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Why I'm Giving Up Tenure at UCLA

(Common Sense-Bari Weiss) Joseph Manson - I've been a professor in the Anthropology Department at UCLA since 1996; I received tenure in 2000. For decades, anthropology has been notorious for conflict between the scientific and political activist factions. In recent years, militant faculty members came to comprise the department's most influential clique and recruited even more militant graduate students to work with them. Typical of elite U.S. universities today, UCLA is awash in Jew-hatred thinly disguised as anti-Zionism. 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. Park was celebrated by the faculty and administration as a courageous, embattled exponent of academic freedom. The Anthropology Graduate Students Association chimed in with a resolution agreeing with Abdulhadi. More recently, the Asian-American Studies Department posted to its website a statement accusing Israel of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and so on. Irrespective of the content, doesn't it infringe on the academic freedom of individual professors for an academic department to take a political stand on behalf of all its members? Several other Jewish faculty and I have made that case to UCLA and the University of California leadership to no avail. A 2019 article by Liel Leibovitz, titled Get Out, argued that the increasingly open hostility of American universities toward Jews is inseparable from the universities' rejection of two values that, during the 20th century, made them into places where Jews could thrive: meritocracy and free debate. In 2019, I thought Leibovitz was exaggerating. Everything that's happened since has shown that he was spot on. That's it: I'm getting out.
2022-07-11 00:00:00
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