UCLA Students Demand Two Professors Be Fired For Doing Their Job
Woke students are using meaningless language, having a meltdown over facts, and 'canceling' people whose ideas they don't like — all in the name of equality.
Students are demanding the firing of two University of California, Los Angeles lecturers for doing their jobs, bringing the quest for conformity and identity politics to an absurd new level.
One of the lecturers is Gordon Klein, who teaches accounting at the Anderson School of Management. A UCLA student emailed Klein recently, telling him that in light of George Floyd’s tragic death, black students “are struggling to focus on their educations when there is massive sociopolitical unrest that concerns both them and the future of their plight in this country.” To show support for black classmates, the student, who is not black, asked Klein to offer a “no-harm” final exam that could only benefit black students’ grades.
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Klein is not the only UCLA lecturer whose job is on the line. Students are also demanding the firing of political science lecturer W. Ajax Peris, an Air Force veteran. People who know Peris well consider him a regular liberal, never a controversial type.
When teaching the history of racism recently, Peris read aloud MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which includes the n-word, and showed a documentary to the class in which lynching was discussed. For students who signed up to “learn” the history of racism against black people, hearing a white lecturer read the n-word from a letter written by a jailed civil rights leader and watching lynching imagery made them feel so “uncomfortable,” they asked Peris to stop. Peris apologized for causing students “discomfort” but continued his teaching, resulting in a great deal of “distress” and “anger” among the students.
Leadership of the Political Science Department quickly condemned Peris in a department-wide email for failing to reassess his “teaching pedagogy to meet the students’ needs.” The same leadership also referred Peris to UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office for an investigation. Furthermore, UCLA will host a town hall for students in Peris’ classes to discuss the “controversy” and next steps. Despite Peris’ multiple apologies, students still want him dismissed.
This afternoon Fox News is reporting:
A California college professor reportedly is being investigated for discrimination and under police protection after refusing a request to exempt black students from final exams in the wake of George Floyd's death.
The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) suspended Gordon Klein, an accounting professor in the Anderson School of Business where he's been teaching for 39 years, for three weeks beginning on June 25 after he declined a student's request to delay a final exam in light of Floyd's death, the Free Beacon reports.
Anderson School of Management Dean Antonio Bernardo sent an email to students on Monday calling Klein's behavior "troubling" and reportedly extended the time students have to complete exams given the "difficult circumstances."
The Malibu Police Department reportedly has an increased police presence outside Klein's home after multiple threats.
At least 20,000 people signed a petition calling for Klein's removal after a student who wasn't in the class posted the email exchange on social media.
Words fail me.
Anybody with a scintilla of moral fiber knows this kind of madness in higher education is precisely that: madness. Lunatics are put away for their own good and the good of those around them. When will the time be right if not now?
ReplyDeleteThe inmates are running the asylum. Some are just now noticing.
ReplyDeleteTwenty years ago, a senior advertising account executive (then, a 40 year old) told me the college grads they hire as junior copywriters can't even write grammatically correct sentences. They have to teach these newly hired college graduates how to write. He was a graduate of Wesleyan University--they hired from similar little-Ivy type schools in New England. He was dumbfounded.
I graduated from a very small, very rural. high school in West Texas (12 in graduating class). Worked my ass off Spring of 1965 to buy a $15 transistor radio with FM capability(about the size of a pack of cigarettes with a 9Vbattery), not to listen to music, there were no FM stations that could be received from my home town. I worked "like a Turk" to have it before June 3rd, The day Ed White made the first American space walk. A time a kid in West Texas could stand out on a dirt road and listen, on a cheap Japanese transistor radio that he had earned himself, to an American "walking" in space and talking directly to Houston, because the FM band was receivable, even on 9V, as long as they were above the horizon. Even in "Boomer Rube" land we understood the concepts of science and history.
DeleteFast forward 50 years and I decide to finish college and teach History because I basically love it. I also minor in English. I am astounded at the illiteracy of the people around me. The historical ignorance of people that were in their 4th year of the history program was staggering, and those nearing completion of a literature degree was no less dismal. My HS English teacher, who earned her degree in the '30's and taught both my parents, would have been shocked. I typically pulled A's on my papers, but only if I hewed the instructors line, but in my head I always heard her saying, "Tom, you can do better." This was a 2nd tier State school and it was required that freshmen take remedial writing and math classes. Many had to have do-overs before they could formally declare a major in the Humanities Dept. A large part of the problem was that they hadn't been any where, done anything, and had no discernable future apart from a continuation of the status quo, which was a continuation of high school without adult supervision.
Tom S.
"Victims" of the monster they helped create.
ReplyDeleteThis is true. None of this is accidental and the prep for it has been ongoing for decades.
DeleteNo one is forcing them to stay in a school that does things that offend their snowflake sensibilities.
ReplyDeleteThere is no "right" to "not be offended."
EZ--I think you'd be surprised at the rights or "rights" these snowflakes or Millennials believe they are entitled.
DeleteOne 20-something (who sought me out, grey hair as a proxy for insight) was certain he had the right to the cheapest goods available from China. Mercantilism, trade deficits, balance of payments, off-shoring as economic or social policy, national security self-sufficiency, etc. Clueless to discuss or engage any of these issues. It was his right, he was entitled to have access to the cheapest-priced goods. And he told me so.
They've been raised, and schooled, where no one ever said "no" to them. The world is their oyster, and they're going to feast at the buffet--and no one is to stop them. Quite remarkable.
Have you ever known a spoiled 4 year old that would rather just accept NO or negotiate a work around rather than stamp their feet and screech, "But I want."
DeleteTom S.
The only good news that I can say is that those who built these Frankenstein's monsters (I'm not implicating Klein or Peris) are finding that the monsters learn quickly and turn on the creator, just like in the Boris Karloff classic.
ReplyDeleteIt's not much, but there is the pleasure of seeing some get their just desserts.
Unfortunately, a lot of innocent people are collateral damage.
For the record, I didn't see the "'victims' of the monster they helped create' comment before I posted mine.
ReplyDeleteWe appear to be on the same page.
Just read this. written a year ago, but very timely well written.
ReplyDeletehttps://areomagazine.com/2019/04/11/iconoclasm-and-the-erasing-of-history/
Tom S.
UC Berserkeley prof destroys BLM and its useful idiots everywhere with barrage of High Explosive truth rounds:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.zerohedge.com/political/anonymous-berkeley-professor-shreds-blm-injustice-narrative-damning-stats-and-logic