UCLA likely had political motives, scholar says
The University of California Los Angeles recently canceled a student-led course on public health in Palestine for violating a school regulation that states only instructors can give grades.
One expert in higher education policy told The College Fix the cancellation doesn’t violate academic freedom, but it is likely motivated by politics.
Students at the Fielding School of Public Health planned for the course, which would have met in the fall, to focus on “reproductive, environmental and nutritional health in Palestine,” according to the Daily Bruin.
One of the instructors said the course “was passed unanimously by the department’s curriculum review committee, and that should have been the end of the story,” the outlet reported.
“A couple days later, we started hearing whispers in the department that we might need to go to a different review committee,” said Samira, a planned student instructor who requested partial anonymity, according to the Daily Bruin.
The Fielding School’s Educational Policy and Curriculum Committee reviewed and ultimately canceled the class.
While the committee did not make any reference to the course’s content, it stated that the course did not meet regulations. School policy states that grades can only be issued by instructors of record and classes cannot be taught by unsalaried students, according to the Daily Bruin.
However, the student-led class structure was not new for the school. Graduate students had taught previous courses, ranging in topics from the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri riots to President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, the student newspaper reported.
Rafik Wahbi, doctoral student of public health, said that students need to be educated in this area because Palestine has experienced “the worst public health conditions that any human group has ever experienced in the modern day,” according to the Daily Bruin.
Randall Kuhn, the class’s professor on record, pointed out the success of these classes, saying, “they won awards from public health societies. Our school published about it in their school magazine,” the outlet reported. Despite this precedent, the committee maintained that the new course could not be offered.
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The committee’s inconsistency has led to speculation that the cancellation was due to political concerns. Wahbi characterized the committee’s justification as “disingenuous.”
The Fix reached out to UCLA media relations, the Fielding School of Public Health, and Professor Kuhn via multiple emails over the last two weeks for more information about the course’s cancellation. None responded.
Chance Layton, a spokesperson for the National Association of Scholars, told The Fix the school’s decision was “likely politically motivated,” especially as “UCLA comes under pressure from lawmakers for practicing racial preferences in hiring and admissions.”
He also said the decision fits a broader pattern of ideologically driven curricula.
“The student interviewed by the Daily Bruin posits that the ‘cancellation was inconsistent with everything else he has seen from his school.’ Well, of course it is! The school has been pushing an ideologically and politically motivated course load for quite some time, indoctrinating students to think of ‘health equity’ first and foremost,” he said.
Layton also said NAS has reported that medical schools have adopted the language of “identity politics as official standards” and have made social justice activism a practical requirement for both students and faculty, despite its lack of scientific grounding.
Still, the NAS spokesperson clarified that the cancelation “does not infringe on academic freedom.”
“Students can still study, publish, and discuss health outcomes in Palestine,” he said. But the school should have clearly stated that courses to discuss and study this topic already exist rather than attempting to find a “loophole.”
“Obfuscation rarely helps in these situations,” he said.
Layton also told The Fix that “the school ought to vet student-teachers appropriately, including the courses they propose to teach.”
“If a school already has a system in place to do so for unpaid students, then I do not see a problem with them teaching a course. This is more an administrative issue than one of policy, as I see it,” he said.
He also said that Palestine has “become an omni-issue,” where even unrelated problems in the U.S., such as housing shortages or poor health outcomes, are reframed to highlight Palestinian suffering and blame Israel.
“‘America has an incredible and almost insurmountable housing shortage!’ turns into ‘Think of all the people in Palestine and the suffering of the now homeless population, can you believe Israel did this?’” he said.
Activists will inject the cause wherever possible, even in academic settings, but the “hyperbolized” portrayal of suffering abroad has little relevance to the real health challenges faced by everyday Americans who fund higher education, he said.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: University of California Los Angeles campus; Pandora Pictures/Shutterstock