The Review

A few years ago, a student at a highly ranked medical school told me that he and his classmates had been learning about something called “master transcription factors” — a term of art referring to proteins that regulate gene expression (I think; scientifically informed readers will correct me if I’m wrong). Except the students at this particular school were told that, because the word “master” had unsavory resonances with slavery, they should instead refer to “program-directing transcription factors.” They still needed to know the first term, since colleagues from less enlightened institutions might not be familiar with its virtuous replacement. But among themselves, they should use the second.

I thought of this anecdote recently while reading about a somewhat different instance of political prescription at a medical school. According to a statement by the University of California at Los Angeles’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFRG), last month a guest speaker in a mandatory course for first-year UCLA medical students called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” led the students in an hour-long political sermon. “Sermon” is not a metaphor; the speaker began, according to the JFRG, by bidding the students to kneel down and touch “‘mama earth with a fist’ while she made a ‘nonsecular’ prayer to ‘mama earth’ and our ‘ancestors.’” In a leaked recording of a portion of the lecture, other frankly spiritualist language can be heard: “Thank you creator, for another day of life. Thank you to the ánimas who are always around us, to the ancestors in this room, to the ancestors of these descendants in this room.”

These prayers to the ancestors are a religious supplement to the speaker’s larger thesis, which is political and revolutionary, a broadside against the “crapitalist (sic) lie of scarcity, of private property, of money and ownership among earth, when mama earth was never meant to be bought or sold, pimped or played.”

The Jewish Faculty Resilience Group paid attention because, according to their statement, the speaker led students in a chant of “free, free Palestine,” which they said violated a prohibition on classroom indoctrination. If not for that detail, it seems likely that the JFRG wouldn’t have taken any particular notice, and therefore nor would anyone else have. How common, in courses like “Structural Racism and Health Care,” are these politico-religious ceremonies?

Certainly the guest speaker, Lisa (Tiny) Gray-Garcia, has other academic speaking gigs under her belt. Her website features letters of recommendation endorsing her work “crafting and leading the artists/activists of PoorMagazine to teach semester-long curricula offered at UC Berkeley and other Bay Area colleges through their media-justice initiative,” as a Vassar sociologist wrote. Gray-Garcia, the sociologist went on, “grounds the work of collective healing and transformation in a practice of facing our own truths in each other’s realities and learning from them.” A UC Berkeley lecturer who taught a course with Gray-Garcia described her pedagogy in similarly religious terms: “We invited our class into deep study that was also personal, that implicated us, and propelled us into processes of transformation through internal and external struggle … This is work that is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually demanding and, at times, even painful.”

That politics is spiritual work entailing not just an intervention in the order of society but an inner transformation of the soul is one legacy of 1960s radicalism, and in many ways Gray-Garcia’s program looks like a direct inheritor of the convergence of the spiritual and the revolutionary marking some corners of the New Left activism of the last century, overlaid with a more contemporary hip-hop idiom (Gray-Garcia is fond of rhymed couplets, like “Change won’t come from a savior, pimp, or institution / Change will come only from a poor-people-led revolution”). Is this the 1960s redivivus?

Not entirely. In the 1960s and 1970s, the spiritual and therapeutic exercises of radical consciousness-raising groups were organic outgrowths of a larger movement (even when, as I have discussed in this space before, they were infiltrated by Scientology). By comparison, there is something confected, even — ironically — corporate, about Gray-Garcia’s program, which, like any consultancy’s workplace workshops, seems designed to attach itself to those corners of an institution where leadership needs to show it’s doing something. There is less space between Gray-Garcia and, say, McKinsey’s career-coaching services than might at first appear. In most cases, the programming is largely ignored, both by students and employees and by the public; we learned about Gray-Garcia only because she happened to touch the third rail of Israel-Palestine politics.

I expect in the coming months to see more scrutiny of aspects of the post-2020 medical-school curriculum. Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, recently called for an investigation into UCLA’s program. It will be interesting to see what turns up.

Recommended

• “I mean, I like Bentham and Mill well enough — in fact Bentham is the sort of absolute freak who cannot fail to win my heart— and I would not begrudge anyone their commitment to the tradition these men founded, were it not accompanied today by a scorched-earth revolutionary fervency that sincerely believes this single school of thought is rich enough by itself to go it alone indefinitely into the future.” In his Substack, Justin E.H. Smith excoriates “fully automated tech feudalism” and its philosophical handmaidens.
• “Jameson remains the untranscendable horizon of our situation. May he long be in action, and may we have the courage to invent unintimidated languages of our own.” For Verso’s blog, Daniel Hartley writes about Fredric Jameson’s first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style — the first in a series of short essays marking Jameson’s 90th birthday. In 2019, the Chronicle marked a different Jameson date: the 35th anniversary of the publication of “Postmodernism, or the Culture Logic of Late Capitalism” in the New Left Review.
• “These cameos are ‘treats’ awarded to Herzog’s helpers like the Toblerone chocolate he proffers at special moments, a small but telling manifestation of his genius for bringing everyone into his particular universe.” In Sight and Sound, back in 2022, Beverly Walker recalled her time in front of the camera in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu.
• “Regrettably, opposing Protestant pamphlets, depicting the pile of excrement that broke their fall, are harder to come by.” In The Public Domain Review, Thom Sliwowksi offers an entertaining history of defenestration.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin