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Campus In Crisis: Activism Is Replacing Rigor At UCLA
UCLA has made headlines in the past few months for all the wrong reasons: from the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from a pro-Hamas mob, a university-funded magazine endorsing furries as a sexual kink, and a student government leader imploring students to take up arms against the LAPD when law enforcement arrested those who led an assault on a synagogue.
These instances are not isolated flukes, or simply the misconduct of a few bad apples ignored by the university. Rather, this behavior, and the totalizing mindset that encourages violent, unthinking action, is learned and abetted by UCLA’s academy. Instead of empowering students to critically engage with ideas, learn from great texts, or become citizens invested in the public good, my university now serves as a finishing school for unreflective activism. This fervor isn’t unique to UCLA, but is a reflection of larger trends of activism replacing rigor within American higher education.
In my 3-year tenure at UCLA, less than a fourth of my classes have assigned complete books. Instead, professors tend to focus on assigning op-eds, TED talks, and essays that are meant to squeeze conversations into a particular moral framework. Professors routinely assign essays on decolonization that call for the destruction of the United States, TED Talks that promote the intersection of historically disadvantaged identities as the lens through which to analyze all social conflicts, and op-eds claiming that anti-Semitism is not a threat facing Jewish people, but rather a weaponized accusation meant to protect Israeli interests. The professors who uncritically structure their classes do a disservice not only to their disciplines and students, but to their own viewpoints that they fail to put to the test of rigorous inquiry.
Instead of learning from the texts that have shaped our civilization, we are assigned short pieces interacting with the ideas of thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, that detest the idea of a straight, white author. Students are graded based on their ability to unquestioningly endorse their professors’ agenda as a reflection of their understanding of class material, instead of being encouraged to develop and articulate their own ideas.
Within this framework, the struggles of all oppressed groups—racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia — are portrayed as interconnected, attributed to a boogeyman of the ‘elite’: those who embrace traditional values or have historically wielded power. This framework justifies violence and malice, if it is done on behalf of those deemed as the “oppressed.” Terrorist groups like Hamas are positioned as heroes, while America is positioned as the purveyor of an insidious status quo.
For example, in one class, I was taught to applaud people with mental illness as heroic, such as schizophrenics who refused to take their medicine. In the same class, the professor lauded their own conditions as self-diagnosed and that formal medical diagnoses were inherently racist, ableist, and classist. Writing as an individual with diagnosed autoimmune disorders, I lost points on an assignment for using “gendered language” in “academic writing,” when referring to an author who was born and identifies as a male.
This totalizing mindset is the culprit for the pro-Hamas encampments within universities, where students burn American flags and prevent Jewish students from accessing campus. One experience, characteristic of this, occurred when a student used an anti-Jewish slur — “Zio” — in class. When I pointed out that this word was indeed a slur popularized by David Duke, the student retorted that she was not interested in “playing respectability politics with these people.” Instead of telling the student that slurs were not acceptable, the professor responded by asking me to expand on who David Duke was.
Although this student and professor would cite the righting of historical wrongs as their goal, their reductionism actually hurts disadvantaged groups. In their struggle to address every problem through one lens, these professors run roughshod over the particular causes that they intend to promote. In 2023, one professor announced that it was the worst year in American history to be black. Surely, even the most pessimistic academic would agree that slavery and Jim Crow presented more problems for African Americans.
This indictment does not apply to every professor at UCLA. Many sincerely care about their students, the integrity of their work, and the future of their discipline. I have been extremely lucky to have been shaped, challenged, and inspired by such professors. However, as an institution, UCLA rewards those who cater to intersectionality ideology over academic rigor.
The struggle for women’s suffrage in America, for example, was not tantamount to South Africa’s liberation from apartheid. 2022 was not the worst year in American history for African Americans. To demand every situation be analyzed through the same binary of oppressed versus oppressor is downright dangerous and serves to justify hatred and violence against anyone with whom one ideologically disagrees. Maximalist rhetoric dilutes the real struggles that minorities face, and allows students to see the world as a black-and-white struggle between absolute good and pure evil.
George Orwell wrote: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’…” Characteristically, his wisdom is ever-relevant in our modern moment. In a class, a professor painted the advocacy of any restrictions on abortion or membership in the Republican Party as fascistic. As lectures, seminars, and syllabi deem American values as evil, students are compelled to proudly associate with some of the world’s most backward groups in the name of justice. It is no surprise that Al-Qaeda, David Duke, and Hamas have found “useful idiots” among the likes of the student activists at UCLA.
Most egregious is how students assert that world conflicts must be understood through their personal experience of either privilege or oppression. As students try to understand situations like the present Israel-Hamas war in the framework of American race relations or gender politics, they project their narrow subjectivity onto a complex reality. Though my peers decry colonialism in their activism, the hubris of demanding that every struggle must be understood through your own experience is a crude colonialism of the classroom.
If a student disagrees with one part of this radical agenda by supporting a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict or by questioning whether children should undergo medical gender transition at the age of 12, they face academic and social repercussions. This zero-sum mentality asphyxiates the exchange of ideas traditionally associated with the liberal arts and liberalism, and demonizes all who dare to even question its fervor.
With the substitution of cheap slogans for real scholarship, my peers have traded nuance for self-righteousness — an abdication of our responsibility as students.
While the violent incidents at UCLA are eye-catching, they are not anomalies; they reflect a deep-seated ideological shift that prioritizes radical activism over genuine academic inquiry. Until UCLA prioritizes the hiring of faculty who will guide students towards constructive conversations, empty statements or performative commissions will only distract from the symptoms of the crisis UCLA has created.
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Bella Brannon is a student at UCLA studying Public Affairs, Religion, and Digital Humanities. She is the Editor-In-Chief of Ha’Am, researched bias in artificial intelligence with the School of Technology Law and Policy, and spent the summer interning with the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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