It will come as no surprise to most Americans that academia has been lost largely to the Left. To put this in perspective, college professors donate to Democratic candidates over Republican ones by a ratio of 95-1, Yet, there are notable holdouts in the academic world, among them the aptly named Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, just outside Washington, D.C.
As one may guess from its namesake, Scalia Law is well known for its libertarian and conservative professoriate and for its resistance to unyielding pressure to change that outlook. Unfortunately, all of this is now under assault by a group of students themselves.
This week, Scalia Law’s Student Bar Association (SBA), in contravention of its supposed non-partisanship, issued a letter to the school’s administration, copying the entire student body, which contained a set of radical, Black Lives Matter-esque demands. The letter demanded, among other things, full tuition scholarships for all black students, affirmative action programs, special funding for “diverse” clubs to bring speakers of “intersectional identities”, and mandatory “race equity” trainings for all faculty, staff, and students.
The idea that students should get scholarships based on their race, or that applicants of certain racial backgrounds should get preference in admissions, is offensive and goes against everything the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s fought to achieve. When Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” I cannot imagine that he was envisioning a nation in which some people receive full tuition scholarships based on their skin color while others do not.
However, on today’s campuses, the modern Left feels comfortable demanding administrations divide people by race and treat them differently on that basis. They demand that students, faculty, and staff be forced to attend lectures, hosted by the woke, on “race equity”. Instead of diversity of thought and intellectual rigor, these programs are designed to promote conformity and to ensure everyone is forced to parrot the BLM narrative.
And make no mistake, the organized BLM is not primarily about ensuring that black lives are valued. If it were, it wouldn’t be remotely controversial. As per the BLM website, BLM wishes to disrupt the institution of the family, and its founders brag about being trained Marxists. Beyond that, they have been dogged by persistent issues of antisemitism and have openly called for the defunding of police nationwide. BLM is a radical organization hiding behind a respectable-sounding name. Here at Scalia Law, the Student Bar Association has openly embraced this radicalism, and is now demanding that the administration do so as well.
The SBA purports to act on behalf of all students and all student organizations. But in fact, conservative-leaning organizations on campus (and there are many) were not consulted about, or even made aware of, the letter before it was released. When challenged about the lack of “inclusion,” the SBA purports to have been “unable” to contact these organizations. That is specious at best, since it had no trouble contacting the leftist organizations on campus and also possess a list of the contact info for each club’s leadership.
When confronted on this obvious lie, the SBA then claimed that they did not coordinate the letter, but merely signed it (as the first signatory), delivered it to the faculty and administration, and then distributed it to the entire student body. They then stated “[we] understand that you don’t agree with the decision the SBA voted on and approved, but it was voted on and passed.” They essentially admit that they have no interest in representing the student body as a whole, and are instead interested in pushing the radical agenda represented by the clubs that signed this demand letter, to the complete exclusion of dissenting voices. To anyone who dissented or disagreed, the message was loud and clear: SBA does not care.
When contacted, the drafters of the letter made it even more clear that these conservative clubs would not have any input on the content of the letter, that no revisions would be made, and that the demands would not be altered in any way to broaden the base of support or build unity among the student body. They offered all clubs a “take it or leave it offer” to sign the letter as written after publication, expressing total indifference to the criticisms of their peers and expressing no willingness to bridge the divide.
Scalia Law is not new to these sort of demands or controversies. Last year, some students from George Mason University demanded that the law school terminate its relationship with Justice Kavanaugh, and years before, students protested the naming of the school after Justice Scalia. Thankfully, on both of those occasions, the administration reminded the students that the Dean and the faculty run the Law School and did not cave to temper tantrums from radical elements of the student body. We can only hope that the administration keeps its resolve now, and refuses to bow to the mob.
[Featured Image: Scalia Law School dedication ceremony, video screenshot]
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Jacob Meckler is a second year J.D. Candidate at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and a veteran of the United States Marine Corps (2014-2018).
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