Joseph H. Manson

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

______________

“I’m walking on eggshells when I teach. No telling what innocent remark is going to set someone off, to report me to the Dean of DEI for racism or homophobia or whatever.”

“This sort of thing started at universities, but now it’s everywhere. Not just workplaces, but clubs and sports teams. The weaponization of offendedness. Do you think these people are genuinely distressed, or that it’s all a scam? A way to manipulate and control?”

“I think some of the ringleaders are pure fakers. Psychopaths. But most of the rank and file, they talk themselves, and they talk each other, into really feeling threatened.”

“Seems like it’s only a minority of the students who are susceptible. But even one is enough to ruin a whole semester.”

“Sometimes faculty are just as deranged. Did you hear what happened at ECU?”

“No, what?”

“Let me tell you.”

______________

January, 2017

“…please welcome David Marino.”

The audience, about 35 people filling the department’s Meeting Room, applauded politely as Rachel Goldberg sat down and David Marino stepped behind the podium while his first slide appeared on the screen behind him.

“Thank you, Rachel, for that very kind introduction.  It’s an honor and a pleasure to have this opportunity to share my work with you this afternoon…”

Although his words were friendly and casual, the atmosphere in the room was serious, even tense. Marino’s talk was the first of four scheduled presentations by finalists for a tenure-track position in biological anthropology at Emerald Coast University, one of the five top-ranked public universities in the U.S. Academic jobs were scarce, and jobs at prestigious research-oriented institutions were even scarcer.  The stakes were high.  Generating the “short list” of finalists had been difficult and contentious for the department’s search committee. About ten of the more than 100 applicants had very impressive publication records. Marino’s greatest strength was that he had spent 11 years doing fieldwork among the Zhindi, an East African tribe that was one of the only human populations still subsisting by hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants. For biological anthropologists, data on the lives of contemporary hunter-gatherers are uniquely valuable for the insight they provide into human evolution, since Homo sapiens lived exclusively by hunting and gathering for tens of thousands of years before the emergence of agriculture and animal herding.

Marino said as much, and then plunged into the specifics of his own and his collaborators’ research. He showed slides of Zhindi camps against backgrounds of stunning savannah landscapes, and he showed slides of charts depicting data analyses.  After 20 minutes, he reached the centerpiece of his talk, a set of hot-off-the-press, still unpublished analyses of Zhindi demography, specifically age-specific death rates and overall life expectancy.  What made the research especially newsworthy was that Marino had collaborated with a group of primatologists who had collected long-term demographic data on a population of chimpanzees, coincidentally just a few hundred miles from where the Zhindi lived.

“In the standard story about the evolution of the human life history pattern, we hear that humans, even in the most technologically simple societies, live much longer lives than our closest primate cousins.  But there’ve been only a few chimpanzee study sites where observations have gone on long enough to really know how long chimps live in the wild.  And those sites might be unrepresentative of typical chimpanzee environments. We know that in captivity, they can live into their 60s.  So, I was very fortunate to be able to collaborate with Prof. Tom Rodriguez, to directly compare Zhindi demography to the demography of the wild chimps that he and his team have been studying for more than 30 years.”

Marino clicked to the next slide, which depicted a rather scraggly-looking male chimpanzee, with torn ears and several scars on his face, sitting beside a tree. 

“This is the oldest male in the population that Tom studies.  His name is Arthur Ashe.”

A few gasps were audible from the audience. But they weren’t audible to Marino.  He was too focused on giving his talk. Looking mostly at the screen, he spoke for a minute about how the demographic calculations were carried out, and then he clicked to a slide showing a graph, with “Age” on the horizontal axis and “Percentage surviving” on the vertical axis.  Two curved lines swept down from 100% surviving at age zero to 0% surviving at age 75 years. One line represented the Zhindi, the other represented the chimpanzees.

“…and so you can see that Tom’s chimps, living in a much more productive environment than at other chimpanzee study sites, have a life expectancy at birth of about 36 years for females and 30 years for males — almost exactly the same as the Zhindi. So, we need to rethink the evolution of human life history…”

Marino proceeded to zoom out from the specifics of his and Tom Rodriguez’s data to the “Big Picture” implications, and then he finished the talk describing unanswered questions raised by these findings, plans for future research, and potential opportunities (if he was selected for the position) for Emerald Coast University graduate students to work with the Zhindi. 

“Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to answering your questions.”

Rachel Goldberg and the other biological anthropologists, sitting in the front row, applauded enthusiastically.  As always happened immediately following any ECU Anthropology talk, the hand of John Loukanis shot into the air, requesting permission to ask what would invariably be a pompous and longwinded question. But some of the faculty from the department’s other subfields (sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology) applauded only briefly, and their faces appeared troubled.

______________

“Arthur Ashe, a monkey!” exclaimed Imani Smith, shaking her head and scowling.

“I think that chimpanzees are apes, not monkeys, but yeah,” said Sarah Wilson.

“Oh, you know some of that biological anthro? They don’t teach it at all where I got my Ph.D. And I don’t think I’ve missed anything worth learning. It’s the same as physical anthro, right? Those white men who measure people’s heads and classify them by race?”

Wilson frowned slightly and Smith continued, “Or have they stopped doing that? Still racist, but more insidious. Really, why are they part of anthropology at all?”

“Historical reasons,” said Ayanna Jefferson.  “If we were starting a department from scratch, we certainly wouldn’t include them.”

Half an hour after the end of the reception following Marino’s talk, the three professors were sipping chardonnay at Fatima’s Wine Bar, a quiet, cozy place two blocks from campus. They had a lot in common.  All did ethnographic fieldwork in Africa. Smith had just been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Her book argued that even after decades of independence, the ruling elite of the former French colony where she worked were in the grip of colonialist false consciousness, transmitted in particular through their education at French universities. These people might look black, but their minds were irredeemably white. Smith also maintained a blog in which she expressed ideas that no academic press would (yet) touch, such as that Presidents Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama were tools (willing or duped) of the white supremacists. In 2013, she had confidently predicted that Obama was about to order the U.S. military to occupy the country’s inner cities. When she was being considered for a position at ECU, every one of the anthropology faculty knew about Smith’s blog, but no one spoke of it. Jefferson was older and more widely published than Smith. Her writings were less outré, but more saturated with impenetrable postmodernist jargon. She analyzed inter-governmental organizations, with a focus on the World Health Organization, and concluded that they were so dominated by white ways of thinking that they unavoidably did more harm than good in Africa. Wilson would be up for tenure review in two years.  Maybe this was why she was the most restless of the three.  Or maybe it was because she was white. She certainly had no fear of controversy. Her book was about the devastation wrought by capitalism in general, and diamond mining in particular, in the African country where she had done the fieldwork for her Ph.D. More recently, she had co-founded and become co-director of ECU’s Institute for Economic and Racial Justice.  The IERJ made almost no pretense to promoting scholarship. It was unabashedly an activist unit enjoying university office space and funding.  Its latest project was maintaining dossiers on “problematic” ECU faculty (suspected transphobes, Zionists, etc.). Two graduate students were being paid to monitor and catalogue all the social media posts and other public statements by these renegade professors.

