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.
… Also typical of elite U.S. universities, UCLA is awash in Jew-hatred thinly disguised as anti-Zionism. In May 2019, one of my colleagues, Kyeyoung Park, invited a guest lecturer, San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi, to her class to proclaim that Zionism is a form of white supremacism. Unlike Rust, Enstrom, Fink, Klein, Brantingham, Park was celebrated by the faculty and administration as a courageous, embattled exponent of academic freedom. The Anthropology Graduate Students Association chimed in with a resolution agreeing with Abdulhadi. More recently, the Asian-American Studies Department posted to its website a statement accusing Israel of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and so on.
…A 2019 article by Liel Leibovitz, titled “Get Out,” argued that the increasingly open hostility of American universities toward Jews is inseparable from the universities’ increasingly brazen rejection of two values that, during the 20th century, made them into places where Jews specifically, and ambitious and open-minded people generally, could thrive: meritocracy and free debate. In 2019, I thought that Leibovitz was exaggerating and rather overwrought. Everything that’s happened since has shown that he was spot on.
The rise of alternative institutions, like the University of Austin and Ralston College, are very hopeful signs even though the work is slow-going. But until those new schools are built, I can’t bear to spend one more moment in a place that’s morally and intellectually bankrupt.
That’s it: I’m getting out.
Joseph Manson | “Why I’m Giving Up Tenure at UCLA” | July 7, 2022
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I think many of the most prominent liberal arts colleges agree, which is why they are being pushed into STEM curricula in order to survive. And, of course, since courses in those fields have not been their primary specialty, they are struggling to complete with major E&T schools. For the most part, they’ve been caught off guard and it’s too little, too late.
The current system of higher education should not even exist, in my opinion. It is a bloated, overpriced dinosaur that needs to be slain. We can educate individuals much more effectively for far less money in a much shorter period of time using different paradigms.
Only a few, select fields should still be taught using the ancient system, and I happen to think theology is one of them.
There are more and more things that I’m having difficulty understanding in the broad scale nature of this kind of thinking. These include the incomprehensibility of why so many Jews, especially those who live in the ultra-liberal NE, continue to support any and all Leftist cause, not matter what. And that goes all the way from wacky “counter-culturalists” like Abby Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg to today’s faculty at major U.S. universities. I once attended a special invitation engagement at Moody Church in Chicago where one of the invited guest speakers was very conservative Dennis Prager. Then Moody Senior Pastor Erwin Luzter asked Prager why so many Jews continue to support liberal, leftist causes (which seem contradictory to their defensive against anti-semitism). Prager hemmed and hawed around for a bit and then shot back a counter challenge question about why so many protestants are off the rails with leftist agendas. While that may be true, it didn’t answer the question, which is why so many Jewish people support so many leftist agendas, which are only going to come back to bite them, as that UCLA professor has found out.
Universities that are caving into this kind of thing are gradually becoming little better than diploma mills.
Now, if only Christian parents will stop sending their kids to government schools.