A HIGH-SCHOOL geography teacher in Colorado has been put on leave after a 16-year-old pupil recorded him comparing George Bush to Hitler.

Sean Allen, 16, who attends a suburban high school outside Denver, has made headlines across the country by recording the teacher lambasting President Bush.

“Sounds a lot like the things that Adolf Hitler used to say,” Jay Bennish told his class. “We’re the only ones who are right, everyone else is backward and our job is to conquer the world.”

Mr Bennish called the US “probably the single most violent nation on Earth”, saying that it had committed more than 7,000 “terrorist sabotage acts” against Cuba. But he told pupils that they were free to disagree with him.

The boy’s father leaked the recording to a local radio and it was quickly picked up by the national media.

The teacher was placed on paid leave while the school board investigated whether he had violated its policy of providing a balanced point of view. He threatened to retaliate with a lawsuit asserting his constitutional right to free speech.

School teachers such as Mr Bennish who express left-wing views in the classroom are the latest group to face being recorded by their students. But unlike their counterparts in universities, it is conservative parents who are encouraging students to make recordings of their views.

The use of micro-recording devices, often built into mobile phones or digital music players, is the latest twist in conservatives’ struggle against what they see as the leftist slant of American education.

An alumnus group at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) caused an uproar by offering a $100 (£57) bounty for taped evidence of professors’ radical rants.

The Bruin Alumni Association was founded by Andrew Jones, the former head of the student Republican organisation who was dismissed from a job at David Horowitz’s Centre for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles.

An outcry forced Mr Jones to withdraw the $100 bounty, but he is still collecting recordings of politicising professors for his list of the university’s “Dirty Thirty” academics.

Attacks on the liberal bent of America’s top universities date back to William F. Buckley’s 1951 book God and Man at Yale and to Allan Bloom’s 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.

But a new “academic freedom movement” was launched three years ago by Mr Horowitz, a former scion of the New Left turned neo-conservative activist who heads the Centre for the Study of Popular Culture. The neo-conservative think-tank surveyed professors at more than 150 departments at 32 elite universities and found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans on campus by more than ten to one. Mr Horowitz is the author of a new book entitled: The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, which has been criticised by some of its targets as a replay of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witchunt of the 1950s, as portrayed in the Oscar-winning film Good Night, and Good Luck.

He is now campaigning for state legislatures to enact an “Academic Bill of Rights” to protect students from discrimination by professors for their political views.

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