"It was just like: I want to win the social competition. I want to be better than other people. And I wanted to go to the best school..."

"... so I got into Yale Law School. And I wanted the best jobs, and I wanted to make the most money. But the thing I realized is that this kind of striving had made me pretty hollow. It had made me less interesting than some of the Christians that I know who seemed to have things figured out much better than the 'elites' that I had surrounded myself with. And I just started searching for something that answered the more important questions, like: How do you be a good father? How do you be a good husband? So one way that I would put this is, and this goes back to the personal relationship thing, is, yes, I do think religion serves a socially useful role. I think the evidence is quite clear that people and families that are raised with some sort of institutionalized faith are happier and healthier and more well-adjusted. But I also think: Isn’t that evidence that there’s something about Christianity that’s particularly true? That if these people who believe these things and practice the faith in these ways — I come back to this phrase, I think it’s from the Book of Matthew: 'By your fruits you shall know them.'"

Says JD Vance, quoted in "JD Vance on the Morality of the Trump Administration/I asked the vice president what is Christian about this White House" (NYT).

Truth = what works.

"But, without Mamaw around to guide him, JD lost his faith in God. 'With her gone, no one really cared about my faith, and soon I stopped caring too.'"

"By 2006 'I was no longer, in any real sense, a Christian.' Instead, he took up the winner-takes-all, blessed-are-the-rich philosophy of Ayn Rand, which he summarises as 'stop whining, stop praying, and start working your ass off.' Hers was the materialistic faith he followed through Ohio State University and most of Yale Law School, where they regarded Christianity as 'a weird superstition.' He now thinks his loss of faith was not primarily intellectual, but the inevitable result of transferring his political allegiance to an ungodly liberal elite. 'It was the equivalent of divorce. I was severing myself from my roots.' But then, around 2014, after he’d fallen in love and got married, he began to see that by becoming 'so focused on winning the game of life… I had neglected the deeper truth.'"

From "God, guns and 'Mamaw' — JD Vance’s memoir is part rant, part sermon/In Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, the US vice-president explains why the liberal elite pushed him into the arms of the Church — and Donald Trump" (London Times).

"Reinforce the academic core of the university; don’t allow classes to be dominated by open laptops or other devices; do more to ensure that people do not self-censor; respect the ideals of free speech and academic freedom; 'be human.'"

Those are among the "smart and sensible recommendations" to be found in Yale's "Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education" according to "Yale Has Come Up With a Surefire Way to Make a Terrible Situation Worse" (NYT). That's written by the president of Wesleyan University, Michael S. Roth.

Sorry, I'm having a Marx Brothers flashback: "The Dean is furious! He's waxing wroth!"/"Is Roth out there, too? Tell Roth to wax the Dean for a while."

So what is Roth waxing wroth about with this anodyne committee report? 

The committee claims that in 2016, “departing from its traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge, Yale expanded its mission statement to include ‘improving the world today,’ educating ‘aspiring leaders worldwide,’ and fostering ‘an ethical, interdependent and diverse community.’”

It's weird to make a show of retreating from something so mild and vague. But Roth paraphrases the rejected mission as a matter of "independent thought, a commitment to truth even when it’s inconvenient and a focus on the creation of truly democratic citizens." Is that what the Trump administration has been "punishing" and what Yale is trying to be self-defensive about? 

The nothing that happened.

The most surprising part about this is that you uploaded it. Nothing happened. Nobody even reacted. Your provocation failed. This demonstrates that you are not unsafe among supporters of Palestinian liberation.

— Daniel Baryon (@AnarkYouTube) April 22, 2024

ADDED: I suspect that the person who posted the video actually wanted to show that the protesters were not accosting those they identified as Jews. In that light, here's a NYT article: "A Night Different From Others as Campus Protests Break for Seder/Pro-Palestinian protesters, many of whom are Jewish, prepared Seder dinners at college protest encampments, even as other Jewish students sought community in more traditional settings":

"Identifiably Jewish students found themselves surrounded and cornered by protest mobs."

