The decision in Louisiana v. Callais represented a straight, non-liberal activist reading of the Constitution, which prohibits racial discrimination for any purpose. Naturally, brain-washed progressives pronounced the SCOTUS ruling this year an abomination, a claim based in bias and ignorance as I explained here.
Never mind: the news media and legal websites have overwhelmingly attacked the decision, as has the legal academia sector. The latter is especially ominous. The SCOTUS ruling was the right one, I believe, but certainly one that can support serious, good faith debate. On the scholarly side, however, the analysis of the issues only go one way. Is that the kind of expert “consensus” the climate change hysterics maintain exists on that topic? How could that be?
In his essay “The case for Callais” on SCOTUSblog [“This publication has been inundated with essays by academics critical of Louisiana v. Callais, but has not published a single one in defense of it. So I decided to take it on in my column”] Brian Fitzpatrick explains how. He writes at the start,
“When I was thinking about becoming a law professor – I am sorry to say this was something like a quarter century ago now – I went to go see one of my favorite former law professors, Elena Kagan, for advice. She was then the dean at Harvard Law School, but I had known her merely as my Administrative Law professor. She asked me what field I wanted to pursue and I told her race discrimination law. It was the reason I went to law school to begin with. It was what I had written my law school thesis on.
“Her response: don’t do it. She explained that, in order to get a job as a race discrimination scholar at any school, I would have to win over the other scholars at that school who worked in that area. Kagan said that at every school the scholars who worked in that area all supported racial preferences. The problem was that I was against racial preferences. She said for that reason alone no one in the field would support hiring me. She told me to choose something else.
“So I did. I decided to pursue class action litigation instead. It’s been a perfectly pleasant career. But it also explains why the academy is monolithic – and, frankly, untrustworthy – on race issues: you aren’t allowed to specialize in these issues unless you toe the party line. Today, we call this “ideological capture” of the academy. I think it’s a pretty sad state of affairs and I am not the only one.”
“Sad” doesn’t begin to describe what is wrong with this phenomenon, but it does explain the process whereby colleges and universities slowly but relentlessly eliminated objectivity and balance in entire fields—education, of course, but also history, journalism, political science, law, and, based on what I have experienced this year, ethics. The consequences of that strategy are readily apparent, but how to undo the process and return to independent and ideologically diverse thought essential to a democracy is not so clear.
Ethics Alarms 
I think literature was one of the first areas of study to be subverted.
I’ve been rereading Jane Austen. I’ve always thought the genius of her oeuvre is her ability to depict people doing what they need to do to survive and even thrive in the social world they’ve been placed in. Georgian/Regency England wasn’t particularly woke, needless to say. But today’s criticism seems to spend all it’s time saying just that. The current forewords and commentary in the current publications strain mightily to make Austen a ferocious critic of the mores of the time, including the British social and economic structure, and even slavery. It’s as if they are critiquing portraiture by focusing solely on the background. It’s just so ridiculous. They create an Austen that never existed and in so doing miss the point of her art entirely. And I’m sure they’re all in lockstep and tenured and have written similarly ridiculous analyses of other authors. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a commie, all you see is oppression.
Accreditation. You also have to fire all of the ideologues who are indoctrinating people into this and revoke their meaningless degrees. It’s hard to do that without getting into firing people for speech, but academic standards are about upholding intellectual rigor and scholarship.
Some departments will have to be almost completely purged, such as English and the Humanities.. The University is supposed to be difficult and force people to grow into intellectual virtues.
Yes, English and the Humanities. That’s where the post-modernists have done the most damage. The problem is there are no old school Ph.Ds. in the pipeline, are there? Most non-lefties don’t go to English and Humanities graduate schools, they go to business and law school. Now, even law schools have been corrupted.
The problem is that law school is corrupted as well. The tricky part is that you don’t want a university that has a direct set of beliefs because that could hurt the free debate that makes them thrive, but you also don’t want the crazies taking over either.
There are thousands of administrators with “educational leadership” or “doctor of education” degrees that aren’t worth the paper they are written on. These people are all over the university. They lack the intellectual sense to provide real leadership.
Then you combine the DEI, social justice, anti Christian and Jewish sentiments, and it’s just a mess of debauchery to me.
My college had about two or three non-teaching deans. The faculty really ran the place, as it should have.
That also sheds light on why Kagan often seems to be more competent than a supposedly “wise” Latina, and a non-biologist.
I guess points for trying…Not sure how much of a case he made for the Callais.
The 12 paragraphs he writes summarize as follows.
It spends almost as much time speaking speaking against it (219) as speaking for it (308).
Roberts made the ultimate case for Callais when he said, “No discrimination on the basis of race means no discrimination on the basis of race.” What more is necessary?
Well, for what it’s worth, I agree with Roberts. Really, nothing else should be needed. My larger point is that he does very little to rebut his detractors or defend the decision. He almost spends as much time arguing against the outcome as defending it.