By Joseph Manson
Thursday, July 07, 2022
I find myself thinking a lot lately about the
deficit of imagination among people who consider themselves savvy and
sophisticated.
Here’s what I mean: Let’s say you work for a prestigious
company or organization that professes to care about a certain set of values:
open-mindedness, curiosity, excellence, hard work. And let’s say you watch as a
colleague, previously held up as a paragon of those values, is ostracized and
smeared for a thought crime that was not considered a thought crime until about
five minutes ago. Maybe he made a bad joke. Or maybe he used the phrase “guys”
instead of folks. Or Hispanic instead of Latinx.
Common sense would tell you: If it can happen to
him, it can happen to me. Common sense would insist: If the leopard is
currently eating the face of the person in the the cubicle next to me, what
will stop it from eating mine?
But when the leopard comes for your colleague, what
I have witnessed is that something like 99% of people find a way to wiggle out
of this obvious next step. They tell themselves the person getting their face
eaten deserved it. Or that the leopard was just particularly hungry that day.
That’s what makes today’s essay, by UCLA Anthropology
Professor Joseph Manson, so important.
Most people who leave their jobs as professors
these days do not do so because they have a choice. They leave because they are
pushed out by ideological bullies. But Professor Manson is leaving of his own
volition. Why? In large part because he understands the nature of leopards.
Here’s his piece
- Bari Weiss
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.
In an act of petty spite, ritual moral purification, or
both (take your pick), the woke faculty clique, which comprised a majority of
the sociocultural anthro faculty, banned him from using—polluting?—any of their
course numbers. (Jeff continued to offer the course, just under a different
kind of number.)
Even though Jeff stopped attending faculty meetings, and
in every other way accepted his punishment of permanent ostracism, his
tormentors weren’t finished with him. In early March 2020, the following flyer
appeared in the hallways of the anthropology department.
“Predpol” is the name of Jeff’s predictive software. The
sponsoring “Institute
for Inequality and Democracy” is a far-left UCLA unit whose associate
director is Hannah Appel, who also holds a faculty position in anthropology.
That is, a professor tried to organize a mob to demand the professional
destruction of a colleague.
Within a few days after the appearance of these flyers,
the pandemic lockdown confined us to our homes and the anti-police movement
soon had bigger fish to fry after the murder of George Floyd. Nevertheless,
Jeff remained a popular and powerful hate-figure for the department’s woke
faction. On September 23, 2020, during a webinar, “The
Case for Letting Anthropology Burn?” sponsored in part by the UCLA
anthropology department—yes, you read that right—many of the chat comments from
graduate students reviled him and called for further action against him.
The entire episode recalls a prescient observation in
a 1995 article by
the great psychological anthropologist Roy D’Andrade: “Isn’t it odd that the
true enemy of society turns out to be that guy in the office down the hall?”
The Other Signs and Portents
Not only was Jeff ostracized, he was effectively erased.
None of the faculty talked about him, if they could possibly avoid it.
Meanwhile, our department chair opened most faculty meetings by solemnly
intoning that our department was a community, a family,
and that “we’re here for each other.” In private conversations, I was able to
elicit from some of my colleagues an embarrassed acknowledgment that the woke
faction had treated Jeff abominably, and that we strongly resembled a
dysfunctional family in denial. This pervasive institutional doublethink was
partly a result of Jeff’s own apparent decision to refrain from open
confrontation: I offered to help him, by defending him publicly if he wished,
after both the 2018 resolution and the 2020 flyers. He thanked me, but politely
asked me to stay out of it.
The principal driver of the doublethink in my department
and so many others at UCLA is fear of the woke faction.
Signs of this fear are omnipresent. Discussing whether to
stop requiring the GRE (a standardized test, like the SAT) from applicants to
our Ph.D. program, one colleague told a meeting of the biological anthropology
subfield that he regarded the GRE as the most informative part of an
applicant’s dossier, but that we had no choice but to vote to stop requiring
it. Why? Because otherwise we would be regarded as racists. (I was the only
person to vote against dropping the GRE requirement).
Asking a question following a public talk, a colleague
conspicuously used the word “Latinx” even though the speaker had described both
herself and her research subjects as “Latinas” and even though he himself, in a
previous private conversation, had mockingly referred to the opinion
polls showing that only a small minority of Hispanic Americans prefer
to be called “Latinx.”
Outside the anthropology department, UCLA as a whole is
showing all the signs of woke capture that typify the contemporary U.S.
university. Emeritus Professor Val
Rust (Graduate School of Education) was banned from campus after
incurring the wrath of graduate student adherents of Critical Race Theory.
Researcher James
Enstrom (Environmental Health Sciences) and lecturer Keith
Fink (Communication Studies) were fired from dissenting from the woke
orthodoxy. Gordon Klein, after being fired by UCLA’s business school in Spring
2020 for refusing
to use race-based grading criteria, mobilized mass support and legal
assistance, was reinstated, and is now suing
the university.
Statements recounting one’s activities on behalf of
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion are mandatory in
faculty job applications and in promotion dossiers. Among its “Gender
Recognition” policy recommendations, a university task force is calling for
“curricular updates . . . For example: inclusion of non-binary and intersex
identities in biology courses for health care practitioners.” Is this a threat
to pressure course instructors in the life sciences and social sciences to deny
the human sex binary? The experience of former Penn State evolutionary biology
postdoc Colin
Wright suggests that it might be. For arguing against assertions that
“biological sex is a continuous spectrum” and that “notions of male and female
may be mere social constructs,” Wright’s academic career was derailed by an
online mob. He now writes on
Substack.
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.
Irrespective of the content, doesn’t it infringe on the
academic freedom of individual professors (and postdocs and graduate students,
whose careers are dependent on faculty recommendations) for an academic
department to take a political stand on behalf of all its members? Several
other Jewish faculty and I have made
that case to UCLA and the University of California leadership to no
avail.
As Doris Day sang, the future’s not ours to see, but it’s
a good bet that the grip of woke orthodoxy on the University of California, and
most other once-great American universities, will only tighten in the years to
come.
Why am I pessimistic? For a few reasons.
First, the younger faculty tend to be far more woke than
their elders. Second, administrators and student protesters perform elaborately
choreographed routines that inevitably end with the former enacting
policies that they wanted to enact anyway, for which the latter’s public temper
tantrums serve as a pretext. Third, now that standardized
tests have been dropped from undergraduate application requirements, a
growing number of students will be simultaneously unable to handle university
level coursework, and predisposed to denounce their professors for heresy,
having been chosen for admission on the basis on their leftist activism as high
school students. Meanwhile, California’s K-12 schools are increasingly substituting
mind-damaging political indoctrination for education.
So Why Not Stick Around for the Paycheck?
One of my more cynical friends, a tenured professor at a
different university, is no longer on speaking terms with his colleagues,
refuses all requests to serve on committees, and spends as much time as
possible out of the country. And yet he remains at his school. He thinks I’m
out of my mind, swapping a salary for a pension.
Maybe he’s right. And maybe I’m craven for ducking the
unpleasantness that would be entailed by going that route, or by remaining at
my job and becoming a chronic troublemaker. But I strongly suspect that
mainstream U.S. higher education is beyond
the point of self-repair, and therefore no longer a worthwhile setting for
the intellectually curious.
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.
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