"Sahar Tartak, a sophomore who has written for these pages, was poked in the eye with a flagpole and needed hospital treatment. On Friday night the mob cheered as students ripped down the American flag in front of a memorial for fallen soldiers and tried to burn it. Students called Yale trustees and senior administrators 'terrorists.' Their chants included 'There is only one solution, intifada revolution' and 'From the river to the sea, Palestine is almost free.' They cornered a man at the plaza for wearing a T-shirt that read 'F--- Hamas.' This protest is in clear violation of Yale's code of conduct, which explicitly forbids protesters from obstructing building entrances or blocking students' ability to observe an event. But the administration sat on its hands.... For the police to step in, the Yale administration has to give them the green light, according to the [Yale police] officers. Some officers expressed frustration that Yale wouldn't allow them to intervene...."

Writes Gabriel Diamond, a Yale senior, in "Protests Turn Violent At Yale" (Wall Street Journal).

UPDATE:

In the realm of law school rankings and affirmative action: "There is no subterfuge here."

I'm reading "Law schools love to hate U.S. News rankings. But some can’t let go. Yale law’s decision to stop cooperating with the publication landed like a thunderclap. Records show what other schools thought about the 'revolution.'"

Let me drag this key passage out of the middle:

As schools weighed their decisions, some questioned the purity of the boycotters’ motives. One theory: Some schools, correctly anticipating that the Supreme Court would soon strike down race-based affirmative action, could be planning admissions changes that would hurt them in the rankings but preserve diversity. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board surmised as much, saying, “The Yale and Harvard announcements look like attempts to adapt in advance.”

When the University of Michigan’s law dean heard this theory from an alumnus, he dismissed it, saying in an email shortly after Yale’s announcement that his school’s decision to withdraw was “100% not connected to any Supreme Court ruling.”

“There is no subterfuge here,” wrote Mark West, dean at Michigan, which ranked 10th at the time.

"[Ron] DeSantis, 44, is not the first Republican politician of his generation to rail against his own Ivy League degrees while milking them for access and campaign cash."

"But now, as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination, he is molding his entire campaign and political persona around a vengeful war against what he calls the country’s 'ruling class': an incompetent, unaccountable elite of bureaucrats, journalists, educators and other supposed 'experts' whose pernicious and unearned authority the governor has vowed to vanquish...."

From "How Ron DeSantis Joined the ‘Ruling Class’ — and Turned Against It/Over the years, Mr. DeSantis embraced and exploited his Ivy League credentials. Now he is reframing his experiences at Yale and Harvard to wage a vengeful political war" (NYT).

I see no problem with a young person taking advantage of elite education and then rejecting its values. Who better to challenge the "ruling class" than someone who's had a direct experience with it? If education is any good it equips you to go on to pursue your own goals. Does the NYT think the students are supposed to absorb indoctrination and then go on to be loyal to the elite?

"Well, I went to a law school where I didn't learn any law," said Justice Alito, who went to Yale.

He was responding to Lisa S. Blatt, the lawyer for Jack Daniel's, who'd just said — transcript here — "Justice Alito, I don't know how old you are, but you went to law school, you're very smart, you're analytical, you have hindsight bias, and maybe you know something...."

It was a gratuitous shot at Yale Law School, because Blatt wasn't arguing about Alito's knowledge of law compared to that of ordinary people, but reacting to his assertion that no reasonable person would think Jack Daniel's had authorized a dog toy shaped like a bottle of Jack Daniel's but bearing references to dog urine and feces. He'd said:

"... Professor Dan Epps... hypothesized that Yale plans to make major changes to admissions in the wake of the expected Supreme Court affirmative action rulings, 'and they are doing this proactively'..."

"'... rather than dealing with any rankings implications later.' [Some] students [agreed and] speculated... that not having to worry about LSAT and GPA data dragging down its U.S. News rank will allow YLS to either (a) continue to use racial preferences in admissions or (b) water down its academic credentials. Furthermore... some sources suggested that Dean Gerken withdrew from the rankings because she feared that YLS was about to lose the #1 spot it has held for more than three decades—and she didn’t want that to happen on her watch.... One professor told me that... there was no sense within the faculty that YLS’s #1 ranking was at imminent risk. Instead... 'This is clearly part of a larger and deeper commitment on her part toward leadership in the law school industry when it comes to fairness, welfare, and equity.'"

