Things are tough for liberal professors these days. No doubt they never thought these three words would ever be strung together: President-elect Trump.
And now nearly 200 of them have been accused by a conservative student group as advancing “leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
Really now. We thought that was part of the job description. It’s college, after all.
This shouldn’t come as a huge shock: Included in the list are 10 law professors.
They were nailed by Turning Point USA in a list the conservative site titled, “Professor Watchlist.” It appears that Turning Point USA did a lot of Google searches to track professors who have expressed naughty leftist points of views in the past.
For instance, Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet was placed on the list for a blog post in which he said conservatives had lost the culture wars. And he wanted the Red Staters to feel the wrath of the Blue Staters:
“For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all.”
He told the Harvard Crimson he was cool with being on the list. “It comes with the territory.”
Others expressed concern that the list could be damaging because it could prevent free speech and stifle academic freedom.
Some also said their views were taken out of context.
According to a story from the ABA Journal, one professor said he was “appalled” he did not make the list. Funny. We’d take his class in a heartbeat.
There have been attempts to quantify if law schools lean left. In 2010, The National Jurist reported on a study that showed law schools hired a higher number of openly left-leaning professors than conservative ones.
Another study — which tracked federal political donations — showed most lawyers also have liberal views. “American lawyers lean to the left of the ideological spectrum,” the study said. “This places the average American lawyer’s ideology close to the ideology of Bill Clinton.”
Did they vote in the most recent election?
Here are the most liberal law professors:
• University of Pennsylvania law professor Regina Austin, for espousing critical race theory.
• John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor Gloria Browne-Marshall, for saying “Southern white radicals” fought the Obama administration’s health care law.
• Bioethicist Arthur Caplan, accused of comparing Trump’s tactics for gaining support to those used by Hitler.
• Ohio State University law professor Joshua Dressler, for saying that U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s statement about New York values might have been anti-Semitic.
• Georgetown University law professor Gary Peller, for criticizing the “unmitigated praise” for Justice Antonin Scalia in a law school press release mourning his death.
• University of California at Berkeley law professor John Powell, accused of saying the Bush administration took money away from protecting levees in New Orleans because the structures were protecting black people.
• Indiana University clinical law professor Fran Quigley at the Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis. He criticized the Indiana Republican agenda in an op-ed and wrote that Haiti represents “a tea party fantasyland” with its rock bottom minimum wage, deforestation and virtually nonexistent public safety and government health care.
• George Mason University professor Craig Willse, who opposed renaming the university’s law school after Justice Antonin Scalia.
• University of California at Los Angeles law professor Jonathan Zasloff, accused of stating on social media that Republicans were catering to their KKK core of old, angry, white Southern men with reactionary views on race.
