Posted on 07/07/2022 6:07:45 PM PDT by MtnClimber
The ideological takeover of my university has ruined academic life for anyone who still believes in freedom of thought.
I’m a 62-year-old professor—by academic standards, still young. But I am retiring this summer because the woke takeover of higher education has ruined academic life. “Another one?” you ask. “What does this guy have to say that hasn’t already been said by Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Joshua Katz, or Bo Winegard?
Read on.
Defenestration of a Colleague
I’ve been a professor in the Anthropology Department at UCLA since 1996; I received tenure in 2000. My research has spanned topics ranging from nonhuman primate behavior to human personality variation. For decades, anthropology has been notorious for conflict between the scientific and political activist factions in the field, leading many departments to split in two. But UCLA’s department remained unusually peaceful, cohesive, and intellectually inclusive until the late 2000s.
Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of “critical” (i.e. leftist, postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique. These militant faculty members recruited even more militant graduate students to work with them.
I can’t recount here even a representative sample of this faction’s penchant for mendacity and intimidation, because most of it occurred during confidential discussions, usually about hiring and promotion decisions. But I can describe their public torment and humiliation of one of my colleagues, P. Jeffrey Brantingham.
Jeff had developed simulation models of the geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime, and had created predictive software that he marketed to law enforcement agencies. In Spring 2018, the department’s Anthropology Graduate Students Association passed a resolution accusing Jeff’s research of, among other counter-revolutionary sins, “entrench[ing] and naturaliz[ing] the criminalization of Blackness in the United States” and calling for “referring” his research to UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Research, presumably for some sort of investigation. This document contained no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembled a religious proclamation of anathema.
As you won’t be surprised to hear, Jeff is not a racist, but a standard-issue liberal Democrat. The “referral” to the Vice-Chancellor never materialized, but the resolution and its aftermath achieved its real goal, which was to turn Jeff, who had been one of the most selfless citizens of the department, into a pariah. He taught—and still teaches—a course called “The Ecology of Crime,” which consistently drew more than 150 students and earned rave reviews. This course had a catalogue number that grouped it with sociocultural anthropology, and it fulfilled a sociocultural anthropology requirement for anthro majors.....
Most states now require five years of college to sit for the CPA exam. Many other professions require at least a BA degree.
One solution of course is simply attend a local community college, live off campus and finish the remaining two or three years via on-line courses.
At least one law school, Hamline, has an accredited on-line law school.
Victor David Hanson provides interesting insights into this problem in his podcasts. He went to UC Santa Cruz shortly after the campus was built. He taught minority students at Cal State Fresno. He spends time at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto. He has taught at the Army War College and at Hillsdale University. He has nothing but severe disdain for the woke professors and students at Stanford.
“Can you understand the Declaration without Locke? Locke without Hobbes? Hobbes without Machiavelli? Machiavelli without the Scholastics and Aristotle? The whole intellectual underpinning of our civilization is being destroyed.”
Excellent and insightful comment - this is truly the basis of stealing our heritage through “woke” academic incrementalism.
Exactly. My oldest two did their preliminary coursework at a community college at a fraction of the cost. My youngest is doing the same before she enrolls in a nursing program. So far all kids are debt free. Probably didn’t hurt that I kept telling my kids what a rip-off college is. They tell me they made the right choices.
Uh Oh. He discovered the basic fact that black people commit a majority of felonies in Los Angeles.
You are a very perceptive individual.
One cannot defend what one cannot define.
L
My 2nd son (conservative) graduated from a liberal (aren’t they all) public university in 2020. He studied accounting which is hard to be “woke” and minored in philosophy as he said it was still the classics and therefore hard to ruin.
Most white collar employers will toss resumes without a college degree into the trash. Unfortunately that’s still the reality.
One problem with the trades is that it’s hard on the body—a white collar worker can keep working maybe decades longer than a blue collar worker can….
Race...
You’d think anthropologists would know better.
I think you may be surprised at how that is changing. And, maybe for an entry-level job with some firms, but after your first job and you gain experience and a track record, pretty much nobody cares.
Trust me on this, there are a lot of college educated kids who cannot string together two sentences and who have marginal interest in, you know, actually working and showing up on time.
I’m retired now. I earned a bachelors degree and two masters. If I had it to do up over again I’d apprentice with a plumber or electrician after trade school. Not only is academia all fouled up but the Fortune 100 companies I worked for are pretty awful as well.
We need look no further than Chicago on weekends to see the relationship between blackness and crime.
Not all colleges are rip off. There are a good number of career oriented colleges that combine general study courses and professional courses. Webb Institute, any of the state maritime academies, the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point.
I can speak directly about the state maritime academies. They provide academic courses but a good amount of hands-on traing and learning as well as cadet shipping and time on training vessels. Students can become licensed deck officers or licensed marine engineers upon completing all course work and successfully passing US Coast Guard administered exams.
Starting salaries are pretty good, room and board and about $9,000 a month to start.
woke faculty are trying to ruin the classics by eliminating classical language requirements. And since the Greeks and Romans owned slaves, they are trying to eliminate those courses altogether.
“As you won’t be surprised to hear, Jeff is not a racist, but a standard-issue liberal Democrat.”
Isn’t that an oxymoron?
Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and Walter Williams suggest that there’s more to the story.
The “black community” would do well to pay more attention to them, and historically to Booker T. Washington. It would do well to pay less attention to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and historically to W. E. B. DuBois.
Their problems are cultural, not genetic ... and largely self-inflicted.
Interesting website.
It’s one of my favorites.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.