“UCLA race and equity official placed on leave over social media posts about Charlie Kirk killing” (ABC):
UCLA’s director of race and equity has been placed on leave over social media posts he made about the killing of Charlie Kirk, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.
Jonathan Perkins, an official with UCLA’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Office, apparently published the remarks on BlueSky. The posts seemed to express both satisfaction and indifference to the fatal shooting of the conservative activist.
The posts were “written in my own hand, in my own voice, in no way the echo of my employer, UCLA,” Perkins said in a written statement provided to The Times, adding that they were protected by the First Amendment.
“It’s a truly sad day. My livelihood could ultimately be threatened for stating, in the clearest terms, that I felt no grief at the death of an avowed white nationalist- (a) man who dedicated his life to despising mine, to despising my people, to despising our very existence,” Perkins’s statement said. “I am devastated to learn of higher ed colleagues around the country, facing similar and much worse consequences, including termination. I admit, I thought UCLA was different. I hope we are.”
What I find interesting about this is that taxpayers, both California and federal, are forced to work extra hours every week in order to pay someone to be “director of race” in a society where a government-run enterprise isn’t supposed to be able to consider race (14th Amendment). (Why would taxpayers in Arkansas and Maine have to pay, you might ask? Despite decrying inequality, California universities insist on feeding at the federal trough rather than using state tax dollars and leaving the federal money for universities in poorer-than-average stages, such as the Islamic Republic of Michigan.)
What did the Director of Race at UCLA have to say? From the Daily Mail:
These sentiments are a little different from what my Democrat friends in Maskachusetts have said. They mostly say that they’re happy that Charlie Kirk was killed (and sad that Donald Trump wasn’t), but it isn’t personal as it apparently was with Director of Race Perkins. The Maskachusetts Democrats didn’t like what Charlie Kirk had to say and are happy that he was killed because now he can’t say anything more.
As usual, Phil, you are a nattering nabob of negativism. Why not focus on the positive?- UCLA’s Director of Race Discrimination is masked indicating that he respects THE SCIENCE. Come on, Phil, keep on the sunny side of life. You will be happier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbmQQ4RfzVE
Phil — I don’t know why you keep mentioning steering federal research dollars to poorer states. Such dollars should be intelligently spent and that means awarding grants to the smartest researchers, who generally are employed by the most prestigious universities. What we should do is allocate funding solely to the most creative and smartest researchers, which generally means blue states: Massachusetts (Harvard, MIT), New York (Columbia, NYU), Illinois (University of Chicago, Northwestern), California (Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA). The dollars awarded to poorer states are in most cases spreading the dollars around due to political appeasement so that the entire research budget will be passed by Congress. So we end up wasting some money in order to get funding for the best researchers approved. What a waste.
When you decided to obtain a PhD, you attended MIT, and when you decided to teach, you taught at MIT. If you think the poorest states are so deserving of federal research dollars, how about you swap your PhD from MIT for a PhD from the University of Mississippi?
A significant reason that the poor states (which are usually red) are poor is that they lack as much intellectual as the blue states. Really smart people generally will not attend the University of Mississippi if they can attend Stanford or MIT. This creates a virtuous circle where after graduation the geniuses stay in, say, Massachusetts (now the life science / biotech capital of the world) and the Bay area (e.g., San Francisco is now the AI capital of the world).
I know you will completely ignore these facts and going forward, I will see lots of posts from you about allocating more money to the poorest states.
James Mitchell
https://jamesmitchell.info/
Anon: Great researchers can and do follow the dollars. If the Feds offered a research group at Harvard five years of full funding on condition that they move to an institution in a poorer-than-average state either (1) Harvard and Maskachusetts would match the Federal offer so that the research group would stay (a huge win for the U.S. taxpayer, freeing up funds to be spent elsewhere or, God forbid, pay down our $37+ trillion national debt), or (2) the research group would move.
(Our neighborhood here in Florida is home to neuroscientists and entire research groups that moved from universities in other states because of the opportunities, including funding, available at https://mpfi.org/ (see, for example, https://mpfi.org/science/our-labs/tian-lab/ , which moved from University of California, Davis))
@phil i think we had this discussion before. The rich collages (Blue) are rich because for last 100 years they proved themselves in doing good research and establishing good research programs. It is same as Red collages having huge football programs because they work hard at it and they are better. Right now we have a Congress and Executive branch favorable to Red states and these red collages can get research fuds if that’s what they want to do.
Anon: Not only is the discussion old, but the experiment has been conducted. MIT claimed that it was the only possible source of magnet nerds for the U.S. and, therefore, must be selected as the location for the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Florida State swooped in and said “if you built in Tallahassee the magnet nerds will come here.” It seems that the Florida-based lab has been hugely successful. Al Gore even showed up in 1994 to dedicate it, according to Wikipedia, just 22 years before the Earth was consumed by a runaway greenhouse (2006 warning of a “point of no return within 10 years” if his climate-saving proposals weren’t adopted, which of course they weren’t).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_High_Magnetic_Field_Laboratory
I guess you could use CERN as another proof that researchers follow the money. Geneva wasn’t a center of scientific research prior to the mid-1950s formation of CERN. New Jersey wasn’t a scientific powerhouse prior to Bell Labs being established in 1925 and yet trailblazing Black female scientist Wilma Shockley invented the transistor there.
The Racism League universities aren’t clairvoyant. University of Pennsylvania, for example, demoted trailblazing female scientist Katalin Karikó whose mRNA research ultimately prevented SARS-CoV-2 from killing 100 percent of humans, as it was on track to do.
@phil looking at the Tallahassee experiment, if the Red states(schools) wants to develop good research programs they can do it, nobody is preventing them. With current favorable conditions we just need to wait 10 to 15 years so that Red Schools will over take Blue schools in research programs. For all the young people here, lets get ready to move south.
southerner: I am not making a red state/blue state argument. I am saying that Racism League schools should live their sacred “reduce inequality” principles by asking that federal funds be redirected to schools in poorer-than-average states. Although the Democrats are the party of the elite, there are poorer-than-average blue states, all of which are home to various universities. The Islamic Republic of Michigan, for example. Frozen Somaliland (Maine).
How are Perkins’ statements about Charlie Kirk protected by the 1st Amendment? No government entity prohibited him from saying anything he wanted. He has no inalienable right to be shielded from consequences of his statements. Just ask Amy Wax.
Isn’t MIT museum exhibit states something like “for 100 years MIT followed wrong principle that science were not racial” In 2020-th MIT switched to one German corporal’s and his affiliates’ view, who declared much of new physics “Jewish*. Somehow when I discuss US academia, Hitler references come up on first paragraph.
Behold the director of lousy blog comments. Remember all the greats who went to UC Berkeley & all the way to to the top had to take black studies. The lion kingdom had to take several years of religion class & didn’t go all the way to the top. Not sure what was more useless.