From "Yale And Harvard Law To U.S. News: Drop Dead/Two leading law schools have withdrawn from the influential law school rankings; will others follow?" by David Lat (Substack).

I remember when U.S. News first started this ranking. It was 1987, and I was 3 years into teaching at the University of Wisconsin Law School. From day one, the professors at my school were hostile to the rankings. We had our values, and how dare U.S. News attempt to influence our choices. 

Here's how the rankings looked in 1987. We were #20 at that point — the point when the game began. A decade later we were struggling for position in the 30s and we currently stand at #43.

"Princeton went coed in Alito’s sophomore year. Alice Kelikian, who became a friend of his, remembered hanging out with him around a microwave oven..."

"... that had just been installed on campus, warming up chocolate-chip cookies while talking about Italy and the philosopher John Rawls. Kelikian, who dated one of Alito’s friends, noted that Alito was always 'very respectful of me,' adding, 'A lot of male classmates were not.' Still, feminism was in the air...."

From "Justice Alito’s Crusade Against a Secular America Isn’t Over/He’s had win after win—including overturning Roe v. Wade—yet seems more and more aggrieved. What drives his anger?" by Margaret Talbot (The New Yorker). This is a very long article, and my excerpts don't represent the overall thesis justifying the article title. I'm just pointing to some things that intrigued me.

In 1973, the year after Alito graduated...

The year I graduated from college. 

"After a year of high-profile scandals, Yale Law School is retiring an all-student listserv that became a breeding ground for progressive activism and online pile-ons..."

"If students want to 'debate important questions,' the dean of Yale Law School Heather Gerken announced in an email on Wednesday, they can post on a physical bulletin board in the law school’s hallway. 'Debate and dialogue are the touchstones of an academic institution,' Gerken said. The new forum will force students to 'take time to reflect before posting, a habit that lawyers and members of a scholarly community must practice.'"

From "Yale Law School Axes Student Listserv That Energized Protests and Scandals/Ivy League law school will force students to write physical messages on a bulletin board after the listserv turned toxic" (Washington Free Beacon).

It's mind-boggling that Yale law students can't be left to their own devices writing on an email list. 

In the days before email, students and faculty would post their views on a bulletin board, nicknamed the "Wall," in the law school’s main hallway. That system, which Yale Law School is bringing back, "provided a healthy reminder that human beings are on the receiving end of the messages people send," Gerken said. "Indeed, sometimes students would run into the very people with whom they were debating and speak face-to-face."

Yale law students can't keep track of the humanity of the people on the receiving end of the email they write? What a concession! 

If you remember "Trap-house-gate"...

... you might want to read "A Controversial Dean's Departure From Yale Law/Dean Ellen Cosgrove, at the center of many recent YLS scandals, is retiring" by David Lat (at Original Jurisdiction).

"What can you say about an institution that is willing to break faith with its members and engage in blackmail and the subornation of false statements to wage a political vendetta?"

"Sadly, you’d have to say that it’s pretty typical these days. As we’ve seen in the willingness of the press, with help from the FBI and other government agencies, to spread many false stories, from the Russian 'collusion' myth to the phony reports on the Covington boys in Washington to the bogus University of Virginia 'rape' case, politics trumps all in America’s elite institutions. Which, by all appearances, aren’t so elite after all. Maybe we should stop acting as if they are."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, in "Students suing Yale Law show America’s elites have a low opinion of minorities" (NY Post).

"At this point, there is only one way to make YLS suffer: deny it the prestige it so desperately seeks."

"Specifically, conservative and libertarian 1Ls and 2Ls should transfer out en masse to ensure that other schools can take credit for their appellate and SCOTUS clerkships. Good luck placing clerks with only three of the nine Justices and half the federal judiciary."

Writes Josh Blackman at The Volokh Conspiracy.

What an extravagant proposition! Yale may "desperately" seek prestige — in this case the prestige of winning clerkships — but don't the students equally desperately seek prestige? Even if some of them are not so desperate, the proposition depends on en masse transfer. 

