SOMEBODY BUY THAT MAN A TRAIN SET.

You can walk away from higher education if you want.  "Isn't the point of being retired not having to come in to the office? 'Emeritus' is not Latin for 'doing for free that which I used to be paid to do.'"  It sounds like UCLA {motto: On! Wisconsin!) anthropologist Joseph Manson wants to keep writing, although getting any new work past peer review might be perilous.

For decades, anthropology has notoriously been riven by conflict between scientific and political activist factions, leading many departments to split in two, but UCLA’s department remained unusually peaceful, cohesive, and intellectually inclusive until the late 2000s. Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of “critical” (i.e. far-left postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique. These militant faculty recruited even more extremely militant graduate students to work with them.

I can’t recount here even a representative sample of this faction’s penchant for mendacity and intimidation, because most of it occurred during confidential discussions, usually about hiring and promotion decisions.

It's apparently no longer the custom in that field to have unruly workshops but still to respect the forms of scholarly inquiry.  "This document contains no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembles a religious proclamation of anathema."  That goes beyond arguing from tight priors, but so it goes in the Church of Intersectionality, with all the dynamics of a middle-school clique populated by the kind of querulous weaklings that fill the common room.

In private conversations, I was able to elicit from some of my colleagues an embarrassed acknowledgment that the Woke faction had treated Jeff [Brantingham] abominably, and that we strongly resembled a dysfunctional family in denial. This pervasive institutional doublethink was partly a result of Jeff’s own apparent decision to refrain from open confrontation: I offered to help him, by defending him publicly if he wished, after both the 2018 AGSA resolution and the 2020 flyer posts, and he thanked me but politely asked me to stay out of it. But the principal driver of the doublethink was fear of the Woke faction.

That's so common, whether we're talking about the United States Senate, the UCLA faculty, or any other place where the dictatorship of the sociable holds sway, those of us who are willing to take the incoming often have people confiding their covert agreement or support, whilst keeping their heads down when the opportunity to take a stand arises.

In those circumstances, though, the prudent thing to do might be to go Galt.

One of my more cynical friends, a tenured professor at a different university, suggested [drawing a salary and exerting minimal effort.] He’s no longer on speaking terms with his colleagues, refuses all requests to serve on committees, and spends as much time as possible out of the country. He thinks I’m out of my mind, swapping a salary for a pension.

Maybe he’s right. And maybe I’m craven for ducking the unpleasantness that would be entailed by going that route, or by remaining at my job and becoming a chronic troublemaker.

The problem with taking that approach is that it looks like the kind of tenure abuse that keeps Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes current whilst not changing any wokies minds.

Better to invest in that train set.