Superficial dandies

I was trying to make sense of a student evaluation yesterday. One of my students complained at last semester's end (though the semester ended in May, I only got around to reading my evaluations yesterday) that I was too hard on him or her and that I needed to understand that not everyone is as privileged as I.

That struck me as odd. Privileged? Really? As I have mentioned here before, I grew up in poverty and busted my hump for decades to get out. And because I tell my students a very abbreviated version of my life story at the end of the year (I intend it as inspiration, not cannon fodder) my students are aware of this fact. So the claim that I am privileged struck a particularly discordant tone.

Reading Thomas Sowell's column today cleared things up for me. Sowell observes of our contemporary culture:

People who have achieved success are often referred to as "privileged," especially by the intelligentsia. Achievements used to be a source of inspiration for others but have been turned into a source of grievance for those without comparable achievements.

I see this phenomenon frequently in some (but not most) of my students. Another student complained that I was playing favorites. The basis for the charge? I praise students who answer questions correctly and do not give similar praise to those who get the answer wrong.

This entitlement mentality goes hand in hand with the "incessant self-dramatization" to which Sowell rightly objects. Increasingly, young people nurture the notion that they deserve success regardless of merit. They seem to believe that achievements, fame, and honors are like lottery winnings. How have we failed them so badly?

The power of liberal academic dogma

Anyone who thinks that universities in America are places of free and open inquiry either: (1) has not recently stepped foot on an American campus or (2) is liberal and deluded. The latest demonstration of narrow-mindedness in the left-leaning academy comes from North Dakota, where the NoDak Law Review had the audacity to publish articles by pro-marriage scholars. For this bit of heresy, the Law School is being flogged in the local press and legal community.

Protests from North Dakota lawyers have been so passionate and widespread that North Dakota Law School Dean Paul LeBel posted a disclaimer on the school’s Web site assuring the legal community that “the university and the School of Law are welcoming and inclusive educational communities.”

Just last week I shared dinner with a fellow member of the legal academy who unwittingly slandered me to my face. She complained of "anti-gay bigots" who "oppose gay marriage." Of course, it never occurred to her that I, a rational person, might support conjugal marriage, much less that the word "bigot" might be an insulting calumny. Mercifully, another colleague arrived at that very moment to save me from having to respond. But the point was (once again) driven home: scholarship in the American academy is for the exchange of ideas and the pursuit of truth, unless those ideas are conservative and the truth is inconvenient for the liberal worldview.

Professor Defarge

This hilarious story appeared on the Journal Online a couple of days ago, but a friend just brought it to my attention. As often happens when American professors open their mouths or put pen to paper, Professor of "French Narrative Theory," Priya Venkatesan, made herself a laughingstock when she threatened to sue her former students because their anti-intellectualism allegedly violated her civil rights. A sample, a soupcon, if you will, of her comedy routine:

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways."

I work in academia. Yes, these people really exist and no, we conservatives don't have to make them up. I recently received a draft program for a scholarly conference I will soon attend. With genuine anticipation I opened the program scanning for workshops in my subject area. To my chagrin, I found them. The description of one workshop began by denying that gender is biological and declaiming that social science has now proven "that gender is not fixed; rather, it is variable and negotiable." It went on to complain, "The hegemonic masculinity is the culturally dominant masculinity."

Um, yeah. As a friend is fond of pointing out, truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.

St. Thomas and Planned Parenthood

Thomas Mengler, the dean of St. Thomas Law School, has rightly decided not to extend volunteer credit to a student for working at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

"I view myself as responsible for promoting and protecting our institutional identity, including but not limited to our Catholic identity," Mengler said Thursday. "Our law school clearly has a faith mission."

Two aspects of this story, which the author brushes past, seem worth remarking upon. First, note that St. Thomas requires its students to perform volunteer service. The Star-Tribune attempts to bury this telling fact. Service is as prominent a component of the school's Catholic mission as its defense of innocent human life. However, it is a component for which liberal MSM outlets like the Trib are not prepared to give credit.

Second, Mengler's decision is unlikely to earn him friends in the legal academy. Most legal scholars disparage defense of the unborn, as they disparage defense of traditional institutions such as conjugal marriage, as theocratic, dogmatic, and irrational. Kudos to Mengler, who unlike a certain wimpy element within Christendom (against which I often inveigh), cares much more about unborn humans than he does about receiving an invitation to the cocktail party.

Add St. Thomas to my ealier list of law schools for aspiring conservative lawyers to consider. (And while we're at it, throw in BYU in the Mountain West.)

