The inmates are running the higher education asylum
Kaylee McGhee White
One of the primary benefits of higher education is supposed to be that students emerge on the other side as more learned, sophisticated adults who are capable of intelligent thought and ready to lead in whatever workplace they choose. But undergraduate and graduate students now barely qualify as learned.
The failure of our academic system to produce mature and well-rounded citizens has become painfully evident. Even in universities of once great repute, such as Yale and Harvard, students are closed-minded and irrational. They struggle to comprehend high-school-level literature, according to Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, and they are too busy shouting down speakers with views different from their own to consider whether theirs are well-founded. In short, they are ill-prepared for the real world, where people with all sorts of beliefs, religions, and backgrounds have to interact and get along and where challenges are the norm rather than the exception.
And this is probably a more generous characterization than these students deserve. The recent meltdown at Stanford Law School (the No. 2 law school in the country) suggests that today’s students aren’t just frail dopes — they’re also despicable bigots.
At an event hosted by the school’s Federalist Society chapter, students shouted down U.S. Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan, hurling profanities at him and preventing him from giving his lecture. Every time Duncan tried to speak, students would yell things such as “Scumbag!” and “You’re a liar!” One sign brought into the event read, “Duncan can’t find the clit.” Eventually, Duncan was forced to move on to a question-and-answer session, during which a student asked him, “I f*** men. I can find the prostate. Why can’t you find the clit?”
This is how our future lawyers, judges, and scholars conduct themselves.
If Stanford Law School had any self-respect, it would expel every one of the students involved in this shameful display. But since that’s not going to happen, the law industry should do the next best thing and refuse to give them jobs.
At least two federal judges have already committed not to hire clerks from law schools that refuse to uphold free speech on campus. That’s a good start, but every major law firm and court bench should do the same, lest we find ourselves in a society run by petty despots who think sexual insults are an appropriate form of communication.