The Ivory Tower: wrath demon or succubus?

Last night I read something that pissed me off so bad I had to play Plants Vs. Zombies for an hour before I could sleep.

Now, the politicization and tribalism of campus life have crowded out old-fashioned expectations about justice and neutrality. The imperatives of race, gender and identity are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law.

Critics of those values are nothing new, of course, and certainly they are not new at elite law schools. Critical race theory, as it came to be called in the 1980s, began as a critique of neutral principles of justice. The argument went like this: Since the United States was systemically racist—since racism was baked into the country's political, legal, economic and cultural institutions—neutrality, the conviction that the system should not seek to benefit any one group, camouflaged and even compounded that racism. The only way to undo it was to abandon all pretense of neutrality and to be unneutral.

It's one thing when you see stupid kids running around doing this sort of shit at Laurier U to people like Linsay Shepherd. It is an entirely different thing when you see the Prime Minister of Canada use one (1) planted asshole with one (1) Nazi flag at a lawful, legal, peaceful Freedom Convoy demonstration to invoke the Emergencies Act and seize the bank accounts of anyone who donated money to the charity. That's what we're talking about here. As the author put it,

At first, the conventional wisdom held that this was "just a few college kids"—a few spoiled snowflakes—who would "grow out of it" when they reached the real world and became serious people. That did not happen. Instead, the undergraduates clung to their ideas about justice and injustice. They became medical students and law students. Then 2020 happened. 

All of sudden, critical race theory was more than mainstream in America's law schools. It was mandatory. 

Starting this Fall, Georgetown Law School will require all students to take a class "on the importance of questioning the law's neutrality" and assessing its "differential effects on subordinated groups," according to university documents obtained by Common Sense. UC Irvine School of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, and Boston College Law School have implemented similar requirements. Other law schools are considering them. 

As of last month, the American Bar Association is requiring all accredited law schools to "provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism," both at the start of law school and "at least once again before graduation." That's in addition to a mandatory legal ethics class, which must now instruct students that they have a duty as lawyers to "eliminate racism." (The American Bar Association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, voted 348 to 17 to adopt the new standard.)

Trial verdicts that do not jibe with the new politics are seen as signs of an inextricable hate—and an illegitimate legal order. At the Santa Clara University School of Law, administrators emailed students that the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse—the 17-year-old who killed two men and wounded another during a riot, in Kenosha, Wisconsin—was "further evidence of the persistent racial injustice and systemic racism within our criminal justice system." At UC Irvine, the university's chief diversity officer emailed students that the acquittal "conveys a chilling message: Neither Black lives nor those of their allies' matter." (He later apologized for having "appeared to call into question a lawful trial verdict.") 

Professors say it is harder to lecture about cases in which accused rapists are acquitted, or a police officer is found not guilty of abusing his authority. One criminal law professor at a top law school told me he's even stopped teaching theories of punishment because of how negatively students react to retributivism—the view that punishment is justified because criminals deserve to suffer.

"I got into this job because I liked to play devil's advocate," said the tenured professor, who identifies as a liberal. "I can't do that anymore. I have a family."

Other law professors—several of whom asked me not to identify their institution, their area of expertise, or even their state of residence—were similarly terrified.

Nadine Strossen, the first woman to head the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at New York Law School, told me: "I massively self-censor. I assume that every single thing that is said, every facial gesture, is going to be recorded and potentially disseminated to the entire world. I feel as if I am operating in a panopticon." 

This has all come as a shock to many law professors, who had long assumed that law schools wouldn't cave to the new orthodoxy.

They're attacking the foundational values of Western Civilization, is what they're doing. The basic notions of rationalism, the dispassionate review of evidence, and equality before the law are now "racism." That's what Critical Race Theory is all about, and it is running your government as of right now. All thanks to the pointy-headed intellectuals of the Ivory Tower. 

This is not the first time I've talked about this, this link is to an article by a North Korean escapee who had to walk across the Gobi desert so she could go to Columbia U.

Famed North Korean defector Yeonmi Park offered a chilling account of her time at Columbia University, saying that not even North Korea went to the level of brainwashing that she witnessed.

Speaking with Fox News, Park became increasingly dismayed with the cost of an education that amounted to little more than what she described as indoctrination.

"I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think," she said. "I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying."

Like in North Korea, Park said she witnessed example after example of anti-Western sentiment and guilt-tripping. During her orientation, for instance, a staff member scolded her for liking classic literature.

"I said 'I love those books.' I thought it was a good thing," Park said of her orientation. "Then she said, 'Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.'"

When the North Korean defector tells you that Columbia is crazier than Pyongyang, that's not a good sign.

But now the good news. Here's an author saying the university system in the USA is a lot closer to collapse than it looks.

It seems very clear that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American students, and that the Supreme Court is going to find this. (One expert said no discrimination would result in around 65% Asian-American admits.) The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes. Stopping standardized tests -- which are imperfect and correlated with socioeconomic status -- seems to be bad. Other items like the personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable. I'm all for looking at test scores in context, but dropping entirely denies opportunity. (I wonder if this is correlated to the earthquake coming when colleges can no longer discriminate against Asian-American students.)

 He's talking about this case, wherein Yale rejects Asians and Whites every year based on race alone. That case is going to the Supreme Court, where it seems plain that absent some form of fuckery, Yale and the other Ivy League schools will lose. The student debt crisis is a huge issue in the USA, and schools are going bankrupt.

Here in Canada, Laurentian University went out of business, and in February the big scandal from Quebec is three (3) schools went under at the same time, stranding thousands of foreign students with no school and they haven't got their money back either. Scamdal!

Universities have never really gone bankrupt in Canada that I know of, they're semi-government entities. But here we are, universities going super hard Woke and then going broke because the kids don't like it and the parents won't pay for it.