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Sunday, August 28, 2005
 A Few Comments On the New York Times Article Directly Below, On Intellectual Diversity In America’s Law Schools [And I mean “intellectual diversity.” One commenter on the subject at History News Network irritably asks, “Why not just call it ‘ideological diversity’ or political diversity,’ since, you know, that's what [one commentator on the subject is] actually talking about?” Because that’s the beginning of what most people are talking about. Ultimately they’re talking about intellectual diversity.] I think the article is devastating. Law professors use direct speech (humanities types generally do not), and the direct statements the law professors quoted in the article make about the culture of law schools and the intellectual implications of the study are devastating: “ ‘Law schools are sort of organized in a club structure, where current members of the club pick future members of the club.’ ” “The most serious problem pointed to by the study, Professor McGinnis said, is that the ideas generated by the law schools are both uniform and untested.” " ‘We have a higher responsibility to our students, ourselves and our disciplines," he said, "that our preference for ideological homogeneity and faculty-lounge echo chambers betrays.’ " Note that the commentators are indeed drawing intellectual conclusions (“the ideas generated”) from political data. At some American law schools, virtually everyone thinks alike (they are “clubs,” “echo-chambers”), with the result that the ideas generated out of those schools are “uniform and untested.” Law schools make humanities departments look like hotbeds of polemic. |