UCLA goes bonkers, hires unhinged “activist in residence” to give a lecture mandatory for all entering med-school students, who are forced to pray for “mama Earth” and chant pro-Palestinian slogans

The last time I posted something about an article by Georgetown University Law Professor Jonathan Turley, I believe someone beefed because Turley was a conservative, implying that his articles couldn’t be trusted. Well, I deplore the attitude that you can judge the veracity of claims using the ideology, race, or gender of someone who reports them: all you have to do is check the facts!  And it turns out that the startling and disturbing facts adduced in this new piece by Turley on his website check out (remember, most articles give links).

And yes, it’s true that UCLA has an “Activist-in-Residence” program, blending ideology with scholarship, and that first year medical students at UCLA were forced to listen to a lecture given by an apparently bonkers pro-Palestinian woman described as a “formerly incarcerated and unhoused poverty scholar” who made the students chant for Palestine as well as to pray to “mama Earth.”

Read and weep by clicking the headline:

This is unbelievable, except, as far as I can determine, it checks out. Excerpts from Turley are indented:

There has been much discussion about the controversial mandatory lecture for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles from a pro-Palestinian speaker accused of anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric. However, there is less attention to the fact that Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia was appearing because she is one of UCLA’s paid Activists-in-Residence.

Gray-Garica is described by UCLA as “a formerly unhoused and incarcerated poverty scholar who prefers to keep their face covered in public.”

. . . In her two-hour lecture, Gray-Garcia dismissed modern medicine as “white science” and told the medical students to engage in a prayer to “mama Earth.” Students were expected to pray and affirm that “Mama Earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped or played.”

It was part of what was billed as a talk on “Housing (In)justice in LA: Addressing Unhousing and Practicing Solidarity.”

A complaint filed after the lecture [JAC: see below] alleges that students were expected to chant “Free, free Palestine” and when one student refused to stand during one prayer, an unidentified UCLA faculty member asked for the pupil’s name. The complaint alleges that students were concerned that they would face repercussions if they did not chant and pray on command.

In the lecture, posted online, Gray-Garcia keeps her face covered with a keffiyeh while veering off into a diatribe over the Gaza Strip.  She also attacked the concept and defense of private property as “crapitalist lies” that kill “black, brown and houseless people.”

First, let’s check out Tiny Gray-Garcia. You can see her views on her public Facebook page, with this header:

A few pictures, with and without keffiyeh or face covering.  If you browse, you’ll find that it’s all-Palestine all the time

And Mama Earth, too! This looks like the garb she lectured in, as you can see in the short clip below:

But she isn’t always covered; she appears to be the woman in the middle (from her Facebook page):

Here she is on the latest Activist-in-Residence page, face not visible.  I wonder if there were ever any conservative or even centrist “activists” included in this program.

Here’s the page showing UCLA’s Activist-in-Residence program,  As they say, the purpose of that program is to disrupt the university and effect Social Justice:

It is our objective to “turn the university inside out” and invite artists, community organizers, and movement leaders to undertake power-shifting scholarship and pedagogy focused on social change. This program provides opportunities for activists to engage with the UCLA community to develop and strengthen their capabilities, work, and commitment towards social, racial, spatial, and gender justice.

This is explicitly ideological and would certainly not be permitted at the University of Chicago. Yet UCLA is a public university, and I wonder if the program is being funded by the taxpayers of California.

Now some of the projects sound like really good ones, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that social-justice change, all in a “progressive” direction, is part of the mission of a university, especially a public one. Below is UCLA’s official profile of Tiny as a “Poverty Skola” on the page (click to enlarge), further described as a “formerly unhoused, incarcerated poverty scholar”. (“Formerly unhoused” is progressive Newspeak for “was once homeless”, and of course you know what “incarcerated” means. Her crime is not given, though, in the ten-minute video below; she says it was a “poverty crime”.)