Ayanna went on, “But for the foreseeable future, we’re stuck with them. So we need to do what we can to minimize the toxicity. There are three more finalists for the bioanthro job. Hopefully they won’t all be as bad as this one.  Although actually I think that even Marino is okay as a person. He’s sympathetic to the Zhindi, and he’s done some things to help them out, especially that medical evacuation service. I think he has the potential to educate himself into someone we could get along with.”

Smith snorted and shook her head.

“I don’t think he really knew what he was saying, but that’s no excuse,” said Wilson.

Smith glanced at her phone. “Well, folks, daycare closes in 15 minutes, and after that it’s $5 a minute in fines, so I’d better get going. See you on campus.”

______________

Half a mile from Fatima’s Wine Bar, David Marino and the members of the search committee were being seated at Miguel’s Tlayudas, one of the best Oaxacan restaurants in a city famous for them. 

“It’s one of the good things about E.C., the food,” said Ann Stewart. “So many amazing restaurants. Although, one person who used to be in this department said that it made him sad that there were too many tempting restaurants, that he could see them from the streets but couldn’t possibly try them all, and who knows what great food he might be missing?”

The others laughed.  Rachel Goldberg was chair of the search committee.  She studied nutrition, workloads, and women’s fertility in an indigenous Central American group.  Bill Thompson did comparative cross-cultural analyses of myths, from an evolutionary psychological perspective. Stewart was a primatologist — she had spent 25 years studying a wild population of macaque monkeys in Thailand.

After they had ordered, Thompson turned to Marino with a serious, slightly embarrassed, expression.  “Ah,” he began, “I don’t know if you noticed this, David, but there was some murmuring when you showed that slide of a chimp and said that his name was Arthur Ashe. I mean, an ape, with the name of a black man? You can see the problem.”

Marino reddened and put a hand to his forehead.  “Shit, I didn’t even think of that. Pretty much all the chimps at Tom Rodriguez’s study site are named after tennis stars, because Tom is a huge fan.  Played in college himself, before he discovered primatology, and he’s still pretty good, even though he’s pushing 60. I was just trying to illustrate the longevity of the chimps, by showing an elderly one.”

The other three sighed and shook their heads. Then Stewart chuckled. “Tom tells the story of how, when he was traveling in Italy, he struck up a conversation with someone who turned out to be the brother of some famous Romanian player –”

“Simona Halep,” interjected Marino.

“– yeah, and he said, ‘I named a chimpanzee after your sister!’ Tom is so guileless, he can get away with things like that.  The guy wasn’t offended at all.” The conversation turned to gossip about other biological anthropologists, the pros and cons of living in Emerald Coast, the challenges of teaching large undergraduate courses, etc. etc.

______________

Interlude: The Other Finalists

During the next few weeks, three other finalists for the biological anthropology position visited ECU, gave talks, dined with the search committee, and met individually with interested faculty and graduate students. Two were geneticists who gave highly technical talks and conveyed subtly that, if hired, they would spend more time building connections with faculty in the Biology Department than with their colleagues in the Anthropology Department.  The third was a game theory expert, whose talk contained many mathematical models, and plenty of intriguing new ideas, but no data. 

______________

From: Irene McAlister

Date: Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 9:04 PM

To: ANTHRO-VOTING-FACULTY

Subject: Bioanthro Search Committee Report

Dear Colleagues:

The report of the search committee for the biological anthropology position is now available for reading in the Department office. As is our policy on personnel matters, an electronic version will not be circulated. You will need to ask Linda to borrow a hard copy.  Please don’t remove it from the Department office.

I welcome comments, whether emailed, by hard copy, or in person, about the search committee’s recommendation. I will keep the identity of commenters confidential for anyone who wishes. 

We will discuss the case at the next faculty meeting, Thursday Feb. 16 at 9am in the Meeting Room, after which ballots will be distributed. The deadline for returning completed ballots will be Thursday Feb. 23 at 9am.

Regards,

Dr. Irene McAlister

Professor and Chair

Department of Anthropology

Emerald Coast University

______________

Bill Thompson thought of himself as a person with an open mind and an unusual talent for building bridges between divergent, even contradictory, worldviews. This made him particularly valuable to an anthropology department, he believed, because anthropology spans an enormous philosophical range, from reductionistic molecular genetics to political activism.  On this mild California winter’s day, Bill hoped to do some bridge-building by lunching with Sarah Wilson in the sun-drenched outdoor dining area near the Anthropology building.

“I’m really upset, Bill, I want to be clear about that. You know the times we’re living in, how traumatizing it is to see that orange-haired fascist in the White House and wonder what he’s going to do next.  The university, and for sure the department, ought to be a place where we can feel safe, well anyway feel safer, and draw sustenance from like-minded folks.  So why does your committee want to hire David Marino, who compares black people to apes?”

“Look, I understand about the problems with his talk, and the search committee spent a lot of time discussing them.  But like I told you, those chimpanzees are all named after tennis stars, and David wanted to show an elderly one, and that one just happened to have been named after a black tennis star. And not named that by David, remember.”

“It’s not just that chimp’s name.  That whole part of the talk, the way he analogized apes to black people…” Wilson shook her head. “Hiring Marino might split the department. Imani told me that she wouldn’t be able to bring her daughter to her office if he was here, she wouldn’t feel safe. She might ask to move to Gender Studies.”

Thompson frowned. “Do you agree with that, that David is a threat to three-year-olds?”

Wilson narrowed her eyes. “Stop mansplaining and whitesplaining.  What matters is that Imani feels that way. I hope you’re not questioning the validity of her lived experience.  Really, I expect better of you.”

“Sorry. Look, I know that David could have done a much better job describing the context of his work, making it clearer why hunter-gatherer research is important, and that it doesn’t, at all, imply that any group of living people is any less modern or less evolved than any other.  I’m sure that if he takes this job, once he’s here he’ll be happy to be educated by you, and Imani, and anyone else in the department, about how to talk about his research in a more inclusive way.”

