UCLA Professor Quits Over ‘Woke Takeover’

“Higher education is morally and intellectually corrupt, beyond the possibility of self-repair.”

By Charlie McCarthy, FPM 22.7.22

A tenured anthropology professor said he’s leaving his job because of a pervasive woke culture at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Joseph Manson, 62, used his blog to explain that he decided to retire from his position because “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,” wrote Manson, who began teaching at UCLA in 1996.

Manson said UCLA’s Anthropology Department “remained unusually peaceful, cohesive, and intellectually inclusive until the late 2000s.”

“Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of ‘critical’ (i.e. far-left postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique,” Manson wrote. “These militant faculty 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, because most of it occurred during confidential discussions, usually about hiring and promotion decisions.”

Manson said wokeness affected other UCLA departments, too.

“Outside the anthropology department, UCLA as a whole is showing all the signs of Woke capture that typify the contemporary U.S. university,” wrote Manson, who then cited several people who had been fired or banned from campus.

He also said that “typical of elite U.S. universities, UCLA is awash in anti-Zionism, a.k.a. thinly disguised Jew-hatred.”

“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,” wrote Manson, who added that “Park was celebrated by the faculty and administration as a courageous, embattled exponent of academic freedom.”

Manson predicted that “leftist ideology” will continue to grow across the University of California and other U.S. universities.

“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 U.S. universities, will tighten in the years to come,” Manson wrote. “The younger faculty tend to be more Woke than their elders.”

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley took to social media to affirm Manson’s concerns.

“Manson is the latest example of the not-so-noble lie that pervades our institutional of higher education. We mouth principles of academic freedom and free speech while allowing colleagues to be hounded and harassed,” Turley tweeted.

“Most faculty members remain silent as their colleagues are isolated and ostracized. Their departure is silently welcomed because there is less of a reminder of what we have lost in higher education.”