Open Letter to the People of California

UCAs a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles (B.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1977), I would like to thank the People of California for paying for the UC System: when a semester of public education cost less than a parking space today, when professors were really expected to teach, when graduates had good job prospects, when employers had a reasonable expectation that the graduates they hired would be literate, when there were no (explicit or implicit) anti-white, anti-Asian quotas, when Jewish students and other friends of Israel were not hounded for their ethnicity or beliefs, when sexual assaults on campus were rare but males accused of perpetrating them received fair hearings, when History Departments still bothered to teach U.S. history, when Marxists and conservatives (there were some then) actually lunched together at faculty clubs, and when “political correctness” was an unimagined term.

Special thanks to Clark Kerr, vilified by both right and new left. And thanks also to great political leaders like Governor Brown (Sr. not Jr.) for making possible the glory days of the UC System.