Wilson sighed exasperatedly. “So, you’re saying he’ll be another drain on the labor and emotional energy of the faculty of color and their allies? We are tired, Bill, tired. Why should we have to educate him?  He should have already educated himself.”

The two ate their salads in silence for a few seconds.

“The search committee all agreed that David is a better fit for our department than any of the other finalists,” said Thompson softly.

“What about that geneticist, Anjali? I didn’t understand 90% of what she said, but she has published in the top journals, and she’s a woman of color, of whom there aren’t any now in bioanthro.  You know that’s going to come up next year in the external review of the department, don’t you? That bioanthro is lagging behind the other subfields in faculty diversity.” Wilson’s severe expression relaxed momentarily into a slight smirk.

Thompson turned pale and spent a few seconds chewing on some arugula. 

“I wish that the problems with David’s talk had been brought up with him during the Q-and-A. That he’d been given a chance to explain himself.”

“It didn’t seem so troubling then. Maybe Marino’s laid-back California demeanor masked the full implications.  Or maybe we were in a state of shock.  The more that Imani and Ayanna and I, and also Emily and Sunil, have been talking about it, the more problematic we realize it was. You can be sure that we’ll have a lot to say at the faculty meeting.”

Wilson glanced at her phone.  “I have to teach in ten minutes. Thanks for chatting, Bill, it’s good to keep the lines of communication open.”

______________

Irene McAlister was a dour-looking woman with dark red hair and green eyes. She rarely smiled. Her voice conveyed world-weary resignation.  Among her colleagues who had raised children and therefore spent some time immersed in children’s entertainment, opinion was unanimous: she was Eeyore.

This temperament had suited McAlister well to her ethnographic fieldwork with an indigenous Siberian tribe. The Chukchi were serious people. In some ways McAlister felt more comfortable among them than among her own tribe, the perpetually grinning, faux-cheerful Americans. It also suited her well to her current role in the ECU anthropology department: to preside over the inevitable, inexorable replacement of anthropological scientists (like herself) by militant activists, hire by hire and retirement by retirement.  So, she understood the real reason behind the uproar over the impending hire of David Marino: he represented a glitch in a historically fated process.

Sitting across from McAlister in her office on the day before the faculty meeting, Ayanna Jefferson leaned forward and spoke in a low, intense voice.

“I don’t understand why nothing can be done about this. How can we even be considering hiring this man?  He said that he studied African people because they are less evolved than the people of other continents. If he gets the job, I’ll refuse to even be in the same room with him, and I’m not the only one who feels that way.”

“I don’t remember him saying that, but, you know, his talk was recorded. Let’s go to the tape and find out.”

“Listen to it again?  Are you serious? Once was traumatizing enough.”

McAlister sighed.  “My own opinion about David Marino is actually irrelevant. The process for hiring faculty is set in the department’s bylaws, which are required to be consistent with university regulations. The search committee makes a short list, invites those people to give talks and be interviewed, then writes a report recommending one of them, then there’s a faculty discussion of the report, then a vote by secret ballot, and then the Chair writes a letter summarizing the whole process, and sends that along with the dossier to the Dean, who usually rubber-stamps the department’s decision.  If I were to ignore the bylaws and short-circuit the process, which seems to be what you’re asking for, what’s most likely is that Patricia would put the department in receivership and appoint a temporary Chair from another department, with no more faculty hires or grad student admissions until we get our act together and resolve our differences.  I don’t want that, and I don’t suppose that you do either.”

“Patricia” was Patricia Entwistle, the Dean of the Social Sciences division.

“The process, yeah. It’s the process that I have a problem with.  A lot of problems, in fact.  Starting with, why a secret ballot?  Shouldn’t we all be accountable for our choices?”

Jefferson had been hired away from another university, at great expense, only three years earlier.

“We’ve been committed, at least since I started here 28 years ago, to democratic practices in this department.  That means, among other things, that junior faculty have the same voting rights as tenured faculty.  So you can see why the voting has to be by secret ballot.  For junior faculty, being ‘accountable,’” she gestured with air quotes, “on any controversial issue would mean making powerful enemies before going up for tenure.”

“How can a practice that might lead to hiring a racist be called democratic?”

McAlister sighed again.  “It’s my job to make sure that the procedures mandated by the department’s bylaws are followed. If you or others find that unacceptable, then complain to Patricia.”

“Oh, we will. And one more thing, a request from Imani.  At tomorrow’s discussion, after the search committee’s report, could you call on her to speak first?”

“Sure.”

______________

The Meeting Room was full, and uncharacteristically quiet. Usually, it was filled with friendly chatter in the minutes before a faculty meeting began. At exactly 9:01am, McAlister brought down her gavel and called the meeting to order. After a few preliminary items, she announced that the day’s main business, the biological anthropology faculty position search, would begin with the search committee chair, Rachel Goldberg, summarizing the committee’s report.

Goldberg’s hands shook slightly as she gripped a hard copy of the report on the table in front of her, but she kept her voice steady as she described the history of the search, the characteristics of the applicant pool, the strengths and weaknesses of each of the four finalists, and why the committee had settled on David Marino as its top choice.  At the immediately preceding impromptu breakfast meeting of the biological anthropology faculty, the decision had been reached to leave the controversy out of these opening remarks – to let Marino’s detractors be the first to raise it.

The moment Goldberg finished, seven hands were raised. 

“Imani, then John, then Emily, then Ann…” began McAlister, setting the order in which each person would be recognized.

Imani Smith read a prepared statement that took four minutes to deliver.  Anthropology has a shameful past, she reminded them, as a handmaiden of racist imperialism.  She had hoped that her colleagues were sufficiently aware of this to at least avoid, if not condemn, discourses of the kind that Marino promulgated, and she was both sad and angry to discover that she was wrong.  Didn’t they know that rhetoric and imagery comparing black people to apes is still prevalent in America? She cited a Republican state legislator Tweeting a cartoon that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.  Finally she announced that, if David Marino were hired, she would ask the Dean to move her from Anthropology to Gender Studies. As she said this, she looked directly at Bill Thompson, who looked down at the table. Smith then stood, gathered her papers, strode toward the door, and left the room.  Ayana Jefferson, Sarah Wilson, and several others snapped their fingers in unison for about 15 seconds.  Then the room fell silent.

“John,” McAlister finally said in a small voice.