Republicans and Crime

William Stuntz has posted some interesting data he uncovered during his research into the growth in prison populations that has occurred in the U.S. over the last thirty-five years. Contrary to type, Democratic governors tend to oversee disproportionately large (relative to national averages during the same time periods) increases in prison populations, while Republican governors tend to preside over disproportionately small increases or even decreases. Stuntz concludes that the common explanation for the putative over-population of America's prisons -- it's the fault of evil conservatives -- is wrong. Stuntz allows that he has not completed his research and that additional data might turn out to run contrary to this trend.

(Stuntz begins his post with the assertion, "Pretty much everyone—Republican or Democrat, right or left—familiar with America’s criminal justice system agrees that our prison population is far too large." That assertion simply is not true. Perhaps Stuntz means to say that everyone in his elite circle of acquaintance who is familiar the criminal justice system agrees with that proposition.)

The data is not self-explanatory, and causation in this case is necessarily a matter of speculation. Stuntz offers his own explanation. He posits that Democrats hoping to appeal to swing voters, who are mostly white and working-class, must appear tough on criminals, and black criminals in particular, and so must put more blacks in prison. Meanwhile Republicans, who are reputed to be tough on crime, must merely pay lip service to law enforcement.

This explanation rests in part on the supposition that at least some, if not most, imprisoned persons do not belong in prison. Stuntz, like many liberals, seems to assume that some large portion of prison residents in the United States are not at all culpable. This is unlikely, to say the least.

Another intepretation of Stuntz's data, at least equally as reasonable, is that Democratic policies result in higher crime, and therefore result in higher prison populations. This interpretation is consistent with studies that demonstrate links between welfare dependency and crime, fatherlessness and crime, and divorce and crime. Democrats are the champions of welfare entitlements, higher tax burdens, and regulations that retard economic development. And they are doing everything in their power to undermine the traditional family, advocating for same-sex marriage and no-fault divorce, and opposing parental consent prerequisites to abortion.

In any event, kudos to Stuntz for conducting this research, which is sure to rub many in the academy the wrong way.

Getting educated at CU

Titus is right. The 4/20 pot smoke fest at CU Boulder makes for hysterical self-parody. It also gives CU students the oppotunity to showcase the many valuable skills and virtues they are acquiring in consideration of their diligence and tuition payments, such as:

Delayed gratification: "Oh forget it," one student said, aborting the countdown to 4:20 p.m. and lighting his pipe early.

Eloquence: "Sweet."

Leadership: "You guys need to go stand on those stairs,” one girl shouted to her friends, who were seated in a circle on the quadrangle grass. “You don’t even understand."

Civic-mindedness: CU freshman Emily Benson, 19, of Kansas City, said she thinks the decriminalization of marijuana will become a hot topic in the upcoming political season and said she felt part of something bigger than just a smoke-out on Sunday.

Altruism: “We’re at the starting point of a movement,” she said. “This is a big part of the reason I applied here — for the weed atmosphere.”

Humility: “I just like being generous and doing nice things,” he said. “I’m like a good Samaritan.”

Reason and rhetoric: CU senior Tyler Molvig, 24, said that rather than condemning the smoke-out, CU and the city should embrace it as a money-making opportunity. “I mean, it’s gonna happen regardless,” he said.

Enterprise: Entrepreneur Barrett Betz, 20, conceived of the potential financial benefit 4/20 holds earlier this year, and sold peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Hostess snack cakes and bottled water for a $1.

Forget Harvard. I want my daughter to get an education at Colorado University.

A law school for the 21st century

Though Professor Erwin Chemerinsky is a misguided lib, he's also a brilliant scholar and legal educater. The Founding Dean of the new UC Irvine Law School, Chemerinsky lays out his vision for Irvine's model of legal education and challenges more established law schools to follow suit. The gist of his message is to focus on preparing students to practice law. A salutary and obvious goal, too often overlooked.

Gender binaries are so last semester

The Boston Globe reports on the increasing use of mixed-gender student housing, allowing men and women to room together in the same bedrooms on college campuses. The usual suspects -- feminists, homosexuality advocates, confused, transgendered souls -- are behind the trend. Particularly striking is the rhetoric of mixed housing advocates. Some choice samples follow.

Denise Darrigrand, dean of students at Clark: "It's a new world, and gender has taken on all kinds of new definitions. It's about being more inclusive, and it's about keeping pace with the times."

