In a recent article, City Journal’s Heather MacDonald discusses some incidents involving the racial climate at UCLA. The incidents are so fantastic that at times the reader will probably suspect that MacDonald is guilty of hyperbole. However, I taught at UCLA for eleven and a half years. Things really are as bad as she describes.

One incident, which involves education professor Val Rust, illustrates the “eggshell plaintiff” attitude among some of the students at UCLA, how the tiniest slight can become a major racial grievance:

UCLA education professor emeritus Val Rust was involved in multiculturalism long before the concept even existed. A pioneer in the field of comparative education, which studies different countries’ educational systems, Rust has spent over four decades mentoring students from around the world and assisting in international development efforts. He has received virtually every honor awarded by the Society of Comparative and International Education. His former students are unanimous in their praise for his compassion and integrity. “He’s been an amazing mentor to me,” says Cathryn Dhanatya, an assistant dean for research at the USC Rossiter School of Education. “I’ve never experienced anything remotely malicious or negative in terms of how he views students and how he wants them to succeed.” Rosalind Raby, director of the California Colleges for International Education, says that Rust pushes you to “reexamine your own thought processes. There is no one more sensitive to the issue of cross-cultural understanding.” A spring 2013 newsletter from UCLA’s ed school celebrated Rust’s career and featured numerous testimonials about his warmth and support for students.

It was therefore ironic that Rust’s graduate-level class in dissertation preparation was the target of student protest just a few months later — ironic, but in the fevered context of the UCLA education school, not surprising. The school, which trumpets its “social-justice” mission at every opportunity, is a cauldron of simmering racial tensions. Students specializing in “critical race theory” — an intellectually vacuous import from law schools — play the race card incessantly against their fellow students and their professors, leading to an atmosphere of nervous self-censorship. Foreign students are particularly shell-shocked by the school’s climate. “The Asians are just terrified,” says a recent graduate. “They walk into this hyper-racialized environment and have no idea what’s going on. Their attitude in class is: ‘I don’t want to talk. Please don’t make me talk!’ ”

Val Rust’s dissertation-prep class had devolved into a highly charged arena of competing victim ideologies, impenetrable to anyone outside academia. For example: Were white feminists who use “standpoint theory” — a feminist critique of allegedly male-centered epistemology — illegitimately appropriating the “testimonial” genre used by Chicana feminists to narrate their stories of oppression? Rust took little part in these “methodological” disputes — if one can describe “Chicana testimonials” as a scholarly “method” — but let the more theoretically up-to-date students hash it out among themselves. Other debates centered on the political implications of punctuation. Rust had changed a student’s capitalization of the word “indigenous” in her dissertation proposal to the lowercase, thus allegedly showing disrespect for the student’s ideological point of view. Tensions arose over Rust’s insistence that students use the more academic Chicago Manual of Style for citation format; some students felt that the less formal American Psychological Association conventions better reflected their political commitments. During one of these heated discussions, Rust reached over and patted the arm of the class’s most vociferous critical race–theory advocate to try to calm him down — a gesture typical of the physically demonstrative Rust, who is prone to hugs. The student, Kenjus Watson, dramatically jerked his arm away, as a burst of nervous energy coursed through the room.

After each of these debates, the self-professed “students of color” exchanged e-mails about their treatment by the class’s “whites.” (Asians are not considered “persons of color” on college campuses, presumably because they are academically successful.) Finally, on November 14, 2013, the class’s five “students of color,” accompanied by “students of color” from elsewhere at UCLA, as well as by reporters and photographers from the campus newspaper, made their surprise entrance into Rust’s class as a “collective statement of Resistance by Graduate Students of Color.” The protesters formed a circle around Rust and the remaining five students (one American, two Europeans, and two Asian nationals) and read aloud their “Day of Action Statement.” That statement suggests that Rust’s modest efforts to help students with their writing faced obstacles too great to overcome.

The Day of Action Statement contains hardly a sentence without some awkwardness of grammar or usage. “The silence on the repeated assailment of our work by white female colleagues, our professor’s failure to acknowledge and assuage the escalating hostility directed at the only Male of Color in this cohort, as well as his own repeated questioning of this male’s intellectual and professional decisions all support a complacency in this hostile and unsafe climate for Scholars of Color,” the manifesto asserts. The Day of Action Statement denounces the class’s “racial microaggressions,” which it claims have been “directed at our epistemologies, our intellectual rigor and to a misconstruction of the methodological genealogies that we have shared with the class.” (Though it has only caught on in recent years, the “microaggression” concept was first coined in the 1970s by a black psychiatrist.) Reaching its peroration, the statement unleashes a few more linguistic head-scratchers: “It is, at its most benign, disingenuous to the next generations of Scholars of Color to not seek material and systematic changes in this department. It is a toxic, unsafe and intellectually stifling environment at its current worse.”

