The University of California’s program creates a stifling orthodoxy, threatening academic freedom and the Fellow-to-Faculty Pipeline
David Turner is a fellow and Assistant Professor of Black Life and Racial Justice at UCLA’s school of public affairs. In his spare time, Turner does community activism, having co-founded the “Police-Free LAUSD Coalition,” a group that calls for wholesale police abolition. Activism also shows up in his scholarship. In an article for Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, for example, Turner praises Black Lives Matter student activists for the way they reject capitalism and adopt a “Black queer feminist lens.”
Turner’s career trajectory is typical of professors who get their jobs via a fellow-to-faculty program—his came from the University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). As I’ve written, the program serves as a side-door into faculty positions. Rather than recruiting professors through competitive searches, fellow-to-faculty programs select postdoctoral fellows who demonstrate a commitment to diversity. They then advance them into tenure-track positions, allowing administrators to push their hiring priorities unburdened by a normal competitive process.
The PPFP’s criteria raise serious questions about academic freedom, and the vast constellation of similarly oriented programs on other campuses implies extensive ideological capture. Some in academia are now ringing the alarm.
