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.....
Probably a good thing to get out before getting involuntarily dragged into a student show trial.
Our education system from preschool to grad school is hopelessly broken.
I do not miss academia.
Brick-and-mortar universities will be replaced by the internet.
Bookmark
Personally, I don’t think it will be long before the whole higher education/college paradigm collapses. It’s a different world and people don’t need college as they did following WWII until maybe the 90’s.
There just isn’t anywhere near the value of college as there once was. Outside of STEM curriculum, there is very little that you actually “learn” to help you in a career. College has become nothing more than an extremely overpriced indoctrination camp and a whole lot more people are saying, “No, thanks. Keep your debt.”
“Our education system from preschool to grad school is hopelessly broken.”
I agree.
I’m in my 70s now, and I went to college many years ago. I got my degree, and started a career. I am retired now.
However, If I was a young man today I would avoid college like the plague, and would go to a good trade school and learn something useful. A good tradesman — or tradeswoman — is essential, and can make a good living and provide for his or her family. The wokesters with their gender studies degrees can live in communal hives and feed on themselves.
The only exception to this would be students who are serious about the STEM disciplines, because there still may be some universities that offer quality programs.
Moron.
Make them pay you.
They have to.
Giving up tenure is violence!
Brings to mind the persecution of Mike Adams, professor of criminal justice, at UNC-Wilmington. Did not end well for Mike. This brownshirtery is a nightmare.
Evidently, you have sufficient range time under your belt.
Oh, not that type of miss...
But we shouldn't kid ourselves that we aren't losing a great deal by ceding the humanities to the kooks. The Founders were familiar with Cicero, Locke, Montesquieu, and some probably the Scholastics, Plato and Aristotle in summary or translation.
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.
We are close to having ceded what Lenin called the "commanding heights" of our political economy to a corporate-fascist state. Ceding the "commanding heights" of our intellectual life to these commie kooks isn't going to make the fight against the political left and their corporate allies any easier.
The fellow can write and many of the comments at the link are sensible and well put.
I suppose the bottom line is that much of American academia is being steered by people who are mentally ill. You know, Democrats.
The left used to talk about “speaking truth to power”.
Then they gained power.
Now they want to silence all opposition.
Miss my students and non-woke faculty members. That’s about it.
He needs to stick around. Higher education needs more like him to fight back against the woke commies.
I said this in all earnestness to a professor friend of mine: Before this is over your colleagues will come to kill you.
That term, as used by the "critical race theory" crowd actually does mean criminal and antisocial behavior and attitudes.
Thanks for mentioning the mortar.
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