Editor's note: The following column was written by Dennis Clayson, who is a professor at the University of Northern Iowa.

We have decided that it is time to come clean. Clayson's articles are actually written by four other people.

Almost 13 years ago, several of us became concerned over the lack of basic conservative knowledge on campus and in the community. We had colleagues who insisted there was no such thing as "political correctness," while condemning anyone as racist who questioned their motives for "diversity."

There were people, even professors, who believed that taxing the rich more would somehow help the poor, and some, as hard as this is to believe, thought that such taxes might even benefit the middle class.

Ignorance like this could only exist in isolation.

It sounds incredible now, but at the time there were people who thought that taking money from one person by force and then using that money to support bureaucrats with any left over going to people chosen by the bureaucrats, was a moral act, even an act they would vote for.

Fortunately, times have changed.

So four of use got together and began producing an article from the right. Several of us didn't have tenure at the time, and two of us were Iowans, which meant that we had an aversion to standing out in a group.

So it is understandable that we didn't want anyone to know who we were.

We called ourselves "The Gang of Four," but we needed a pen name, so we made up one. We wanted it to be easy to spell and easy to remember, but one that no one in Iowa would actually have. One of our group remembered seeing a name in England that we could use, "Clayson."

The first name was simply the first name of a deceased uncle of one of the Gang.

Other than our commitment to true and correct principles, we each had fun with our own areas of expertise.

But now we have run into trouble.

We had to place our fictitious person somewhere on campus. This turned out to be easier than we had thought. UNI treats its professors very well, but the university really doesn't pay much attention to them.

We could have just said, "Professor Clayson is a Top Professor at UNI who teaches Important Stuff and the Tasting of Fine Wines," but that sounded a little pretentious.

We wanted to have a certain amount of prestige, so we chose to place our professor in the College of Business. But we also wanted him to be hidden, so we put him into the marketing department. One of the Gang thought this was the perfect place because nothing that happens there is ever noticed.

If the administrators and faculty at UNI had actually thought about this for a moment, they would have realized that they had never actually met Professor Clayson.

This worked well for years until the College of Business actually hired a Dennis Clayson. He was indeed a professor with a Ph.D. We contacted him, and he agreed that we could continue to use his name.

This created some confusion. We told him to simply say "thank you," if someone said something about a column. Once in awhile, someone will contact him or ask about his last column, or his upcoming column, and they seem a little surprised that he doesn't know any of the details.

Although Dr. Clayson never reads any comments about our articles (after all, why should he?), he has been feeling a little heat lately, and we are feeling a little guilty.

In addition, there is a blogger who is getting close to discovering our secret. He hasn't been able to identify us yet, but we can feel his hot and rather rancid breath on our necks. As one of the Gang mentioned some time ago, bloggers have very large egos and very small lives, so he appears to have a lot of time to spend on this.

As stated in other sources, many bloggers have all the bravery of an obscene phone caller, but none of the creativity. Yet this one, against all odds, seems to have figured it out, so we thought we should come clean before we are exposed.

Now, will we actually tell you who we are? No way. Since most of what passes for discourse in the Cedar Valley is anonymous, we thought we should stay the same.