UCLA Anthropology professor Joseph Manson is retiring form his tenured position at the school after more than 25 years. Today, in a piece published on Bari Weiss’ Substack site, professor Manson explain his reasons for leaving. Simply put, he can’t stand to continue working in a department that has been slowly taken over by woke extremists. Unlike other professors who have resigned under pressure, Manson isn’t leaving because he’s become the target of the mob. He’s leaving because he’s seen the mob target people around him.
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.
That resolution really is a piece of work. It concludes by calling for Professor Brantingham to be denounced for a litany of woke sins:
Resolved, That the Anthropology Graduate Students Association (AGSA) denounces the research of Professor Brantingham and all other anthropological research that reinforces and
naturalizes the institutions of racial capitalism, mass incarceration, imperialism, and global white supremacy;READ RELATED: Russia cuts off gas to Finland that they were barely using anyway
In March 2020 a fellow professor led another effort to denounce Professor Brantingham but that effort was interrupted by the pandemic. Professor Manson describes how even as Brantingham became persona non grata in the department, the department chair continued droning on about how they were all part of a “community.” Privately, some of the professors would admit the problem was the woke contingent but publicly no one was willing to take them on for fear of becoming their next target.
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.
As to why he himself is leaving rather than sticking around to fight the woke mob (or simply keeping his head down and cashing his paycheck) professor Manson says he doesn’t see any happy ending for academia.
…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.
In other words, it’s probably too late to undo the damage wokeness has done to our universities. Maybe the best anyone can do now is try to limit the spread to other institutions.
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