No, seriously. This isn't a joke.
"UCI made headlines last Fall by fielding the nation's first school-sponsored E-Sports team at a public university." UCI Magazine editors crowed, "The campus wooed players with athletic scholarships, and built a trailblazing computer arena."
Athletic Scholarships. For video-game players. UCI Vice-Chancellor for Student Affairs Thomas Parham thinks that the idea is somehow a great way to "weave its gaming endeavor into academics, research, and student life."
"It won't be just another sport." Parham sniffed. Parham is evidently a strong supporter of Snowflake Culture, having given a $1,000 donation to Obama's campaign, according to Open Secrets.
Rather than waste much time on the University's absurd rationalizations for such a program, we should take a close look at UCI itself and see whether this institution of higher learning is even worthy of any further public support.
UC-Irvine is the second-largest employer in Orange County, California. It has a reputation as a hotbed of Anti-Semitism and Jewish students and faculty have alleged discrimination and harassment. The school has hosted several Radical Islamic speakers including Holocaust Deniers. This is a fact that shouldn't be overlooked in Irvine's E-Sports program. A sizable number in the Tech/Gaming community are overtly anti-Jewish.
President Obama gave the graduation speech there in 2014. In 2015, the UCI student government banned displays of the American flag. Another major controversy centered on granting an exclusive concessions monopoly to Aramark Corporation. Aramark, it should be noted, has a major political lobby inside the Beltway Swamp. They've retained the lobbying firm headed by Tony Podesta's ex-wife, Heather. Heather Podesta is known inside the Beltway as The 'It Girl' of Washington and The Insider's Insider.
Jacques Derrida, who founded the philosophy of 'Postmodernism' taught at UCI until his death in 2004. In the 1990s, UCI researchers claimed Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics; but aside from that, UCI hasn't produced much of any value since. Former UCI President Ralph Cicerone was a Climate-Change fanatic who turned most of the school's sciences in a leftward direction.
UCI has an endowment of a half-billion dollars and cranks out 9,000 diplomas a year for those paying the estimated $33,000 a year that it costs to attend. The head of this school is one Howard Gillman, a career academic bureaucrat who took over in 2014. He was appointed by Janet Napolitano, Obama's former DHS chief who now heads the University of California system.
Gillman is a vocal critic of President Trump, and published an encyclical against the proposed Travel Ban. Of course, by his own admission, he opposes it because "it unfairly discriminates against Moslems." Irvine, incidentally, is less than an hour's drive from San Bernardino, the site of the infamous Christmas terror attack in 2015. Despite Gillman's statements condemning anti-Semitism, he has failed to implement any of the promised reforms protecting Jewish students. In 2015, both he and Parham allowed Anti-Zionism Week to be observed on campus.
It certainly appears that our country wouldn't lose much by losing UC-Irvine. Irvine has a decent medical school, but the rest of the university could be defunded and closed down with no great loss to society.
We've said before that the Government needs to adopt the same strategy for funding colleges that it has for funding military bases: close the ones that are irrelevant and invest in the schools that produce. UC-Irvine would go to base-closure status, no doubt.
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