Rich Species, Poor Species:
From an official description of a University of New Mexico Law School class, Environmental Global Warming: "Global climate change is the major environmental threat of our era. Its effects are felt by all species, but especially on those who are poor..." I didn't realize that interspecies distribution of wealth is such a hot (no pun intended) issue! (Hat tip: Christina Hoff Sommers, who was too busy criticizing political bias at UNM Law to notice the humor in the line she quoted.)
volokh.com
Liberal Bias Rules UNM Law School
By Christina Hoff Sommers
American Enterprise Institute
As a writer and frequent campus lecturer, I am accustomed to encountering activist professors. Nevertheless, when I visited the University of New Mexico Law School recently, I was taken aback by the political fervor of the faculty.
I had been invited by the student-run Federalist Society to lecture on the foibles of campus feminism. I consider myself a feminist, but I believe that academic feminism has been hijacked by gender war eccentrics— like the law professor who confronted me at the University of New Mexico. In the question-and-answer period, she insisted that American society is a "patriarchy."
Well, the UNM Law School is no patriarchy. The dean is a woman and fifty-seven percent of this year's entering class is female. During orientation, new female students were warned by members of the Feminist Legal Caucus to avoid the Federalist Society or they would be "marked forever."
For the record, the Federalist Society is a highly respected national legal organization with chapters on campuses throughout the country. It champions conservative and libertarian ideas— as well as debate over them. But the University of New Mexico Law School is not a place for free and open debate.
A 2004 study by the New Mexico Federation of College Republicans found that 100 percent of the full-time professors at the law school were registered Democrats. The Federalists could not find a conservative to serve as their faculty adviser.
By contrast, the student body is politically diverse. Students complain that courses lack objectivity. Here is the catalogue description for a seminar called Environmental Global Warming: "Global climate change is the major environmental threat of our era. Its effects are felt by all species, but especially on those who are poor...." Another course called Gender and the Law explores "how the Law created categories that support subordination based on gender."
All of the students in the Clinical Law Program recently had to attend a lengthy lecture on immigration given by an ACLU member and watch a video of a weeping woman facing deportation. For "balance" the students were shown a 30-second anti-immigration television commercial from an Alabama political candidate.
The day I visited campus UNM faculty members were organizing a teach-in on Guantanamo and manning tables to protest military recruiters on campus. Last year the faculty achieved a prized, long-term goal: it terminated a hugely popular "DA Law Clinic" where students worked with the local District Attorney's Office. The professors were uncomfortable with a program that prosecuted— rather than defended— accused criminals.
The dean of the law school, Suellyn Scarnecchia, professes a commitment to diversity— but that does not include changing the school's strict "liberals only" hiring policy. She and her faculty seem not to question the ethics of running a public, taxpayer-supported law school as if it were a re-education camp for the political left...
abqjournal.com |
