34 of 38 Harvard faculty members who signed a letter supporting Professor John L. Comaroff have signed a retraction letter saying they "failed to appreciate the impact" their letter would have.

The Harvard Crimson reports. (Harvard Crimson). 

Comaroff is accused of "unwanted touching, verbal sexual harassment, and professional retaliation."

The initial letter posed a series of sharp questions about sanctions levied against Comaroff, who it described as “an excellent colleague, advisor and committed university citizen.” But professors began to pull their support for the letter after a federal lawsuit filed against Harvard on Tuesday detailed years of sexual harassment allegations against Comaroff — some of which had been reported previously.

Among those who did not retract were Harvard Law School professors David W. Kennedy, Randall L. Kennedy, and Duncan Kennedy. I think you can extrapolate their reasons if you read the retraction letter:

"Our concerns were transparency, process and university procedures, which go beyond the merits of any individual case.... We failed to appreciate the impact that this would have on our students, and we were lacking full information about the case. We are committed to all students experiencing Harvard as a safe and equitable institution for teaching and learning.”

What happened to the concerns for "transparency, process and university procedures, which go beyond the merits of any individual case"?! They openly proclaim that their interest in sound procedure for the individual should be subordinated to the emotional state of the larger group... but only when the group speaks in a loud enough voice. How did they "fail[] to appreciate the impact on... students"? It seems more likely that the professors didn't believe there would be an outcry that would make them so uncomfortable.

The "extraordinary arrogance and presumption" of the "the recent letter signed by 1,100 law professors urging the U.S. Senate not to confirm attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions"

According to Stephen B. Presser, legal history professor emeritus at the law school at Northwestern University. (He's written a book, "Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law," the last chapters like "The American Law Professor as Aloof Olympian," "Changing the Legal Fabric of the National Government Towards Libertarian Paternalism," and "The Law Professor as President.")

From Presser's column about the lawprof letter:

The pious pontification of the law professoriate has become cliche in modern America, leading many pundits (correctly in my view) to criticize our current president for his tendency to think like a law professor, and to view the world in the abstract, removed and unrealistic way in which it is seen from the faculty lounge....

The exaggerated self-importance of the teacher of law is buttressed by immersion in an ideology very different from what most senators and most Americans believe about the law in particular and the world in general.....

That ideology is a culmination of a century of the ascendance in the law school of a set of beliefs that seem to convince most professors that the law is really no different from politics and that it is infinitely malleable. For too long, they say, the law has has [sic] been used as a tool of the rich and powerful to oppress women, minorities and the powerless. It should be the task of judges, legislators, and lawyers alone, they say, to interpret the Constitution and laws and to use that malleability to redistribute power and resources to the oppressed....

Their ideological zeal and the inevitable tendency of ideologues to believe in the insincerity and malice of those who disagree with them have led them to believe the spurious charges that torpedoed Sessions' judicial nomination decades ago, and to see him as an enemy to the groups they favor.

Presser has a big critique of lawprofs that goes beyond the immediate question whether Sessions should be confirmed. He even ends with a call to teach "law as a repository of timeless truths." I'd love to see the letter the 1,100 lawprofs could write against the notion that the law ought to be taught as timeless truth. 

Presser's column includes material that appears in the first 2 pages of his "Law Professors" book, such as a quote. You can read the pages in the book, here. It's put like this in the column:

One law professor, Harvard's Duncan Kennedy, nicely limned the problem, when he declared, as a law student at Yale, that his teachers were "either astoundingly intellectually self-confident or just plain smug." He went on to state that their classroom gestures seemed to say, "I am brilliant. I am famous in the only community that matters. I am doing the most difficult and most desirable thing in the world, and doing it well. I am being a Law Professor." Kennedy published those words in 1970, but the problem is even worse now.

It feels very Trumpian to scoff at lawprofs' "extraordinary arrogance and presumption," but Kennedy was speaking from the radical left. Kennedy is associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement, which utterly rejected the idea of "law as a repository of timeless truths."

Is this all to intra-lawprof?

We're about to end our formal relationship with the lawprof President. Some throes are involved. Perhaps it's best to avert our eyes.

Ted Cruz's office says "in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of 'critical legal studies'..."

"... a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans."

That's in response to a New Yorker article quoting something Cruz said in a speech 3 years ago. (What Cruz said back then, at an Americans for Prosperity conference, was that when he was at Harvard Law School "There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.")

The Cruz spokesperson called it "curious that the New Yorker would dredge up a three-year-old speech and call it 'news.'"

Curious... there's a noncommittal word. I don't see anything wrong with digging stuff out of old Cruz speeches. He's a new character on the national stage, so it's not like old territory is being reworked. It was an inflammatory statement, and he needs to stand by it (and back it up), defend it as hyperbole, or concede he was wrong.

"Podium teaching."

Have you seen this term? I'm not finding it on Google, but I'm hearing it used as if it's a standard term. It's a retronym, like "acoustic guitar," invented to distinguish traditional classroom teaching (in law school) from the clinics.

I'm trying to examine why I find the term so annoying. It's not just that I don't want the thing I do to be the retronym. It's that I hear something insulting in the word, as if we who are planted in the classroom are pod people, to be distinguished from the real people out in the real world doing real things.

And then it's the fact that we do not have podia at the law school. (Don't confuse "podium" with "lectern.") Every elevated platform for a teacher to stand on was ripped out long ago because it was seen as noncompliant with the Americans for Disabilities Act. So every classroom that had seats configured with sightlines designed for a professor on a podium got a flattened front end in case there might be a teacher in a wheelchair. That means there are some rooms that are utterly surrealistic from the teacher's point of view. You feel like you are down in a well with the students banked up to the ceiling. You have to keep reminding yourself to crank your head up now and then to make eye contact with the students in the back couple of rows.

To call me a podium teacher and deny me a podium....

Ah, well, all in the name of leveling.