Yale Law School must feel so secure after all these years on the top of the charts. Being #1 leads to being #1 as everyone chooses #1. Who can stop?

"Two Yale Law School deans, along with Yale Law School’s Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, worked together in an attempt to blackball two students of color from job opportunities as retaliation for refusing to lie to support the University’s investigation into a professor of color."

So reads the complaint quoted in "Two students sue Yale Law administrators for alleged retaliation in Amy Chua case" (Yale News).

ADDED: David Lat has this — very intra-Yale — at Substack:

If Dean Gerken wants to be renewed, I think she might have to fire some folks—specifically, Ellen Cosgrove and Yaseen Eldik. This isn’t something Gerken would do willingly; she doesn’t relish admitting mistakes, and rumor has it that Cosgrove is the Littlefinger of the YLS kingdom, a canny operator with all sorts of dirt to spill. But I find it hard to imagine that some heads won’t roll over all this—and if Gerken doesn’t want it to be her head, she’ll have to offer up some others.

"The theme of our party was Constitution Day. I was trying to say we’d be serving classic American foods, quintessentially American foods—sort of caricaturing ourselves as Americans..."

"... on Constitution Day, this very American day. And I have a very casual tone when I write emails. So that’s why I referred to 'basic-bitch-American-themed snacks.'"

From "The Yale Law School Email Controversy: An Interview With Trent Colbert/Colbert is 'cautiously optimistic' that the climate at YLS might improve in the wake of this conflict." (The interview is conducted by David Lat at his Substack.)

Colbert is one of Yale Law School's Native American students, by the way, and the email at the core of this controversy was addressed to Native American Law Students Association. This is such a small group — so hard to recruit in "critical mass" numbers — that it amazes me that Yale wasn't especially considerate to Colbert when he was accused of racism. 

It's also interesting to me that the Native American group was making a party out of being ordinary Americans. It's so loathsomely incurious of Yale to jump at the critique by black students and to have no interest in what this meant to Native American students.

That party idea made me think of "Mundane Halloween," a trend in Japan and Taiwan where they costume themselves as ordinary people — "From 'the guy who had to work during vacation' to 'the surprised man who got a vasectomy last year,' all the costumes you're about to see are downright amazing."

"Now, could someone write an erudite, historically informed analysis arguing for why 'trap house' should be considered offensive?"

"Sure—and [Yale Law School diversity director] Yaseen Eldik, in his lecture to the sender of the email, has provided a helpful outline. But if you have to write a mini-dissertation on why something should be seen as offensive—or deliver a twenty-minute speech, as Eldik did—then it’s… probably not offensive.... In situations like this one, involving an allegedly offensive communication, law schools should have a 'meet and confer' requirement, like courts do when it comes to discovery disputes. Before the administration gets involved, the complaining students should be required to try and talk things out with the offending party.... ... I think that when students disagree with each other or take offense at certain statements made by other students, the students should be allowed to work out those differences on their own, without involvement by the administration (except in the most extreme circumstances). I recognize that the viewpoint I'm about to articulate is seen in some circles as naive or outdated, but I still believe that the proper response to misguided or offensive speech is more informed and appropriate speech (again, excluding situations of harassment, threats, and the like, which I realize can occur)."

Writes David Lat in "The Latest (Ridiculous) Controversy At Yale Law School/'Cancel culture' gets crazier" (Substack).

May I present a helping of Sunday-morning class politics — edgy but light and humorous, the way you like it, no?

I know it's tough for you because the Yale Club's guest rooms are closed until Labor Day, but you can ask your billionaire funder, Peter Thiel, if you can stay at his Park Avenue apartment. Seems like it has a nice view, just the thing for a down-to-Earth fella like yourself. pic.twitter.com/foJnFEhra9

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) July 11, 2021

"Who cares about a parenting memoirist’s removal from a law-school teaching roster?"

