UCLA is named in four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, in each case as the setting, employer or alma mater of a guest or as an example in a larger argument. No excerpt describes the university’s founding, governance or curriculum. What the sources supply is a set of specific associations: an undocumented undergraduate active in the DREAM Act effort, a conservative author who entered at sixteen, a law professor who writes on free speech, and a 2013 classroom dispute that a guest presents as a case study in campus victim claims.
Sophia Campos and Secure Communities
In the May 14, 2011 episode on immigration reform, Bob Zadek introduced Sophia Campos as someone who had been on the show before, describing her as an activist who was an undergraduate at UCLA and had been active in the DREAM Act attempted legislation, which he said he supported. Campos then identified herself as an undocumented student in her fourth year at UCLA and as a productive member of society despite her undocumented status. She argued that Secure Communities and its implementation had a negative impact on students and undocumented people who, in her account, do good work in the country and try to promote the economy. Immigration Reform Is Broken (2011)
Her contribution to the episode was to describe the effect of police and ICE collaboration on willingness to report crime. She said that when people hear about collaborations between police and ICE they feel less comfortable and less safe going to the police, and she raised the possibility that police might hand a person over to ICE. Earlier in the same episode, Zadek had put the figure of 60 percent to guest Elise Foley for Merced, California, and Foley had said the share was much higher in certain areas than the one-in-four national figure she gave for people deported under the program who had never been convicted of a crime. Immigration Reform Is Broken (2011)
The UCLA connection in this episode is biographical rather than institutional. Campos speaks as a student located in Southern California and as a member of the community she describes as threatened by DHS; the excerpt does not say that UCLA itself took any position on Secure Communities, and no university official appears.
Ben Shapiro and Eugene Volokh
Two later episodes name UCLA in introducing guests. In the August 27, 2011 episode on Hollywood and television, Zadek introduced Ben Shapiro as a graduate of UCLA, which he entered at the age of 16, and of Harvard Law School, noting that at 17 Shapiro was the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the United States. The episode’s subject was Shapiro’s book Primetime Propaganda: The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011)
Shapiro’s thesis, as he stated it, was that steadily over the last 50 years, and really since the 1970s, television had become a left-wing outlet, infiltrated by people who are ideologically driven rather than simply market-driven, ranging from executives to creators. He distinguished television from movies on the ground that a movie audience plunks down a dollar while a television viewer pays the cable company rather than the producers or the network, leaving what he called wiggle room for a steadier diet of leftist material. He offered Green Zone with Matt Damon as an example of a movie that went too far off the track. UCLA appears in the episode only in Zadek’s introduction of Shapiro; the discussion itself does not return to the university. Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011)
In the March 14, 2021 episode, Zadek introduced Eugene Volokh as a law professor teaching free speech law among other topics at UCLA School of Law, and as a computer scientist by earlier training who had entered college at 15, had an accomplished career in computer science before switching to law, and was the creator and co-blogger of The Volokh Conspiracy, a daily blog sponsored by Reason magazine. The episode concerned the criminal prosecution of Douglas Mackey, also known as Ricky Vaughn, for misleading voting memes, the concept of cheap speech, and the potential revival of criminal libel laws in the digital age. Criminal Memes: The Ballad of Ricky Vaughn (2021)
Zadek framed the episode around the law’s habitual lag behind technological advance, saying the law is always breathlessly trying to catch up with technological advances and never does. He described the confluence of attacks on free speech, misunderstanding of what free speech means, and pressure on free speech as the reason for the discussion. Volokh’s own quoted contribution in the excerpt is limited to thanking Zadek for having him on; the substantive exchange is not preserved in the source material. Criminal Memes: The Ballad of Ricky Vaughn (2021)
The 2013 classroom dispute
The December 13, 2021 episode with Mark Milke, on what Milke calls the victim cult, contains the only extended treatment of a specific UCLA event. Milke described a 2013 episode in which students who felt aggrieved said the classroom had become hostile and toxic and started something called the Students of Color at UCLA campus, with one student saying he founded it to fight microaggressions. Milke asked rhetorically whether UCLA had suddenly turned into a bastion for David Duke, and answered that what happened was that a professor named Val Rust, then 80 years old, who taught comparative education, was marking essays and insisting that students use proper grammar, proper capitalization and the Chicago Manual of Style. Understanding the Victim Cult (2021)
In Milke’s account, one student disliked this and did not want to learn the system, and came up with the notion that this was discrimination and microaggression. The matter went viral, and the university eventually took the student’s side and put a monitor in the 80-year-old professor’s classroom, a professor Milke described as well-loved by most students. Milke presented this as an example of a student gaining power vis-à-vis someone more informed and worldly, and of an administration giving in — which he called a mistake. Understanding the Victim Cult (2021)
Milke placed the UCLA case in a series alongside Yale in 2015 over Halloween costumes and Evergreen State College and Bret Weinstein, whom he described as a left-wing professor who voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and who refused to leave campus for a day when his skin color was deemed the wrong skin color. He also cited Asian Americans at Harvard as actual victims of discrimination because of a preference for other minorities. The through-line he drew was a loss of the individual in favor of skin color, ethnicity or background, and he argued that the moment one forgets to look at people as individuals, nascent victim cults appear on campus and elsewhere. Understanding the Victim Cult (2021)
Across episodes
The four episodes do not develop a shared argument about UCLA. The 2011 immigration episode uses the university to place Sophia Campos as a Southern California student; the 2011 Hollywood episode uses it to establish Ben Shapiro’s biography; the 2021 free speech episode uses it to establish Eugene Volokh’s academic position; and the 2021 victim cult episode uses a 2013 UCLA classroom dispute as one example among several campus cases. The only overlap is thematic rather than institutional: three of the four episodes concern speech, status or grievance, and the campus dispute is the only one in which UCLA itself is described as acting — through an administration that, in Milke’s telling, sided with a student against a professor. Immigration Reform Is Broken (2011) Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011) Criminal Memes: The Ballad of Ricky Vaughn (2021) Understanding the Victim Cult (2021)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about UCLA’s founding, its location within a city, its enrollment, its budget, its governing board or its relationship to the University of California system. They do not record any official UCLA statement or policy on Secure Communities, on the DREAM Act, on free speech or on the 2013 dispute, and they do not give the outcome of that dispute beyond Milke’s statement that the university took the student’s side and a monitor was placed in the classroom. No excerpt identifies the student who founded the group, the department or course in which the essays were marked, or any date for the dispute beyond the year 2013.
Guests and episodes
2 appearances by 2 guests, 2019–2021.
- Eugene Volokh (UCLA Law Professor) — Criminal Memes: The Ballad of Ricky Vaughn (2021) — Technology and Free Speech Law.
- Sebastian Edwards (UCLA Economics Professor) — AMERICAN DEFAULT (2019) — The 1933 United States Debt Default.