A Brief History of Students Secretly Recording Their Professors

James O’Keefe, the right-wing activist known for trying to stage sting operations against government agencies and news organizations, appeared on Wednesday at a gathering of conservative students to recruit spies.

Mr. O’Keefe, fresh off a botched attempt to sting The Washington Post, was spotted at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit by Jane Mayer, a reporter for The New Yorker. She posted a photograph of the provocateur surrounded by young men in collared shirts and lanyards.

Mr. O’Keefe was “recruiting kids to go undercover,” wrote Ms. Mayer, for a “secret college campus spy program.”

He later appeared to confirm that in a tweet:

He would be piggybacking on what has become a notorious pastime on college campuses in the age of iPhones and other surreptitious recording devices.

Back in 2006, as a young website called YouTube heralded a new age in amateur cinematography, students started posting videos of their professors lecturing — not because they were provocative, but because they were dull. “The boredom of lectures is a frequent theme,” reported Inside Higher Ed, “with audio of a professor talking while students look bored — or in the case of one student at Southern Methodist University, fight a losing battle to stay awake.”

Other students devoted themselves to capturing more-explosive content. That same year, Andrew Jones, a former student at the University of California at Los Angeles, created a website, UCLAprofs.com, aimed at exposing members of the faculty as political radicals. According to the Daily Bruin, Mr. Jones offered cash to students who agreed to supply him with recordings of certain suspected professors.

Professors started to be more careful about letting students record their lectures for reference. Some students didn’t ask permission. Smartphones became ubiquitous, making it difficult to tell who was recording what, and when.

Classroom Recordings as a Subgenre

Secret recordings became a boon to new-media outlets that emerged to blow the whistle on campus liberals. In 2010, Campus Reform, a website devoted to exposing examples of left-wing bias at colleges, publicized a video clip that appeared to show Bradley Schaefer, an astronomy professor at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, upbraiding conservative students about their views on global warming.

Later, a longer video of the same lecture showed Mr. Schaefer interrogating both sides of the climate-change issue in what the professor described to the Associated Press as an attempt to stimulate discussion about environmental policy. The college did not punish him.

Campus Reform turned classroom recordings into a subgenre. In 2013 a student filmed a professor at Michigan State University saying that Republicans “don’t want to pay taxes because they have already raped this country and gotten everything out of it they possibly could.” Campus Reform wrote about it, and the story merited a mention on The O’Reilly Factor.

A year later the website obtained an audio recording of a professor at Eastern Connecticut State University telling his students that, if Republicans had their way, colleges would begin to close. State lawmakers demanded an apology from the professor, and got one.

The sort of work Mr. O’Keefe was recruiting students to do this week may take things even further. The activist’s early attempts to expose campus liberalism have not relied on videos of unprompted offenses against conservative values. Instead, he has dispatched operatives to manufacture controversies in the hope of eliciting embarrassing reactions from college officials. Students working for Mr. O’Keefe’s organization, Project Veritas, have secretly recorded themselves asking administrators to rip up copies of the U.S. Constitution and ban Lucky Charms from the cafeteria because they are offensive to the Irish.

“Project Veritas has already recruited 20 student-journalists,” the organization reportedly wrote in a recent fund-raising email, “ready to help us expose the most egregious, biased, anti-intellectual behavior from their professors.”

Some professors have taken extreme measures to avoid the risk of having classroom discussions go viral. Last month an economics instructor at Duke University was criticized for trying to ban student journalists from her class on hedge funds, which featured guest speakers from the world of finance. “Audio recordings are not permitted,” the lecturer wrote on the syllabus, “and students will be asked to keep the information shared by some of our guest speakers confidential.”

That story went viral, and the ban was lifted.

Steve Kolowich writes about ordinary people in extraordinary times, and extraordinary people in ordinary times. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.

Correction (12/21/2017, 4:41 p.m.): This article originally misquoted a professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. The professor said that “college will start closing if these people have their way,” not “if Republicans have their way, colleges will close.” The article has been updated to reflect this correction.