As the leader of UCLA's student Bruin Republicans three years ago, Andrew Jones often made it his mission to ridicule and antagonize campus liberals.
To mock supporters of affirmative action, he organized an "affirmative action bake sale" that sold cookies for prices ranging from just 25 cents apiece for minority women to $2 for white males. To needle protesters staging a march against the Iraq war, he proudly recalls positioning himself at the head of the line and displaying a banner reading, "Saddam Loves Walkouts."
Jones is now cranking up a far more controversial effort -- or stunt, skeptics say -- to zing his philosophical opponents, and he is capturing a national media spotlight in the process.
His new tactic is to offer students bounties of up to $100 per class for providing tapes and notes of classes taught by certain UCLA instructors. Outraging some faculty who liken it to a witch hunt, the campaign targets are teachers who, Jones says, should be exposed for turning their courses into forums for left-wing indoctrination.
As the lanky 24-year-old son of two schoolteachers emerges as at least a momentary conservative star in America's campus culture wars, Jones remains essentially a provocateur and one-man band. After an erratic start to his post-college career -- he was fired from at least two jobs and is suing a third former employer -- Jones has created an independent alumni organization with influential advisors but only one employee, himself. And he has managed to roil academics from coast to coast even before buying any information from students.
Jones said he has a personality streak that thrives on "pushing the envelope.... You've got me, on one side, being the kind of campus activist who will be out there, and he'll be a firebrand and will get in people's faces."
His conservatism, Jones said, blossomed in his years in Westwood, spurred by "simply being around the leftist enthusiasms of a certain portion of my UCLA classmates -- especially their hero-worship for ghouls like Che Guevara."
Some classmates don't have fond memories of him, either.
"I think he got off on being inflammatory," said Brian O'Camb, who edited columns Jones wrote for the campus' daily student newspaper and who now is working on a doctorate in English literature at the University of Wisconsin.