John Loukanis had a loud, nasal voice and a manner that alternated between overtly arrogant and transparently insincerely self-deprecating. 

“I’m sure we’ll discuss much further the controversy raised by the way David presented his work. But first, as a kind of background, so to speak, which the search committee’s report didn’t describe in quite this way, I want to highlight David’s publication record, which is very impressive.  I have compared his h-index with several other researchers of similar topics who are at a similar career stage…”

Several people rolled their eyes.  To the more cynical, Loukanis was providing unintentional comic relief. At faculty meetings, he pontificated about the h-index – defined as the maximum value of h such that a scholar has published at least h papers that have each been cited at least h times — of every candidate for hiring or promotion, and how it compared to others’ h-indices.  Google Scholar profiles include a scholar’s h-index, but for those people without Google Scholar profiles, Loukanis painstakingly calculated it himself. No one else in the department cared about the h-index. In fact, the more they listened to him, the more they became convinced that it was worthless. But Loukanis was incorrigible.

“Emily,” said McAlister, the moment Loukanis finally finished speaking.

Emily Hansen was a horse-faced blonde woman who had grown up in a small town in Minnesota.  Around colleagues and students, she was always cheerful. From her appearance, accent, and demeanor, it was easy to imagine her ladling portions of tuna hotdish onto plates at a Lutheran church social.  This impression was deeply misleading. She despised her parents and siblings, and barely spoke with them.  She was a hardcore neo-Marxist and a Machiavellian political climber.  Her goal was to succeed McAlister as Chair, then rise to Dean, and after that, well…

“Thanks, Irene.” Hansen smiled. “I am hoping against hope that we can reach some consensus about this! I don’t think David himself is a racist. In fact, he seemed perfectly benign at the personal level. But that’s not the issue.  The issue is whether to reward and align ourselves with discourses that perpetuate racialized hierarchical power structures, here and throughout the world. It’s not just that chimpanzee’s name. It was the entire project of comparing chimpanzees to African people, with the implication that Africans are somehow less evolved.  If the goal is to compare the two species, why make the Zhindi the representatives of humankind? Why not compare chimpanzees to Wall Street bankers?”

“Ann,” said McAlister.

Ann Stewart was known as a quiet, easy-going, agreeable colleague.  This was the first time in the 18 years she’d been in the department that she’d spoken about a controversial issue at a faculty meeting. Her voice shook slightly.

“It all depends on what trait you’re talking about. If you were interested in, say, the genes that make human language possible, and that chimps don’t have, you could compare the chimps to any human population, Wall Street bankers or whatever.  But this research is about life expectancy.  If you compared the life expectancies of chimpanzees to Wall Street bankers, you wouldn’t know how much of the difference is due to deep differences between chimps and humans, and how much is due to very recent cultural innovations like clean water, antiseptics, vaccines, and antibiotics, that many people still don’t have access to. Your data would be uninterpretable. What makes the Zhindi good for this particular comparison is their way of life, not their skin color.”

The meeting took up the entire two hours allocated for it. Ayanna Jefferson, like Imani Smith, walked out after speaking. More finger-snapping ensued. Almost half of the nearly 30 professors present did not speak at all. “Ballots will be in your mailboxes this afternoon.  They’re due back in one week, next Thursday at 9am. Enjoy the rest of your day.” McAlister grimaced and lowered her gavel. “Meeting adjourned.”

______________

March, 2017

Guillermo Pérez was ECU’s Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). In writing and in public speaking, he stuck to optimistic, upbeat themes, like the need for “brave spaces” in addition to the obligatory “safe spaces,” and ways to foster “social entrepreneurship.” In this closed-door meeting with Ayanna Jefferson, Imani Smith, and Sarah Wilson, he could speak more frankly.

“Thanks for telling me about this. Sounds as if the climate in your department needs a lot of improvement.  About this hire, though, I’m afraid there’s not much I can do.  You’ve already met with Patricia?”

“Yes,” said Jefferson, “and she said, first, ‘Majority rules,’ and second, that she wasn’t convinced that Marino’s research falls outside the norms for biological anthro, so if she vetoed hiring him, she’d be signaling that she disapproves of the entire bio subfield. And that might lead the whole bunch of them to propose seceding from the anthro department and moving over to the Life Sciences division, and she’s not going to risk that. Well, if I were Dean, I’d tell them, ‘Don’t let the door hit you.’”

“Remind me, what was the vote?”

“Seventeen Yes, 11 No, 3 Abstentions.”

“Hmm. Well, the Dean of DEI doesn’t have veto power over faculty hires. Yet.” He smiled. “But here’s what I suggest, to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again. Ask Irene, with cc to me, to set up a visit by a Climate Facilitator from an outside organization. I know of several that do good work.  DEI will pay for it all. This person will stay for several days, meet with individuals and small groups that want to, and will facilitate a discussion by the entire department faculty. Attendance mandatory.  Issues of systemic racism, implicit bias, privilege, allyship, and so forth.  It’s clear that there are some bad actors in your department. This will put them on notice. Or, better yet, raise their consciousness.”

______________

April, 2017

Soft, ethereal music played as the anthropology professors took their seats in the Meeting Room. The facilitator, Melanie Tomlinson from a company called Spiral Solutions, smiled warmly. She appeared to be about 30 years old. Her C.V. had not been circulated to the faculty, but rumor had it that her highest degree was an M.A. in Conflict Resolution Studies.

“Welcome!  You are on a journey to become a more inclusive, and therefore a higher functioning, organization. Each of you will need to confront some difficult issues today. So, before we start, I’m going to direct you in a brief guided meditation, to get your minds into a peaceful place.”

After a few minutes of focusing on their breathing while listening to descriptions of soothing imagery, the professors opened their eyes and saw that Tomlinson’s expression had changed. The warm smile was gone. She looked like a schoolteacher anticipating the antics of unruly children. The music had stopped. Tomlinson turned to the board and began writing with a red marker.

Diversity

Equity

Inclusion

Structural racism

White privilege

White fragility

Implicit bias

Microaggressions

Allyship

“Doing the work”

“These are the issues you must explore to improve the climate in this organization. It’s not just you, of course.  Almost every organization in this country needs the same. You deserve praise for recognizing that you have a problem.  But that’s just the beginning.  Now comes the difficult part.”

She lifted a sheet of paper from the table in front of her. 

“I have randomly sorted you into 4-person groups. Within your group, I want each of you to reflect on these concepts and what they mean to you. If you know more than the others in your group, be prepared to educate them.  If you know less than others in your group, be prepared to listen.”

