The University of California, Los Angeles has lost four prominent professors that opposed liberal agendas within the past few years.
UCLA parted ways with four professors who expressed anti-left-wing views between 2010 and 2017, according to The College Fix.
The school fired James Enstrom in 2010, a public health professor who had taught at the university for 34 years, calling his study arguing for the elimination of much of California’s environmental legislation “not aligned with the academic mission of the Department.”
Enstrom sued UCLA, and the university settled with him and permitted him to remain a “retired researcher,” essentially rescinding his termination.
UCLA banned international and comparative education professor Val Rust from campus in 2013 after he challenged a student’s capitalization of “indigenous” and questioned the feminist research used by the student in an essay. The school placed three other professors in Rust’s classroom, but this was not enough for student activists, who created a petition demanding further action. When Rust touched one of the protester’s arms while speaking with him about the incident, the student filed a criminal battery charge against the professor, and UCLA subsequently banned him from campus for the remainder of the school year.
The school terminated attorney and lecturer Keith Fink, who taught vastly popular courses on free speech and criticized UCLA’s encroachment on students’ First Amendment rights, after a performance review committee with members he alleged were biased against him failed him in 2017.
Political science professor Tim Groseclose transferred from UCLA to George Mason University after he was denied a promotion despite support from even his far left-wing coworkers. Groseclose had published a book in 2011 entitled “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.”
“Even if your research productivity is the highest in your department, even double that of second place, if you have conservative political views, then you’re not welcome at UCLA,” Groseclose told The College Fix.
“Conservatives, if they are going to be conservatives [at UCLA], they are playing Russian roulette,” said a right-leaning professor at the school, who asked to not be named when speaking with The College Fix. “They are taking their lives into their hands.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to UCLA for comment, but received none in time for publication.
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