Column: ‘DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America’
“Wokeness, or what used to be called political correctness, once seemed merely harebrained, the product of shallow ideas and immature passion.”
The problem with this ideology is that it invades a host and kills it.
Tunku Varadarajan writes at the Wall Street Journal:
DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America
Wokeness, or what used to be called political correctness, once seemed merely harebrained, the product of shallow ideas and immature passion. The common view was that undergraduates would outgrow it once they left campus and faced the rigors of the real world.
You seldom hear that anymore, as those ideas have run amok in culture- and economy-defining institutions ranging from news organizations and local governments to professional societies and corporate boardrooms. But Ilya Shapiro thinks we’re not alarmed enough about their influence in one important corner of academia: law schools. The professional ideologues who wield administrative authority on American college campuses want nothing less than to “change the American constitutional system,” Mr. Shapiro says. They pose a grave long-term threat to “the rule of law and inalienable rights, and even concepts like equal treatment under the law.”
Mr. Shapiro, 45, is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Hunkered down in the study of his Virginia home, he’s working on a book, “Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education,” that seeks to lay bare the process by which bureaucrats appointed to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” on campus have “perverted our system of legal education.”
A prime example was in the news as we spoke. Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter had invited Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to speak on campus. Confronted by a vicious leftist student mob, he asked administrators to intervene. Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for DEI, arose to deliver prepared remarks, which concluded: “I look out and I don’t ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ I look out and I say, ‘I’m glad this is going on here.’ ”
Mr. Shapiro experienced a different kind of DEI humiliation in January 2022. He was concluding his tenure as a vice president of the Cato Institute and due to start a new job as executive director of the Center for the Constitution at Georgetown’s law school.Then Justice Stephen Breyer announced he would retire. Mr. Shapiro tweeted that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the “objectively best pick” for the vacancy but President Biden had already disqualified him on the basis of race and sex. Mr. Shapiro opined that Judge Srinivasan “alas doesn’t fit into the intersectional hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”
The tweet, which Mr. Shapiro describes as “inartfully phrased,” prompted an inquisition at Georgetown.
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DEI infiltration into my alma mater, Washington and Lee, is pervasive. Matt Walsh of Daily Wire and “What is a Woman?” fame was to speak last week in Lee Chapel. Walsh cancelled after receiving death threats following the Nashville shootings but not before a petition to pull the invitation gathered over six hundred signatures, including over forty percent of the current law school faculty and more than a third of the current law students. I would be surprised if any of the signatories, including the law professors, bothered to watch “What is a Woman?” It seems elementary that definitions matter if one is to set out a policy, promulgate a regulation, or write a statute. There is no interest in debate, only submission.
So-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ideology is little more than an excuse to legally discriminate. Likewise, CRT is just racism is a seemingly respectable wrapper.
“The problem with this ideology is that it invades a host and kills it.”
No, the problem is that it doesn’t kill it fast enough.
“The tweet, which Mr. Shapiro describes as “inartfully phrased,” prompted an inquisition at Georgetown.”
So how did they get around the obvious truth being a perfect defense?
“The proof of the pudding” indeed.
That is the goal, of course