Katherine King
        Comparative Literature, Classics

Unlike many of her colleagues, Professor Katherine King doesn’t seem to involve her personal politics in her classroom teaching.  Or at least, this is the favorable assumption that can be made based on the uniformly bland, apolitical titles of her courses in Classics and in Comparative Literature.  In a university whose course list is rife with offerings like “Stompin’ Honkeys and Raisin’ Power Fists,” King’s apparent moderation is in itself nearly revolutionary.

 But, if we interpolate King’s classroom behavior and teachings from the political commitments she has made outside the classroom, things then look a lot less promising.  On January 30, 1990, King wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times proudly announcing that she had been arrested during a protest over U.S. foreign aid to El Salvador.  At the time of her release from custody, she

 “encountered two Salvadoran men who asked me if I had been among those arrested. When I answered yes, they thanked me profusely…Both would have joined the protest themselves but for fear of deportation.  Simultaneously moved and ashamed, I could only reply that it wasn't like going to jail in El Salvador and anyway I had no choice; I had to take responsibility for what my tax dollars were doing to their people.”

 In all fairness, history does not record whether King also attended protests against the El Salvadorean Marxist guerilla movement that was, itself, guilty of manifold atrocities.  Given that their side was, well, Marxist, it seems unlikely.  Interestingly, King’s somber tone disguises her enjoyment of (what was for a political animal like her) an ideological two-fer: a chance to condemn the United States as evil, while conspicuously declining to do so with the El Salvadorean radicals. 

 King was also a major faculty player in the unsuccessful fight to preserve the University of California’s regime of racial preferences in admissions.  Commenting on a 1995 student protest that shut down the Wilshire and Westwood intersection of Los Angeles and led to the arrest of 31 students, King brayed, “I really support taking ethnicity and gender into consideration in admissions and hiring.  Without taking these factors into explicit account, we just won't have enough women and minorities at this campus.”  Taking the claims in order, it’s evident that King doesn’t have much faith in minorities to make it on their own.  But her views on women and affirmative action were in contradiction of all published fact.  Not enough women at UCLA?  Even an affirmative action apologist would have trouble finding faults with the university’s record in that area.  Consider that the total undergraduate female/male ratio for 1997, the last year affirmative action was used for incoming freshman, stood at 53% to 47%.  Seven years later in 2004, the female/male ratio for all UCLA undergraduates now stands at 56.6% to 43.4%.  Far from coming to ruin via SP-1 and Proposition 209, women have prospered independent of preferential admissions, and continue to expand the gender gap on a yearly basis.  All of this hindsight makes one thing very clear: King had no idea what she was talking about. 

The annoying intractability of facts and logic didn’t stop King from assuming a central place in the faculty’s fight against the end of affirmative action.  King was one of the signatories to an anti-SP-1/SP-2 open letter published in the Daily Bruin, and also served as the Treasurer of the “Concerned Faculty at UCLA.”  This group was, par for the course, concerned only about racial preferences, not UCLA’s many other eminently solvable problems.  King also wasn’t afraid to take her political views into the streets.  As a January 6, 1997 Washington Times column noted, King was right in the middle of a massive UCLA campus walkout in defense of preferences, “waving banners and joining students in protest chants.”  Several years later, apparently still perturbed about the issue, King signed on to a 2002 By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) declaration calling for the elimination of the SAT-I, and, beginning with the next fall’s freshman class, an immediate increase in the number of admitted minority students, accomplished through the comprehensive review admissions approach – a.k.a. ‘sell a sob-story.’

            Affirmative action wasn’t the only standard liberal nostrum to draw her love.  Hatred of the military is another part-time pursuit.  A 1992 packet titled “Dismantling ROTC,” published by the University Conversion Project, references a Daily Bruin article (presumably from 1991) which covered an anti-ROTC campaign at UCLA.  A group of faculty, unspecified in the Conversion Project materials, evidently protested the fact that ROTC courses count toward a degree, and that ROTC instructors were granted membership in UCLA’s Academic Senate.  In what was likely some form of open letter or letter to the editor, King and a co-author, Julia Wrigley stated, “The military has a privileged role at the University of California, and democracy be damned.” 

 Granting that King is a Comparative Literature and Classics professor, her ideological fervor is still startling.  Surely at some point, perhaps even as far back as high school, King must have learned the rudiments of history and political science, enough to understand that without a strong, vigilant military, or the indirect protection of a country with one, no democracy will long survive.  King’s advocacy for cutting off the hand that protects her and her country is nothing short of ignorance.

Perhaps emboldened by a complete lack of colleague criticism, King also believes that her position as a Classics and Comparative Literature professor give her an intellectual perch from which to cast judgment on a variety of complicated issues.  In recent years, King has cast a thumbs-down on alleged Israeli violations of Palestinian academic freedom, a thumbs up on behalf of “Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace,” and lastly, an indirect thumbs-down to democracy, this last through her signature to Not In Our Name’s (NION’s) hysterical denunciation of President Bush’s supposed “war without end.”  

            Unafraid of pairing action with words, King popped up at a student protest that came the day after Bush’s 2004 re-election.  The rally featured Iraqi-immigrant radical Yousef Tajsar’s eloquent denunciation of a joint Bruin Republicans and Bruin Democrats barbeque being held that noon at the bottom of Bruin Walk: “When you hear ‘bipartisanship,’ take that shit out and throw it in the trash can.”  King was similarly beside herself with rage, commenting to the Daily Bruin, “I’m really dismayed that so many Americans voted for this right-wing agenda.  It makes me feel better to see all the students out here and all the energy. It makes me have hope in the future.” 

 Frankly, the future wasn’t up in Meyerhoff Park with the radicals and hangers-on affiliated with the so-called Concerned Students of UCLA (a one-off group name created solely for that event).  It was down on Bruin Plaza in the form of a joint event co-sponsored by student chapters of the two political parties that had garnered 98% of the campus vote.  But that didn’t feel like a welcoming venue for King and her ilk.  But students holding posters with slogans like “Radicalize Our Democracy,” and speakers directing amplified curses at both political parties – now that felt like home.