Bari Weiss: A leopard ate a guy's face for daring to help police and this shows the wokes are out of control.
A professor was criticized for developing a potentially racist predictive policing tool.
In yet another tragic victory of darkness over light, ignorance over knowledge, a tenured UCLA professor has quit in response to the woke mobs bent on stifling academic freedom. “The ideological takeover of my university has ruined academic life for anyone who still believes in freedom of thought,” writes erstwhile anthropology professor Joseph Manson on Bari’s Weiss’s blog Common Sense.
In her introduction, Weiss explains the dynamic by which progressive institutions eat their own—literally.
Let’s say you work for a prestigious company or organization that professes to care about a certain set of values: open-mindedness, curiosity, excellence, hard work. And let’s say you watch as a colleague, previously held up as a paragon of those values, is ostracized and smeared for a thought crime that was not considered a thought crime until about five minutes ago. Maybe he made a bad joke. Or maybe he used the phrase “guys” instead of folks. Or Hispanic instead of Latinx.
Common sense would tell you: If it can happen to him, it can happen to me. Common sense would insist: If the leopard is currently eating the face of the person in the the cubicle next to me, what will stop it from eating mine?
But when the leopard comes for your colleague, what I have witnessed is that something like 99% of people find a way to wiggle out of this obvious next step. They tell themselves the person getting their face eaten deserved it. Or that the leopard was just particularly hungry that day.
Well, this anthropology professor wasn’t just going to sit there grading papers while the leopard finished off his colleague’s face in the faculty lounge.
Most people who leave their jobs as professors these days do not do so because they have a choice. They leave because they are pushed out by ideological bullies. But Professor Manson is leaving of his own volition. Why? In large part because he understands the nature of leopards. Here’s his piece.
So, right off the bat: what’s so insidious about these “colleges are the modern inquisition” stories is that there are multiple layers of framing, before you get to what actually happened, that suggest an outrageous and unjust reaction to thought-crime.
Even though I think Weiss is a bad faith actor, I dove into the story expecting that the anthropology professor was hounded out of a job because he still assigned Margaret Mead or something. I read down to what actually happened, because I hate-read this stuff and also the absurd intrigues of academia make the journalism industry appear sane by comparison. But most people will encounter the headline, or skim Weiss’s intro, or something, and get more of the sense that there’s a miasma of intellectual oppression floating around, preparing to eat your face.
So what actually happened?
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