Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

The problem with this theory is that Duncan Kennedy is a fool, and that no one over 25 takes him seriously.  (Then again, he isn’t trying to sleep with anyone over 25, so he may not care.) In real life, most students (I was one) regard their professors with bemused contempt as people who never grew up and left the womb.  So the professors don’t have any “hegemony,” illegitimate or otherwise.

I realize the situation is a little different for people like Prof. Bainbridge.  I take it that deans and the rest of the clownarchy who keep asking me for money have some actual power over him.  But as long as standardized tests and blind-graded exams dictate law school results, the students aren’t going to care much about the professors’ follies.

Maybe those 80% of professors feel that federal funding of educational institutions should not be tied to endorsing any or all federal policies.

Maybe some of those 80% would, in fact, define themselves as conservatives.

Maybe there’s a principle involved that transcends ideology. What a radical concept!

It seems unlikely that the Dean and 80% of Stanford’s faculty subscribes to Kennedy’s views about hierarchy in the legal academy.  Weren’t all those critical theory battles over decades ago?  That quote is from 1979.

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"Maybe there’s a principle involved that transcends ideology. What a radical concept!”

Indeed. And that principle is enshrined in the Solomon Amendment: If you want our money, you’re not allowed to discriminate against us. “Us” being we the people and the government we have elected, represented in this case by our armed forces and their recruiters.

Don’t like it? Find another teat.

"The tenure process is, first of all, incredibly arbitrary; second, it’s degrading. It’s a way in which people with tenure communicate to people without tenure that they’ve got to kiss ass and toe the line and figure out what their elders and betters want, and do it, if they want to survive in the institution.”

I’v never heard of Duncan Kennedy but I have to wonder whether he lives on the same planet as the rest of us.  How does he think things work in the real world of the private sector?  Does he really think that ass-kissing and line-toeing are the exclusive province of universities with tenured faculty?  Is there any workplace where such things do not occur?

It’s been a year or two since I read Legal Education and the Perpetuation of Hierarchy, but my understanding is that Kennedy saw hierarchy everywhere.

To see if Kennedy had a sense of humor you could send him a t-shirt with “It’s good to be the hegemon” printed on it.

Hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue.

i wonder if the profs who wrote that letter would agree that Bush, having lost a case before the supreme court, should use whatever artifice is handy to end-run the decision.

recall that most profs who claimed to support the solomon act challenge turned about after the unanimous decision and said they never really believed in the case.  so in that sense—the sense that ules are empty—the profs are consistent.  i just don’t want to hear any complaints that Bush or others are violating any laws.  that notion, according to them, is empty.

I don’t think it does much good to criticize people who have adopted a more or less postmodern view of the world for having double standards.  They don’t regard a principled consistency as a virtue. 

The whole point of adopting those ideas is to have the freedom to attack other people for inconsistency or hypocrisy when doing so might advance your cause, but to feel no obligation to shun those vices yourself.

I’m enraged by my Stanford alma mater, especially after reading Pres. Hennessy’s little article:
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/novdec/columns/prez.html

about how great free speech is.  I meant to write a letter about his hypocrisy in not noting the restriction against ROTC, but verbal browbeating / near coercion in (almost?) violation of the law of equal access is terrible.

Goodness, Tom Grey, that seems such an overreaction to a bunch of unimportant and ineffectual people.  I suggest switching from rage to mild disdain, which will aptly complement the mercenary affection with which the Stanford administration thinks of you, when it does.

I wonder how those Stanfordian faculty would react if a student refused to answer an exam question on campus if he disagreed with the policy or opinion it examined. I’m guessing the student would be oppressed (grade-wise) for his principled stance.
Do they also bar law-firms that defend interests they don’t like? If the recruiters aren’t allowed on campus, I hope every single federal dollar (including student grants and subsidized loans) is withheld until the school is more tolerant of other’s views.
I went to a top-tier far left-leaning undergrad school (Swarthmore), but they would go out of their way to make sure that every side of every issue could be debated—at least in the classroom and in sponsored events. That’s a much better approach to scholarship than Stanford’s own don’t come, don’t go approach.