"The answer is, in part, because this story manages to touch on seemingly every single cultural flashpoint of the past few years. Chua’s critics see a story about #MeToo—because of her husband, but also because Chua supported the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, even after he was accused of sexual assault. Meanwhile, Chua’s defenders see a morality tale about liberal cancel culture. 'What they’ve done to you is SOP'—standard operating procedure—'for conservative allies but chills me to the bone nonetheless,' a supporter tweeted at her, earlier this month. Megyn Kelly weighed in, tweeting, 'Make no mistake: this is retribution for her support of Brett Kavanaugh, & it is disgusting.' Chua’s allies have also suggested that anti-Asian bias is involved. 'The woke academy reserves a special vitriol for minority faculty who don’t toe the line politically,' Niall Ferguson, a historian, tweeted. Chua and her husband aren’t politically conservative—she says that [her husband Jed] Rubenfeld has historically been 'very left-leaning,' whereas she is a 'solid independent'—but they are provocateurs."

From "What Is Going On at Yale Law School?/The prestigious institution has tied itself in knots over a dispute involving one of its most popular—and controversial—professors, Amy Chua" (The New Yorker).

There's not much new in this article. It's bringing New Yorker readers up to speed on something I've already blogged about a few times, as you can see by clicking the "Amy Chua" tag. It was new to me that — as Chua tells it —Chua's daughter Lulu pushed her to go big:

“She’s, like, ‘You have to fight the narrative,’ so I just did something shocking,” Chua said. She wrote an open letter saying that she’d been falsely accused and described a Zoom call with the Yale Law dean in which she’d been treated “degradingly, like a criminal.”... “I sent it to my entire faculty, and I tweeted it,” Chua said. “Ever since then, it’s been kind of an escalating nightmare.”

If you choose to do "something shocking," aren't you seeking "an escalating nightmare"? I guess the something shocking is what she aimed at others and the escalating nightmare is what she found happening to her. Let me rephrase that: the something shocking what she now says she did and the escalating nightmare is her description, to be published in The New Yorker, of how her life feels to her now. 

And it worked. She's got a big New Yorker story about her. Look at that headline — parse it — and look a the nice photo of her perched on a glossy, empty desk. This is good press.

"And we all know that this is about payback for supporting Brett Kavanaugh, no more. If it brings the law school bad press..."

"... and ruins the already disappointing deanship of Heather Gerken — spoiler, it has — then that’s justice. Just read this, and imagine putting any of these people in charge of your life, your liberty, or your business’s future."

Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the Yale Law School controversy. This is the complicated Amy Chua/Jed Rubenfeld matter that I'm not taking any position on, because I don't trust the witnesses.

Meanwhile, at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Paul Campos is reviling Chua and Rubenfeld.

Campos quotes NY Magazine...

Three other professors [said] that Chua is the victim of overzealous zoomers who have confused the natural hierarchy of achievement — and Chua’s right to favor whomever she wants — with a social-justice outrage. “There are a lot of mediocre students at Yale who were superstars in their little county fairs, and now they’re in the Kentucky Derby and they’re not winning their races and they feel like it’s unfair because other students are doing better,” says one faculty member who thinks the dean, Heather Gerken, was too deferential to students in how she handled the small-group affair.

... and goes nuclear:

This person should be fired directly into the Sun. It’s basically impossible to get into YLS without perfect everything, and the analogy between running the Belmont in 2:24 and impressing a bunch of wankers on the YLS faculty with your talent for subtle ingratiation disguised as “brilliance” is, shall we say, not a super tight one.

It's easy for me to picture how the most elite admissions process could lead to a student body that, in action, feels like "a lot of mediocre students." But that's a dreadful dysfunction of the institution that the faculty is responsible for. It's truly contemptible to stand aloof and blame your students. 

And the use of the rural setting for the analogy — little county fairs — is out-and-proud snobbery of the most embarrassing kind. Little county fairs and the Kentucky Derby — that's rich. Is there horse racing at a county fair? I'd really like to know who came up with that dimwitted analogy, and I can see why it pissed Campos off. He's right that in that analogy, winning the Kentucky Derby is analogized to ingratiating yourself to law professors.

But what we don't really know is what kind of ingratiating was going on with the great power couple that was Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld? Was it something different — creepier and more sexual — than the ingratiating that goes on with other Yale lawprofs?