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.....
Well said.
Ping
I know a place where the English department succumbed to the "new criticism" first and the anthropology department, though it had its liberals (not of the classical type) remained relatively conservative.
That was years ago.
Communists are not big on freedoms.
I believe that WOKE brick and mortar and WOKE online universities will be replaced by UNWOKE universities on line and brick and mortar programs. No business is gonna hire a wokester grad. knowingly, when there is a choice.
I hope herr perfesser understands that the flowering of his political viewpoints was the root cause of his own professional demise. What was the common phrase? Hoisted by his own petard?
This has been going on since the 1970s. Old school liberal Profs gave the 1960s radicals a chance. Once they got tenure, the radicals took over and abandoned any pretense at academic freedom and open discourse. They enforced a hard line radical view and recruited students who were even more radical and irrational than they were. This has been spreading for several generations of profs and students and has resulted in the death of academic values and traditions. Their “scholarship” equates to a false, fabricated reality of transparent lies and they are reflexively in your face political. American universities have become bastions of angry, uneducated activists who live in a cycle of forced indoctrination
Fight back how? Not to be flip about it, but it sounds like a well-reasoned decision for him. In the article, it was clear that his academic department was overrun by radicals and the future for the program was going only in one direction. Not everyone has the energy to become a martyr, and he can probably do more to impact the reputation of his former department by going public with his decision and reasoning than by fighting from the inside.
Yes but the problem is getting that very first white collar job without a college degree. I don’t see it changing at all (yet) in the careers I’m familiar with in my family and friends (banking, government, other professional jobs). Even a good coder without a college degree will be limited in future career opportunities. Resumes without college degrees (and without business/office experience too) are simply tossed.
it can’t happen soon enough....
One thing I would add: In the Federalist, they argue that the political science on which the Constitution is founded is in fact more knowable than mathematics or the physics, since those can be lost, but the study of human passions always teaches the same lessons.
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