The public university's Festival of Monsters, hosted by its own Center for Monster Studies, is an academic conference week that covers topics like cannibalism, eugenics, race, and feminism.
Many of the panels and speeches focused on race and gender issues.
Monsters "are mirrors that allow us to confront our own biases and to develop the empathy we need to combat them," the website states. These mythical creatures also present "a unique site for analyzing geopolitics, popular culture, scientific discovery, technology, and understandings of the human."
The center supposedly aims to explore the role of monsters in culture and humanities.
"It's funny because a few years ago, Ron DeSantis made a joke about students studying zombie studies," notes Matt Lamb, associate editor of The College Fix. "It turns out you can actually go to school for zombie studies."
With enrollments in humanities plummeting, Mark Bauerlein, a professor emeritus of English at Emory University, calls this project "another dying gasp by an institution going down."
Lamb thinks The Center for Monster Studies displays that the University of California views students as immature.
"They sort of have to dress everything up as sort of a cartoon or a funny story," he observes. "It's fine to have a class or two about monsters; certainly there's plenty of great literature about monsters."
Frankenstein's monster, for example, is a good warning about what happens when people start surgically moving around body parts.
"It's a great warning against transgender surgeries," suggests Lamb. "I don't know that we should be imposing our 21st century racial and sexual and political views back onto literature."
To have a whole center that frames race, gender, or the environment as "monsters" just seems "very silly" to him.
Instead, he believes literature should be studied to help us understand what people thought in the past, not as a means to impose one's current views into those writings.
