Why I’m Leaving the University
Joseph Manson, a tenured professor in the UCLA Anthropology Department, explains why he’s retiring—”the Woke takeover of higher education has ruined academic life… 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.”
In the piece, Manson points to a tipping point— the “public torment and humiliation of one of my colleagues” by “practitioners of ‘critical’ (i.e. far-left postmodernist) anthropology…[who] comprise the department’s most influential clique… militant faculty [who] recruited even more extremely 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,” he explains, “because most of it occurred during confidential discussions, usually about hiring and promotion decisions.”
As with so many accounts, the pressure comes from fellow faculty members. Manson’s colleague, Jeff Brantingham, was targeted for his modeling patterns of urban crime and development of predictive software marketed to law enforcement agencies. The Anthropology Department’s Graduate Students Association passed a resolution accusing Jeff’s research of “entrench[ing] and naturaliz[ing] the criminalization of Blackness in the United States.’”
Ironically, from there, it was a predicted path for Brantingham—the “resolution and its aftermath” achieved its goal by turning Jeff “into a pariah.”
But it didn’t end there. As Manson explains, "his tormentors weren’t finished with him, even though Jeff stopped attending faculty meetings, and in every other way accepted his punishment of permanent ostracism… a professor tried to organize a mob to demand the professional destruction of a colleague…[and the] graduate students [who] reviled him… called for further action against him.”
Manson goes on to explain an atmosphere of fear, self-censorship and silence— “Signs of this fear are omnipresent. [For example, when] discussing whether to stop requiring the GRE…from applicants to our Ph.D. program…we had no choice but to vote to stop requiring it, because otherwise we would be regarded as racists.”
Manson details the derailment of careers at UCLA by progressive ideologues, “thinly disguised Jew-hatred,” and a student pipeline to UCLA that includes the removal of all standardized requirements and political indoctrination in K-12 instead of education.
So why leave? Manson explains, “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. The rise of alternative institutions, like the University of Austin and Ralston College, is a hopeful sign…”
See FAIR Advisor Bari Weiss’ Substack Piece on Manson
Related
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On Princeton’s Joshua Katz: Princeton’s Journey to Fire a Tenured Professor
On MIT’s David Sabatini: He Was a World-Renowned Cancer Researcher. Now He's Collecting Unemployment.
On Georgetown’s Ilya Shapiro: Why I Quit Georgetown (an update)
Five Professors Tell How They Were Canceled — and Why They Fought Back