Tomlinson then read the rosters of each of the 4-person groups, and directed each one to its own space within the Meeting Room.  Bill Thompson, the evolutionary psychologist who had been on the search committee, found himself in a group with Emily Hansen, an archaeologist named Jennifer Monroe, and a sociocultural anthropologist named Wei Liu.

“I’ll start,” said Hansen brightly.  “I wrestle every day with the problem of being white, of being, through no choice of my own, part of an oppressor class.  I make mistakes all the time, and cause harms. It’s unavoidable. We can, and we must, interrogate our own behavior, and listen respectfully to those who are harmed.  But we must recognize that it’s a journey without an end.  I was socialized to be white, and I’ll be white on my dying day.”

She continued along these lines for a few more minutes, and then turned to Thompson. “Bill?”

Thompson sighed heavily.  “I’ve learned a lot these past few months, and I know I have a lot more to learn.  I know we’re not supposed to talk about the job search today, that we’re supposed to talk about the department climate in general, and how to improve it, but I want to put it out there, that I had no idea what harm was being caused by David Marino’s talk.  I mean, I’m still glad he’s coming to our department, but he and everyone else needs to know that some of what he said is beyond the pale. So maybe all this conflict over hiring him is a good thing in the long run, forcing us to see and solve problems that were present all along, but invisible.”

Hansen nodded. “Jennifer?”

“I agree, we have a long way to go to reach racial equity in this department.  But I’m disappointed that there hasn’t been more talk about gender equity.”

“Well,” said Hansen, “the department faculty is more than half female, and we have a female chair.  So you can see why it’s a lower priority.”

Monroe muttered something about the high cost of the university’s daycare facility.

“And you, Wei? As the only person of color in this group, I’m sure you have a unique contribution.”

Wei Liu was born in 1960 in Shanghai. In 1967, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, his father, a teacher, was beaten by Red Guards, after which the family was exiled to a rural village to “correct their thinking.”

Melanie Tomlinson, walking from group to group, stopped to listen. Liu spoke slowly. “I’m from China. When I was a boy, my family and friends and I attended meetings like this one.” He looked directly at Hansen. “Very much like this one. I never expected to see such things in the United States.”

Hansen’s cheery smile vanished.

Shortly afterward, Tomlinson called the small group discussions to a close and addressed everyone.

“I am pleased with what I’ve heard.  There’s a lot of honest self-assessment going on.  A lot of consciousness raising.  And someone said that meetings like this were common in their home country when they were young.  That’s encouraging! And now, I would like for one person from each group to summarize what you’ve learned.”

One by one, a spokesperson for each group spoke.  But there wasn’t much difference between what each one said.  Much of it consisted of reciting, like incantations, the words that Tomlinson had written on the board. Only two people said anything memorable. Imani Smith blamed the biological anthropologists for the department’s DEI-deficient climate.

“Nothing against you as individuals, but structurally speaking, what you do is problematic.  Like, why are you always looking for the Missing Link in Africa?  Why Africa?”

John Loukanis’s face was rigid with internal conflict.  On the one hand, he wanted desperately to launch into a mini-lecture, drawn directly from the introductory course he taught, about the human fossil record.  On the other hand, he knew that to utter even one word of this would undo all the healing that this meeting had accomplished.  He kept quiet.

The other memorable (because prescient) observation was by Sunil Kapoor, a sociocultural anthropologist who illustrated the remark that, before it liberalized its economy in the 1990s, India’s number one export to the West was left-wing intellectuals.

“What’s happening here will be good for all of us. Anthropology has always grown by engendering and welcoming critique.  There was a feminist critique in the 1980s and 1990s. Now we’re seeing a race critique.  In a few years, there will be a transgender critique.  These are good things, they strengthen the discipline.”

______________

Two days after the facilitated discussion, Imani Smith, Ayanna Jefferson, and Sarah Wilson were once again gathered at Fatima’s Wine Bar.  They were in much better moods than on that stress-inducing day in January.

“I’d say we’ve suffered a tactical defeat but won a strategic victory,” said Wilson.  “Marino got the job, but the bioanthropologists now know that they need to watch what they say.”

“And I expect that he’s the last white man this department will ever hire,” added Jefferson.

“It’s enough to convince me to stay in Anthro, not move to Gender Studies,” said Smith. 

“And I know that I threatened to refuse to speak to Marino, but as I think more about it, I’d rather keep an eye on him.  How does that saying go, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’?”

The three professors laughed and sipped their chardonnay.

Part I: A Gut-Level Transformation

Last October, I fasted during Yom Kippur for the first time since I was a teenager. I’ve joined a synagogue, where I sometimes attend Shabbat morning services. I’ve stopped eating pork. Almost every day, I read some of the Hebrew Bible (aka the “Old Testament”), with the help of Meir Soloveichik’s commentaries in his “Bible 365” podcast.

All of this would have been unimaginable to me ten years ago. To some who know me but not well, it might be unimaginable even now. This post will be the first of several explaining how I’ve changed and why.

Believe That You’re a Robot, and You Might Become Capable of Believing Damn Near Anything

There are philosophical reasons for rejecting the dogma, preached most forcefully for popular audiences by Richard Dawkins, that humans are nothing but very complicated robots. I describe some of these reasons in Part II of this post. Here, I’ll describe my visceral unease, growing year by year, at what this dogma seemed to do to most (not all) of the people I knew (colleagues and grad students) who held it. Most were either openly unprincipled self-promoting cynics, or else adherents of a virulently creepy utilitarianism, e.g. casually suggesting that some people’s lives have “negative utility” (Lebensunwertes Leben?). One postdoc prefaced every one of his presentations by expressing incredulity that anyone ever acted in anything but a short-sighted self-interested way. (“This is the puzzle I’m going to address.”) Cost-benefit analysis was these people’s Rosetta Stone – it (alone) could render intelligible, with crystal clarity, any aspect of the human condition. And more: it alone could point the way toward practical solutions to social problems. Adherence to rationality itself, they were sure, demanded nothing less.

In mundane conversations, my professional friends and acquaintances remained just as pleasant (or unpleasant, in a few cases) as ever. But I began to feel queasy when serious ideas were on the table, as during seminars and committee meetings. There was a hollowness, a brittleness, a superficiality to the discussions. “There’s a lot more to it than that,” I found myself thinking, again and again – but the “more” that I had in mind didn’t fit into any of the theoretical approaches (evolutionary psychology and gene/culture co-evolution for the science, utilitarianism for the policy ideas) that my colleagues took for granted as the only legitimate ways to contemplate the human condition.

