Why I’m Giving Up Tenure at UCLA – by Joseph Manson
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.)
The Left in the academy seems to have adopted the equivalent of the old Soviet strategy of warfare — just grinding away at the other side and gradually breaking them down. They are making a desert and calling it peace, or at least, woke.