The University of California (UC) system counts 70 Nobel laureates a well as former Supreme Court justices, governors, members of Congress, US presidential advisors and cabinet members, presidents of other countries, founders of Fortune 100 companies, and leading authors, artists, playwrights, musicians, and filmmakers among its alumni and faculty. Today, UC graduates more than 60,000 degree recipients each year.
What makes UC so special? It is the state’s long-standing vision that bringing innovative faculty together with bright and ambitious students and giving those individuals the freedom to pursue their dreams will create game-changing ideas and future leaders. And so it has. But this remarkably successful vision, and the UC system more broadly, is in danger, and the source of that danger comes from within.
At my institution of UCLA, Professor Joseph Manson, who has taught anthropology there since 1996, has resigned because the political climate within that department has become sufficiently stifling that it is now antithetical to the most foundational principle of academic excellence: the freedom of inquiry and open expression.
Professor Manson writes, “I’m a 62-year-old professor—by academic standards, still young. But I am retiring this summer because the woke takeover of higher education has ruined academic life.” He states that, until recently, UCLA’s Anthropology Department was cohesive, peaceful, and inclusive. But in the last few years, he notes a sea change in the department’s hiring that has completely affected the culture within the department to the point that some of the most productive and impactful faculty have been ostracized:
“Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of critical’ (i.e. leftist, postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique. These militant faculty members recruited even more militant graduate students to work with them.”
Some of Professor Manson’s colleagues have tried to stop the research of another faculty member, Professor Jeffrey Brantingham, who applies artificial intelligence and learning algorithms to predict crime by location within a city, and the time of day the crimes are more likely to occur. The crime prediction algorithm that he helped invent, known as “PredPol”, is used by police departments throughout the world. His research shows that the algorithm is reducing crime and helping police departments more effectively deploy resources where crime is more likely to occur and when.
The algorithm grew out of Brantingham’s research on predicting military casualties in Iraq, which helped the Pentagon identify particularly hostile locations within Iraq that US personnel should avoid. Following this, former LAPD chief William Bratton approached UCLA and Brantingham and asked if the data his LAPD staff were collecting on the location of crimes committed, the type of crime, and when crimes occurred, could be used more systematically to predict when and where crime may occur.
In randomized tests conducted in Los Angeles and Kent, England, researchers found that the algorithm predicted crime much more accurately than the subjective predictions made by veteran police staff based on their experience alone. The research findings were published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, one of the leading peer-reviewed journals in the statistics profession.
Using Brantingham’s research, police departments throughout the US and the world have been able to reduce crime by deploying more resources in areas more likely to have crime. They also have been able to economize on their budgets. The algorithm is saving the LAPD about $9 million per year by helping the department utilize its resources more effectively.
In 2015, UCLA issued a press release highlighting Brantingham’s research achievements, noting that “predictive policing substantially reduces crime in Los Angeles.”
But what appears to be another UC game-changing idea is anything but that in Brantingham’s own department. Anthropology PhD students issued a resolution calling for Brantingham’s research to be considered for vetting by UCLA administration because it “reinforces and naturalizes the institutions of racial capitalism, mass incarceration, imperialism, and global white supremacy” and because “Professor Brantingham’s research further entrenches and naturalizes the criminalization of Blackness in the United States and converts state racism into mathematical models by employing police reports and demarcated spaces as putatively neutral.”
This is chilling not only because of the complete intolerance of research that these students don’t like for political reasons but also because PhD students—ostensibly future scientists—don’t seem to understand the principles of the scientific method, principles that have guided scientific inquiry for centuries, principles developed and refined by Galileo, Kepler, and Aristotle, principles expertly applied by Professor Brantingham.
Professor Manson notes that Professor Brantingham has been effectively erased from the department, which is a much bigger loss for his colleagues, who could learn much from him, than it is for Brantingham. And as Manson notes, it is not just the anti-scientific and anti-intellectual tenor of his own department that led him to resign. He notes similar issues in the Graduate School of Education, Communication Studies, Environmental Health Sciences, and the Anderson Graduate School of Business.
Professor Manson did not mention Asian Studies, which last year issued a statement on behalf of the entire department that it stands in solidarity with Palestinians. The statement notes, “We understand that such violence and intimidation [against Palestinians] are but the latest manifestation of seventy-three years of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and occupation.” It goes on to argue “how the Israeli military’s policing of the apartheid wall dividing Jerusalem and isolating the West Bank has influenced the U.S.’s own brutal border security policies along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
It is unbelievable, at least to me, that an academic department would issue a political statement ostensibly speaking for all its’ stakeholders. Does this statement accurately reflect the views of all the Department's faculty, lecturers, and graduate students? Almost certainly not, but this is what happens when intimidation and groupthink usurp freedom and individuality within the academy. And what also happens is that we lose excellent and principled scholars, such as Professor Manson.
This must be stopped. If it is not, an institution that for over a century has been committed to searching for truth and equality and justice, and which has done so much to celebrate the beauty and uniqueness in all of us, will cease to exist as we have known it. And for what?