Then the Great Awokening swept Academia and then the nation, starting with the troubles at the University of Missouri and Yale in 2015, accelerating through the first three years of the Trump Administration, and shifting into overdrive in 2020 following the beginning of the pandemic and the death of George Floyd. What was the reaction of these stalwart adherents of rationality and cost-benefit analysis?

Most of them quickly abandoned rationality and cost-benefit analysis to embrace the newly fashionable religion and the dictates of a politicized, scientistic (not scientific) public health bureaucracy.

Woke doctrine focuses on two areas: race and gender. It was with respect to the latter that my Darwinian colleagues changed their tune most dramatically – whether sincerely or not, I have no idea. Scholars whose own published research was based on the reality of binary biological sex in humans began including their pronouns in their email signature blocks, referring to Latinos as “Latinx,” and calling for preferential treatment for applicants to our graduate program who identified as “non-binary.” People who mocked theistic religion with “Flying Spaghetti Monster” memes were eager to believe (or pretend to believe) six impossible things (like “Sex is a spectrum, not a binary”) before breakfast.

And when the pandemic struck, they treated the CDC’s every mandate and recommendation (e.g., wear masks [See this], keep the elementary schools closed [See this]) as holy writ. When informed of the harmful effects of these measures, and challenged to subject them to cost-benefit analysis, or even reminded that other countries had relaxed these restrictions and had not suffered any more from COVID than the U.S., they either laughed or got angry. Only COVID deniers, they sneered, could say such things.

I came to realize that my colleagues, and others in my academic and academic-adjacent social circles, had not freed their minds for strictly rational inquiry by viewing the universe as purposeless, and themselves as fancy robots. What they had done instead was to unmoor their thinking from any stationary spot on which to stand. They were intellectually adrift in interstellar space, ready to be drawn into the gravitational field of any idea, no matter how crazy, so long as it was cloaked with the appropriate moralistic formulas (sympathy for the oppressed, safety as the supreme value, etc.), and/or backed by coercive authority (your career will stall if you don’t embrace this idea). I kept thinking of the remark attributed to G.K. Chesterson: “When men choose not to believe in G-d, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

A Drink of Water in the Desert

In September 2020, I attended the Zoom High Holiday services of the UCLA Hillel chapter. It was the first time in decades that I had attended High Holiday services. Part of why I abandoned religious practice as a teenager was that I was appalled by the image of G-d deciding who is to live and who is to die during the coming year. To my 16-year-old self, this seemed to be a dishonest way to frighten children into obeying arbitrary rules. In 2020, the Ten Days of Repentance appeared in a very different light.

According to the evolutionary social science theories that had formed my intellectual world for decades, moral systems evolved in the past as a solution to adaptive problems, especially the problem of how to promote cooperation in large groups of unrelated people. Individual moral choices can be understood in a completely deterministic framework. In the present day, every moral rule should be required to justify itself in light of utilitarian analysis. Many of today’s rules might be obsolete tomorrow. But according to the new, post-Floyd dispensation, a system of absolute moral authority is both available and mandatory. The inverted oppression hierarchy distinguishes social categories by culpability and innocence.  White, Christian, heterosexual, “cisgendered” men, on the bottom rung of this hierarchy, are guilty of the great sin of privilege, just by existing, regardless of what any individual does or fails to do. Forgiveness is irrelevant, and redemption is impossible. At the same time, membership in the most “oppressed” social categories confers victimhood and innocence, regardless of what any individual does or fails to do.

Compared to both utilitarian relativism, and the Woke version of puritanism, the Jewish view of sin and repentance, as enacted during the High Holidays, was a drink of water in the desert. There is a moral order to the universe that transcends functional considerations, although its specifics are open to some debate. Every person has free will and moral agency, and is judged to fall short of the ideal, and every person has the potential to “annul the severity of the decree” by means of repentance, charity, and prayer. These lessons can’t be fully conveyed by left-hemisphere logic, quantitative analysis, or indeed by ordinary language – they impress themselves on us by right-hemisphere means such as collective chanting and the performance of minutely specified embodied rituals. For me in September 2020, even as a mostly passive Zoom spectator, the effect was powerful. At the end of the Yom Kippur services, I was well on my way back home.

Part II: The Philosophical Arguments

Twenty years ago, I was telling my students that humans are nothing but robots, programmed by genes and “memes” (in the original sense of that word), and that, in the words of George Gaylord Simpson as famously quoted by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, “…all attempts to answer that question [‘What is man?’] before 1859 [the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species] are worthless and…we will be better off if we ignore them completely.”

First, let me clarify how I haven’t changed. I still do research in evolutionary psychology. Natural selection has shaped the human mind, as it has shaped all traits of all organisms, and that insight has been the source of countless interesting and non-obvious testable hypotheses, an impressive number of which have been supported by rigorously collected data.

What I don’t believe any more is that that’s the complete or final answer to the question “What is man?” (or “What is humankind?,” as Simpson would have written it today).

Where reductionist determinist accounts of human nature (Darwinian, Behaviorist, Woke Intersectional, etc.) go wrong is in mistaking assumptions for conclusions or inferences. In formulating theories in evolutionary social science, it’s helpful to assume that humans are robots programmed by genes and memes. Scientists must quantify variables, and free will (not to mention the soul) is probably unmeasurable in principle. Allowing it into our theories would turn them into unfalsifiable gunk. But the usefulness of an assumption (the limited usefulness: “My hypothesis explained 30% of the variance!” is a social scientist’s exclamation of triumph) doesn’t prove that assumption to be correct, let alone justify turning it into metaphysical dogma. Indeed, any approach that requires accepting proposition x as an assumption is inherently incapable of demonstrating that x is valid. It takes faith to believe (as distinct from assume for research purposes) that humans are nothing but robots.

So, personal faith will play a role in any complete, comprehensive answer to the question “What is humankind?” And that means that in answering this question, non-scientific considerations are inevitable. These include “What beliefs about human nature are consistent with everyday experience?” and “Holding what beliefs about human nature are conducive to individual well-being? To living the good life? To social solidarity?”

