Column: ‘DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America’

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 AmericaWokeness, 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.

Tags: College Insurrection, Social Justice, Stanford Law School

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