Gender has new definitions? Does it mean something more than male and female? But as long as we're being inclusive and keeping pace with the times, why bother having bedrooms at all? Why not just throw all the students into a common bunkhouse? Wouldn't that be more in keeping with modern notions of discretion?

James Baumann of the Association of College and University Housing Officers: "Among Millennial students, whether it's race, gender, or nationality, the borders are coming down. The lines just aren't there anymore."

To what borders is he referring and where have they gone? Does he mean "walls"? Those borders? But the walls are still there. They haven't gone anywhere. They now merely separate one set of post-gender roommates from another set of post-gender roommates. Or am I missing something?

Dartmouth housing applicatin form: "[Dartmouth] seeks to provide a living environment welcoming to all gender identities; one not limited by the traditional gender binary."

Jeffrey Chang, Clark student: Separate housing policies "needlessly reinforce an oppressive gender binary"

If gender is no longer binary, what it is? Are there three variants? Eight? One hundred? Does anyone know? Are not even transgendered variations defined relative to the binary models of "male" and "female." But I suppose that's oppressive. Much like the English language. And biology. Why not throw those out, too? No reason to let oppressive and outdated ideas about language and science impede inclusion. We need to keep pace with the times, after all.

You think I'm being facetious? Dartmouth doesn't. Its housing form, according to the Boston Globe, "asks students their personal gender identity and if students have a third-person pronoun they wish to be addressed by." It? Other? Does the student get to make one up?

I know I am not the first (nor the last) to marvel at the pedagogical irresponsibility of America's colleges and universities, but I really do wonder whether students who get to define realty any way they like have any incentive to learn what the world really is.

A big year for George Mason Law

Adding to its recent successes and innovations, George Mason lands a bumper crop of young scholars.

Remember you read the prediction here first: fifteen years, top 3.

Law school ranking season

US News & World Report has an annual tradition: rank all ABA-approved law schools in the United States, from top to bottom. Law professors have a corresponding annual tradition: complain about the rankings, call into question the veracity of the data, and cast doubt upon the objectivity of the process.

The 2008 rankings are out. Let the grumbling begin.

Pushing legal institutions rightward

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line has a terrific post about Steven Teles' review of the rise of the conservative legal movement. Conservatives were for much of the twentieth century absent from most influential legal institutions, such as the federal courts, public interest firms, and nationally-prominent law schools. That has changed, and not by accident.

Mirengoff notes that conservatives failed to influence legal institutions in the 1970's, when they imitated the tactics and strategies of liberals. They met with success only after they took a "supply side" approach to the problem. Beginning in the 1980's, conservative lawyers moved American legal institutions in "entrepreneurial, relatively informal, and idea-centric ways."

What Mirengoff (and perhaps Teles, though I have not read his book) fails to mention is that conservatives succeeded also by eschewing libertarianism and communicating true conservative principles and ideas. For example, it was not sufficient to oppose government action generally. That approach to lawyering had (and has) almost no effect upon legal institutions, which are capable of distinguishing between good government actions and bad ones. Conservatives found success only when originalists like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork began to articulate a theory of constitutional interpretation that opposes those government actions that are inconsistent with the constitutional text. In just over twenty years, originalism has gone from being a fringe theory to being the dominant interpretive mode in the federal judiciary. And though originalists still comprise a minority in the legal academy, we represent an influential and growing minority; liberals are taking us very seriously.

Ideas matter. And the ways in which we communicate ideas matter. These are additional lessons to be learned from the rise of the conservative legal movement.

George Mason pulls off another upset

George Mason Law School has recently earned just praise for its curricular innovations (Bench Memos, Volokh). And the law school continues to add to one of the most impressive law faculties in the nation by taking the eminently-qualified conservative scholars that liberal law schools won't touch.

There is also this tidbit, which has gone largely unnoticed. GM Law graduates attained the highest bar passage rate in the State of Virginia last summer! Why is this impressive? Consider that the competition for that honor included UVA, William & Mary, and Washington & Lee.

In my view, any smart conservative who is considering attending law school should narrow her search to three candidates: George Mason in the east, Notre Dame in the midwest, and Pepperdine on the west coast. My bold prediction is this: within the next 15 years, George Mason will be one of the three best law schools in the nation.

George Mason ahead of the curve

Another reason why George Mason Law School is quickly becoming the best place in America to get a legal eduction.

The funniest thing I've read this year...

... is this line in a scholarly article I am reading this morning: "Modern academic scholarship represents an infusion of reality into current thinking."

Wait...

Bwah ha ha ha ha ha!

Okay... hold on... need... air... can't... breathe...

Omigosh. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time.