they add more and more incendiary commentary to their courses. It’s tricky,” he added, “because you can’t just keep repeating the same boilerplate. You’ve got to add more. There’s been a marked incentive toward not only the intensification of radical content, but toward the creation of new courses structured in such a way as to be sensitive to the alumni group’s parameters.”

Part of what the UEC does, Mercador explains, is counsel professors on how to meet the ‘abusive, one-sided, or off topic’ requirement of the organization. “We had one rather shy intro comp professor suddenly start screaming at his students, drill-sergeant style, you know, What’s that? I CAN’T HEAR YOU. Say it with me I LOVE LE-NIN I LOVE LE-NIN… This is the wrong approach because it’s too obvious, and the alumni group won’t pay for it. What we’ve told faculty is that it’s more effective simply to repeat at regular -- say five- to ten-minute -- intervals certain anti-capitalist phrases and words. As for students, our advice to them is to help professors as much as possible to sustain and create the ‘cash conflict’ classroom. Leading questions, a faux-naïve heartland conservatism, and of course any reference to religion, will almost always get the ball rolling.”