“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.” — Joseph Manson
An article on Common Sense by Joseph Manson, a retired professor of anthropology from UCLA, recounts his reasons for retiring from teaching at the university. Over the last 20 years, and accelerating over the last few years, he watched the university become more woke. If you been paying attention to culture in the United States it’s a story we’ve all heard before. What would have been considered nonsense in years past has become the new normal and he’s just not willing to be a part of it anymore.
Why am I pessimistic? For a few reasons.
First, the younger faculty tend to be far more woke than their elders. Second, administrators and student protesters perform elaborately choreographed routines that inevitably end with the former enacting policies that they wanted to enact anyway, for which the latter’s public temper tantrums serve as a pretext. Third, now that standardized tests have been dropped from undergraduate application requirements, a growing number of students will be simultaneously unable to handle university level coursework, and predisposed to denounce their professors for heresy, having been chosen for admission on the basis on their leftist activism as high school students. Meanwhile, California’s K-12 schools are increasingly substituting mind-damaging political indoctrination for education.
Why I’m Giving Up Tenure at UCLA – Common Sense