A similar confusion of assumptions with conclusions attends the claim, commonly made by practicing Darwinian scientists, that because natural selection, a mechanical process, can generate the illusion of conscious design of organic adaptations (true), therefore the universe is devoid of meaning and purpose. In fact, mainstream 20th-21st Century science rejects teleological explanations as a matter of first principle; it is therefore incapable of evaluating the usefulness of such explanations. And yet, Darwin himself, in the words of his advocate and spokesman Thomas Huxley, recognized a “wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution, but is actually based on the fundamental proposition of Evolution…The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive” (in F. Darwin, ed., 1887, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, London: John Murray, Vol. II., p. 80).

The robotic human, lumbering through a purposeless universe, is an article of faith, no less than the child of G-d with an immortal soul. What’s more, shared sacred truths about the human condition are a prerequisite for functioning polities, which means that faith-based beliefs about the most important issues are inescapable. The Declaration of Independence, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Marxist dogma, Critical Race Theory…all of these express or consist of basically religious doctrines. Therefore, no human society, and no seriously reflective person, truly lacks religion.

“I have three passports.”

A visiting speaker at UCLA, where I was a professor of anthropology from 1994 until this year, made this comment in 2019 at a dinner attended by faculty and graduate students. He named the three countries that had issued his passports. They are wealthy and they span the same ocean – otherwise they have nothing in common.

“That way, if things start to get dangerous, I can relocate to whichever is the safest.”

His voice and his facial expression radiated smugness. And with good reason: his listeners conveyed, with their nods and their quietly admiring remarks, that they regarded the possession of three passports as the omega of Cool. I said nothing. I felt slightly disgusted, but unsurprised. Almost all Western academics, especially at elite institutions like UCLA, are what David Goodhart calls “Anywheres” in contrast to “Somewheres.” The Anywheres are the well-educated, symbol-manipulating professionals who can work, well, anywhere, and who draw their sense of identity from their achievements. They are self-deracinated – uprooted. The Somewheres tend to be less educated and to draw their sense of identity from attachment to places (national and local) and to a community. For an Anywhere, the value of national citizenship is purely practical – a means by which to enjoy personal prosperity and safety. Emotional attachment to a country, or even the sense of obligation expressed by President Kennedy’s exhortation to “Ask not what your country can do for you…” is seen as foolish at best, and dangerous (i.e., leading to war and genocide) at worst. The possessor of three passports, in this view, has successfully gamed, and partially defeated, the arbitrary, unfair, and archaic nation-state system.

Alex Kaschuta writes that “Anywheres still need belonging” and that, lacking it in their atomized lives, many suffer from depression and anxiety. It’s my strong impression that academic Anywheres, having abandoned nationality, locality, and traditional religion as sources of belonging, tend to take refuge in two ersatz forms of belonging: educational institutions (universities and colleges) and (especially) scholarly societies. One of the under-appreciated lessons from the spread of Cancel Culture is that these so-called communities are held together, not by enduring, unconditional solidarity, but by a combination of fashion-following and fickle self-interest. To put it simply, you’d be a fool to expect the members of your academic “community” to stand with you if it cost them anything.

First, though, another observation about the Anywhereness of academia: even when they acknowledge their national heritage, Western academics tend to distance themselves from it with a mixture of embarrassment and self-mockery. At a meeting of a collaborative research group, comprising scientists from five countries, one presented the others with gifts of a traditional food from the region where she’d grown up. A kind gesture, certainly, but what struck me most were her verbal and non-verbal signals that said, in effect, “Isn’t this quaint?”

The theory and practice of science do, of course, transcend national and ethnic differences. The scientific method is available to all, regardless of cultural background. Two people trained in the same scientific discipline, so long as they are fluent in a common language, can converse productively even across a wide cultural gap. I’m not denigrating these great strengths of science. But it’s important to recognize their limits. When push comes to shove, shared scientific interests are no more a basis for mutual loyalty than any other shared profession. No one would expect that a French accountant and a Chinese accountant (or, more to the point, a Russian accountant and a Ukrainian accountant) can draw on a source of solidarity that outweighs their obvious differences and sources of conflict.

But isn’t it problematic that the Somewheres’ sources of belonging are based on either “accidents” of shared ancestry or proximity (nations, localities) or shared “irrational” beliefs (religion)? Aren’t the scholarly societies that are latched on to by academic Anywheres, based as they are on voluntarily chosen shared commitments to some domain of rational inquiry, psychologically and socially healthier sources of belonging?

That argument might have persuaded me a few years ago. But the mainstreaming of what Colin Wright calls sex denialism (aka transgenderism and gender fluidity theory) has destroyed its credibility. Wright’s account of his own experience of being driven out of evolutionary biology (the academic specialty with the knowledge base most relevant to understanding the male-female phenomenon) for criticizing sex denialism makes it crystal clear that membership in good standing in most of today’s scholarly communities is dependent on endorsing shibboleths (e.g. “Sex is a spectrum”) that have no stronger a rational basis than belief in the literal truth of the Biblical miracles.

Even for the most accomplished and established academic, expressing an opinion at odds with Woke dogma is likely to result in at least informal ostracism from scholarly societies. Anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss criticizes unscientific aspects of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and so has been the target of a vilification campaign in the Society for American Archaeology. Joshua Katz, in addition to being fired from his tenured position by Princeton University, was recently subjected to extraordinary “disappearing” treatment at an international Classics conference: he was not introduced before giving his talk (unlike all the other speakers), and not one person clapped or asked a question after it.

Are universities and scholarly societies “communities”? Sure – just as the Soviet Communist Party of the 1930s was a “community.” Your friends and colleagues, with whom you hobnob happily today, might contrive to destroy you tomorrow for a trivial or wholly imaginary breach of a social norm — possibly one that was invented last week.

The late British philosopher Roger Scruton has written that a key feature of the modern nation-state is that it comprises a set of people who, if it came to it, would risk death defending each other. By contrast, the contemporary scholarly society comprises a set of people who, if it came to it, would betray each other in a heartbeat to safeguard their next promotion, grant, or other token of status.

Which is not to say that these societies are worthless. I belong to several of them, and am somewhat active in one. But I wear these memberships lightly – they’re not part of my sense of identity. I have, with no regrets and almost no distress, ended my affiliation with two organizations that became heavily politicized.

The visiting speaker who boasted of his three passports may well be onto something – the ability to escape war, persecution, and/or unrest in one or two of his three countries — in an increasingly conflict-riven world. But if he has swapped attachment to a nation-state for attachment to a global “community” of scholars, he may be in for an unpleasant shock. Nothing and no one will keep his academic career going if he runs afoul of one of a growing number of what George Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.”

So, what is to be done? After years or decades of “Anywhereness,” is it possible to become re-rooted in genuine communities? That will be a topic of future posts.

Responding to emails from well-informed readers:

1. Gordon Klein was suspended, not fired.
2. The facts of the Keith Fink case are not established. They are a matter of ongoing dispute. The link in my original post presented only Fink’s side of the story.

I’m a professor, retiring at 62 because the Woke takeover of higher education has ruined academic life. “Another one?” you ask. “What does this guy have to say that hasn’t already been said by Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Joshua Katz, or Bo Winegard¹?

There’s only one way to find out.

Defenestration of a Colleague

I’ve been a tenure-track professor since 1996 (tenured since 2000) in the Anthropology Department at UCLA. (My research, which I plan to continue doing, has spanned topics ranging from nonhuman primate behavior to human personality variation). For decades, anthropology has notoriously been riven by conflict between scientific and political activist factions, 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. far-left postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique.  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. 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 contains no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembles 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 AGSA 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 (still teaches) a course, “The Ecology of Crime,” that consistently drew 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.

But 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. In early March 2020, this flyer appeared in the hallways of the anthropology department. “Predpol” is the name of Jeff’s predictive software. The sponsoring “Institute for Inequality and Democracy” is a far-left UCLA unit whose associate director is Hannah Appel, who also holds a faculty position in anthropology. That is, a professor tried to organize a mob to demand the professional destruction of a colleague. Within a few days after the appearance of these flyers, the pandemic lockdown confined us to our homes and overshadowed everything else, and the anti-police movement soon had bigger fish to fry after the killing of George Floyd. Nevertheless, Jeff remained a popular and powerful hate-figure for the department’s Woke faction. On September 23, 2020, during a webinar, “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn?” sponsored in part by the UCLA anthropology department, many of the chat comments from graduate students reviled him and called for further action against him. The entire episode recalls a prescient observation in a 1995 article by the great psychological anthropologist Roy D’Andrade: “Isn’t it odd that the true enemy of society turns out to be that guy in the office down the hall?”

The Other Signs and Portents

Not only was Jeff ostracized, he was unpersoned. None of the faculty talked about him, if they could possibly avoid it. Meanwhile, our department chair opened most faculty meetings by solemnly intoning that our department was a community, a family, and that “we’re here for each other.” In private conversations, I was able to elicit from some of my colleagues an embarrassed acknowledgment that the Woke faction had treated Jeff abominably, and that we strongly resembled a dysfunctional family in denial. This pervasive institutional doublethink was partly a result of Jeff’s own apparent decision to refrain from open confrontation: I offered to help him, by defending him publicly if he wished, after both the 2018 AGSA resolution and the 2020 flyer posts, and he thanked me but politely asked me to stay out of it. But the principal driver of the doublethink was fear of the Woke faction.

Signs of this fear are omnipresent. Discussing whether to stop requiring the GRE (a standardized test, like the SAT) from applicants to our Ph.D. program, one colleague told a meeting of the biological anthropology subfield that he regarded the GRE as the most informative part of an applicant’s dossier, but that we had no choice but to vote to stop requiring it, because otherwise we would be regarded as racists (I was the only person to vote against dropping the GRE requirement). Asking a question following a public talk, a colleague conspicuously used the word “Latinx” even though the speaker had described both herself and her research subjects as “Latinas” and even though he himself, in a previous private conversation, had mockingly referred to the opinion polls showing that only a small minority of Hispanic Americans prefer to be called “Latinx.”

Outside the anthropology department, UCLA as a whole is showing all the signs of Woke capture that typify the contemporary U.S. university. Emeritus Professor Val Rust (Graduate School of Education) was banned from campus, and researcher James Enstrom (Environmental Health Sciences) and lecturer Keith Fink (Communication Studies) were fired, all for dissenting (in different ways) from Woke orthodoxy. Gordon Klein, after being fired by UCLA’s business school in Spring 2020 for refusing to use race-based grading criteria, mobilized mass support and legal assistance, was reinstated, and is now suing the university. Statements recounting one’s activities on behalf of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion are mandatory in faculty job applications and in promotion dossiers. Among its “Gender Recognition” policy recommendations, a university task force is calling for “curricular updates…For example: inclusion of non-binary and intersex identities in biology courses for health care practitioners.” Is this a threat to pressure course instructors in the life sciences and social sciences to deny the human sex binary? The experience of former Penn State evolutionary biology postdoc, now Substack writer, Colin Wright (although unconnected with UCLA), suggests that it might be. For arguing against assertions that “biological sex is a continuous spectrum [and] that notions of male and female may be mere social constructs,” Wright’s academic career was derailed by an online mob.

Also 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. A considerable brouhaha ensued. Unlike Rust, Enstrom, Fink, Klein, or Brantingham, 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, etc. Irrespective of the content, doesn’t it infringe on the academic freedom of individual professors (and postdocs and graduate students, whose careers are dependent on faculty recommendations) 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 the UCLA and overall University of California leadership, to no avail.

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. The younger faculty tend to be more Woke than their elders. Administrators and student “protesters” perform elaborately choreographed routines that end with the former enacting policies that they wanted to enact anyway, for which the latter’s public temper tantrums serve as a pretext. Now that standardized tests have been dropped from undergraduate application requirements, a growing number of students will be simultaneously (1) unable to handle university level coursework, and (2) predisposed to denounce their professors for heresy, having been chosen for admission on the basis on their far-left activism as high school students. Meanwhile, California’s K-12 schools are increasingly substituting mind-damaging political indoctrination for education.

But Why Not Stick Around for the Paycheck?

One of my more cynical friends, a tenured professor at a different university, suggested this. He’s no longer on speaking terms with his colleagues, refuses all requests to serve on committees, and spends as much time as possible out of the country. He thinks I’m out of my mind, swapping a salary for a pension.

Maybe he’s right. And maybe I’m craven for ducking the unpleasantness that would be entailed by going that route, or by remaining at my job and becoming a chronic troublemaker. But 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, but so far it’s been happening painfully slowly.

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’ increasingly brazen rejection of two values that, during the 20th Century, made them into places where Jews specifically, and curious, ambitious, and open-minded people generally, could thrive: meritocracy and free debate. In 2019, I thought that Leibovitz was exaggerating and rather overwrought. Everything that’s happened since has shown that he was right. That’s it: I’m getting out.

What’s next? For one thing, with the time that used to be taken up by teaching and university service, I’ll write blog posts. Stay tuned.

1. Note: Peterson and Boghossian resigned. Katz and Winegard were fired.