Frontpage Editorial: Defund UCLA

Whoa.

From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "'No one wants to openly admit [we all] hope Clarence Thomas dies'":

Earlier this month, Joseph H. Manson, a respected anthropologist and the former winner of a Leakey Foundation Research Grant, announced that he was walking away from his tenured position at the university after what he described as the “woke capture” of the institution.

After writing about the ruthless political persecution of P. Jeffrey Brantingham, a fellow anthropology department academic who was canceled for studying crime patterns, he also listed other purged UCLA faculty.

"Emeritus Professor Val Rust (Graduate School of Education) was banned from campus after incurring the wrath of graduate student adherents of Critical Race Theory. Researcher James Enstrom (Environmental Health Sciences) and lecturer Keith Fink (Communication Studies) were fired from dissenting from the woke orthodoxy. Gordon Klein, after being suspended 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."

Klein came under such sustained attack that he had to be placed under armed guard.

The academic documented campus antisemitism including a talk by bigoted antisemite Rabab Abdulhadi, who had falsely accused a Jewish student of "white supremacy" for supporting Israel resulting in a complaint filed with the Department of Education. UCLA has been the subject of complaints over antisemitism by StandWithUs, the Zachor Legal Institute and others.

UCLA anti-Israel activists, as documented by the civil rights group Canary Mission, have boasted that they're members of terrorist groups, supported terrorism and called for the murder of Jews without any action being taken by the university.

Leftist hate and violence at UCLA has not only been directed at Jews and pro-Israel students. Manson’s principled resignation comes after Johnathan Perkins, the director for Race and Equity at the University of California-Los Angeles, recently tweeted, "No one wants to openly admit [we all] hope Clarence Thomas dies."

Unlike the academics targeted by leftist campus lynch mobs, Perkins faced no consequences.

Despite UCLA's growing extremism, its core budget in past years was funded at as much as a third by California taxpayers. In 2015, UCLA received $440 million from the state. And the nation's taxpayers, through the federal government, provide a majority of its research grants amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars more in money flowing through the system.

As a public university, UCLA is a non-profit under 501(c)(3) even though it has long ceased to function as a non-partisan institution and has become an aggressive leftist political machine.

UCLA spends over $1 million on political lobbyists.

Its personnel rank as 47 out of 25,950 in political funding and have provided almost $1 million to the DNC, $400,947 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, $181,468 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and $151,650 to the House Majority PAC in the 2022 cycle alone. Even though Senator Raphael Warnock, a racist Georgia politician, is on the other side of the country, UCLA's leftists still poured $124,881 into his campaign.

In 2020, UCLA personnel funded Biden to the tune of almost $4 million and nearly another million to Bernie Sanders, along with millions more to various leftist election PACs.

UCLA is no longer a serious academic institution. Its “woke” faculty are purging credible academic figures like Joseph H. Manson and others, while cultivating an atmosphere of hatred on campus and using a taxpayer-funded institution for political and anti-American activity.

It’s time for the IRS to pull UCLA’s non-profit status.

With a $5.1 billion endowment, there’s no reason for taxpayers to fund UCLA either directly or indirectly. If UCLA wants to drive out serious academics while promoting radical discourse, it should do this with its own money and if it wants to function as an arm of the Democrats, it should not enjoy non-profit status while interfering in and subverting our political system.

While the IRS has targeted conservative non-profits, it has continued to allow leftist non-profits, including UCLA to operate without oversight or accountability. Department of Education investigations have failed to clean up UCLA, lifting its non-profit status is the nuclear option.

California and this country deserve great public universities. UCLA and its institutions can no longer claim to be serving any such function. By lifting UCLA’s non-profit status, donors may be redirected to contribute to emerging institutions like the University of Austin that are dedicated to serious academic inquiry and honor free speech: values that UCLA no longer believes in.