A longtime UCLA professor has announced that he is retiring due to “the woke takeover of higher education,” adding, “I strongly suspect that mainstream U.S. higher education is morally and intellectually corrupt, beyond the possibility of self-repair.”
“I’m a professor, retiring at 62 because the Woke takeover of higher education has ruined academic life,” UCLA professor Joseph Manson wrote in a blog post earlier this month.
The professor went on to explain that for decades, the anthropology department was “peaceful, cohesive, and intellectually inclusive until the late 2000s,” until “gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of ‘critical’ (i.e. far-left postmodernist) anthropology,” arrived “to comprise the department’s most influential clique.”
“These militant faculty recruited even more extremely militant graduate students to work with them,” Manson added.
The professor also touched upon the “public torment and humiliation” one of his colleagues, P. Jeffrey Brantingham, had received, despite being a “standard-issue liberal Democrat” himself.
Manson explained how Brantingham’s research had resulted in allegations of racism.
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 contains no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembles a religious proclamation of anathema.
The professor went on to say that “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,” as “a professor tried to organize a mob to demand the professional destruction” of Brantingham.
“Jeff remained a popular and powerful hate-figure for the department’s Woke faction,” Manson said. “Not only was Jeff ostracized, he was unpersoned.”
Manson also touched upon how a colleague publicly used the term “Latinx,” despite previously mocking the concept in a private conversation:
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.”
Manson went on to say that “anti-Zionism, a.k.a. thinly disguised Jew-hatred” is “also typical of elite U.S. universities, inlcuding UCLA.
“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,” the professor wrote. “A considerable brouhaha ensued.”
“I strongly suspect that mainstream U.S. higher education is morally and intellectually corrupt, beyond the possibility of self-repair, and therefore no longer a worthwhile setting in which to spend my time and effort,” Manson declared.
“The rise of alternative institutions, like the University of Austin and Ralston College, is a hopeful sign, but so far it’s been happening painfully slowly,” the professor added.
Manson is not alone in his views on what has become of higher education.
Similarly, Dr. Jordan Peterson resigned earlier this year from his tenured position at the University of Toronto, citing the “appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity” that is “demolishing education and business.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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