The Ph.D. candidates who authored this statement are at the threshold of a career in academia — and not just any career in academia but one teaching teachers. The Day of Action Statement should have been a wake-up call to the school’s authorities — not about UCLA’s “hostile racial climate” but about their own pedagogical failure to prepare students for scholarly writing and advising. Rust is hardly the first professor to be criticized for his efforts to help students write. “Asking for better grammar is inflammatory in the school,” says an occasional T.A. “You have to give an A or you’re a racist.”

If senior administrators at UCLA were honest, they would have publicly declared (i) that Rust did nothing racist or even racial and (ii) that the race-baiting students in his class could have benefited from the grammar instruction he tried to give them. Instead the administrators pandered to the race baiters.

I used to think that such pandering is motivated mostly by ideology — that, in their hearts, senior administrators really agree with the race baiters. In recent years, however, I’ve begun to think that the pandering is motivated mostly by careerism.

One incident is especially revealing. A friend was asked to apply for a deanship at a UC campus. For the penultimate round of the process he and the other candidates were asked to write an essay, which would answer one simple question: “What have you done to increase diversity on your campus?” By “diversity,” of course, the hiring committee meant racial diversity.

I believe that most university administrators constantly think of that question. They fully understand that, if they want to be promoted, they need to have a good answer to that question. Related, if they face a situation where someone is accused of racism, they realize that — again, if they want to be promoted — they must side with accusers of racism, never the accused.

Of course, that’s mainly speculation, and maybe I’m wrong. But regardless, the administrators at UCLA acted as if they are constantly thinking of that question. As MacDonald notes:

As word of the sit-in spread in the press and on the Internet, the administration began its sacrifice of Rust. Dean Marcelo Suárez-Orozco sent around a pandering e-mail to faculty and students, announcing that he had become “aware of the last of a series of troubling racial climate incidents at UCLA, most recently associated with [Rust’s class]” — thus conferring legitimacy on the preposterous claim that there was anything racially “troubling” about Rust’s management of his class. Suárez-Orozco went on: “Rest assured I take this extremely seriously. I humbly dedicate myself to listening and to learning from this experience. As a community, we will work towards just, equitable, and lasting solutions. Together, we shall heal.”

Of course, the very idea of taking “this” “extremely seriously” presupposes that there was something to be taken seriously and solved, as opposed to a mere outburst of narcissistic victimhood. The administration announced that Rust would not teach the remainder of the class by himself but would be joined by three other professors, one of whom, Daniel Solórzano, was the school’s leading proponent of microaggression theory and critical race theory. This reorganization implicitly confirmed the charge that Rust was unfit to supervise “graduate students of color.”

Unsatisfied with the administration’s response, the protesters posted an online petition riddled with a new crop of grammatical puzzlers. “Students consistently report hostile classroom environments in which the effects of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other forms of institutionalized oppression have manifested within the department and deride our intellectual capacity, methodological rigor, and ideological legitimacy,” limped one typical sentence.

A few weeks later, a town hall convened to discuss the Day of Action’s charge of a “hostile and toxic environment for students of Color.” Professor Solórzano presented his typology of microaggressions to explain the school’s racial tensions. Protest organizer Kenjus Watson read a long bill of particulars justifying the Day of Action. Another black student argued that no reconciliation in the school was possible because Rust had not apologized for his transgressions. Several of Rust’s faculty colleagues in the Division of Social Sciences and Comparative Education attended; none publicly defended him.

After the meeting, Rust approached the student who had berated him for not seeking forgiveness and tried to engage him in conversation. Ever naive, Rust again reached out to touch his interlocutor. The student, a large and robust young man, erupted in anger and eventually filed a criminal charge of battery against the 79-year-old professor. Rust’s employers presented him with a choice: if he agreed to stay off the education-school premises for the remainder of the academic year, they would not pursue disciplinary charges against him. The administration then sent around a letter to students, alerting them that the school would be less dangerous — for a while, at least — with Rust out of the picture.

Some will read MacDonald’s article and wonder, “Can it really be that bad at UCLA? Surely, she’s exaggerating things.” It is, and she’s not.

When I taught at UCLA, I once asked a liberal colleague if the racial hysteria bothered him personally — that is, whether he worried if he might ever be the target of it. “Yes,” he replied, that’s why my general strategy around here is just to minimize any human interaction. You never know what’s coming.”