Gray-Garcia’s UCLA lecture online at the link is an excerpt only only 100 seconds long, not the two full hours that Turley implies, but in this Tik Tok clip you can see a weirdly garbed Gray-Garcia walking around haranguing the students with wacko ideology:

@povertyskola

Excerpt of “The myth of Clean and the unhoused body on stolen land -presented by povertyskolaz at #Poormagazine #AetnaStreet #KripHopNation at #uclamedschool #Povertyscholarship #Homefulness #Prop1 #4118 @The Black Kripple @Poor People’s Army @Delphine Brody

♬ original sound – PovertySkola

Here’s Tiny giving a ten-minute talk online, coming off as an activist but also unhinged. What I wonder is what this person has to contribute to the education of medical students.   It’s hard to see why on earth an anti-Semitic Marxist should be selected to give a lecture that must be heard by first-year medical students. Is this the best that UCLA can do? But of course her presentation simply reflects the indoctrination that UCLA’s activists, and at the medical school, want to give their students.  There is, of course, no counterspeech, only that one student who refused to pray to “mama Earth”.

More from Turley:

Gray-Garcia was undeterred by the complaint or the criticism, posting on X the next day: “As we hold our relatives in Occupied Palestine, and all of Mama Earth in prayer and love, we need to make connections.”

Here’s the tweet. Gray-Garcia repeatedly analogizes, throughout her discourse, gentrified American areas with Israeli “colonialism”. She also accuses Israel of “apartheid.”

As we hold our relatives in Occupied Palestine &all of MamaEarth in prayer & love we need to make the connections -for us Houseless, indigenous, swept/evicted people -we r not separate from this struggle – we suffer from the same settler colonial terror https://t.co/G2jFflsud1

— Lisa "Tiny" Gray Garcia (@PovertySkola) October 8, 2023

More from Turley:

There have been ample objections to this indoctrination session at UCLA, but the school has been criticized for years for its viewpoint intolerance and orthodoxy.

However, what is most disturbing is the decision of the university that higher education should have paid “activists-in-residence.”  At a school notorious for excluding conservative and libertarian voices, it is doubtful that it would embrace a pro-life or anti-transgender activist in residence. Instead, the faculty can enlist the support of activists to push an ideological agenda in mandatory sessions like this one.

UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy has gushed with praise for Gray-Garcia’s “rousing remarks presented in the form of spoken word poetry.”

UCLA Luskin Professor Ananya Roy, who created the residency program, heralded how the activists-in-residence is part of “our effort to turn the university inside out.” Roy added that “at the Institute, we organize knowledge within, against and beyond the university. The Activist-in-Residence program brings to the university the movement scholars and public intellectuals who are teachers and guides for this praxis.”

The faculty, including Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris who is the Interim Dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, obviously support this view of higher education.

The question is why taxpayers and donors should support such school-sponsored activism. I previously wrote about the “radical chic” of academia as well as the new focus on “activism” as a field of study.

In fact, Turley says he encourages his students to be activists. But we shouldn’t tell them HOW to be activists, which is exactly what UCLA Medical School is doing by giving Tiny, with known views, a platform. Will they give someone like Turley, or even a centrist, a plaform for a mandatory med-school lecture? Given the way med schools are going, I wouldn’t count on it!

Many of us encourage political activism and engagement of our students. They need to bring their passion and voices to the debates today over issues ranging from abortion to the environment to wars.

We have long benefited from intellectual activists in our country, but they were intellectuals first and activists second. They were thought-leaders who used classic education to advance societal change.

Gray-Garcia embodies how academics are destroying the very intellectual foundation for higher education. Incorporating such “activists-in-residence” are extremely popular moves for faculty at schools like UCLA. However, they are hijacking higher education for their own political and professional purposes. The problem is that few have the courage to oppose such programs out of fear that they will be the next to be targeted in a cancel campaign or university investigation. Most remain in cringing silence as bizarre scenes like the one at UCLA play out on campus.

The one UCLA student who refused to pray on command was a courageous exception. However, we should all pray for the future of American higher education if Gray-Garcia is the measure of American intellectual thought.

You can find the complaint about Tiny’s lecture by UCLA’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group here. The closing statement from that letter: