Last Thursday, I spoke on the Second Amendment, at Western New England College School of Law, in Springfield, Massachusetts, at the invitation of the school’s Federalist Society. The night before, the Red Sox won the World Series, and it was fun to be in the hotel bar, with plenty of Red Sox fans, as the 86-year Curse was lifted. It was sort of like being an eyewitness to the final scene of Beauty and the Beast—a very rare event.
My speech the next day also had an unusual experience, although the WNEC Federalists tell me that it happens all the time to them. For the first time ever, I was “sniped.” According to the WNEC Federalists, when they schedule an event, the school administration quite often schedules a counter-event, designed to keep the law students from hearing whatever the Federalists have to say.
My speech was final event in the WNEC Federalists’ “Second Amendment Week.” On Tuesday at noon, they showed a video of the recent
debate
in London between the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre and Rebecca Peters, a leading scholar of the international gun prohibition lobby. At the last minute, the administration scheduled an event at the exact same time, on the highly controversial Solomon Amendment, which forbids schools which receive federal funding from barring military recruiters. Many law schools, including WNEC, would like to prohibit the military from conducting campus interviews to recruit lawyers for the Judge Advocate Generals Corps, because the military discriminates against homosexuals.
The Federalists asked the administration why the event had been scheduled to conflict with the Federalist event. According to the Federalists, the administration replied that the conflict was unavoidable, because of faculty scheduling. The Federalists, and even some members of the faculty, suggest that the administration’s rationale was nonsense; faculty schedules are the same every week. If the faculty speakers were available last Tuesday at noon, they would also be available the next Tuesday, at noon, or the Tuesday after that.
My speech was scheduled for Thursday at noon. The Federalists entice students to attend events by offering free pizza and soda, which the student Federalists pay for out of their own pockets.
Just a few days before I arrived, an announcement was made that
PMBR,
a company which offers classes to prepare students for the bar exam, would be holding an informational meeting about how PMBR could help students pass the bar. As is the norm at PMBR events, free pizza was offered.
When the PMBR representative arrived on campus, a Federalist heard him remarking to his assistant about how unusual the WNEC administration’s request had been: the administration had contacted him on very short notice, and insisted that he make his presentation on a particular date and a particular time. The date and time just happened to be the exact time when I was scheduled to speak.
Now WNEC does not graduate any students in December, so none of its students would be preparing for the bar exam until next summer. So why would the WNEC administration be so insistent that PMBR make its presentation on a particular Thursday at noon, as opposed to the next day, or the next week?
According to the U.S. News & World Report rankings, WNEC is a “tier 4” law school, meaning that it is in the bottom quartile. A professor at another (mid-ranking) school once explained to me that political correctness and hostility to intellectual diversity are more intense at the lower-ranking law schools than at the higher-ranking schools. At the high end, the leftist faculty are influential in legal scholarship, and in the broader world. Accordingly, they can afford to be tolerant of a few conservative or libertarian faculty or students. But in the lower-ranking law schools, power over of the school itself is the only power the faculty have, and they are often especially rigid about attempting to suppress diverse points of view.
Notwithstanding the “sniping” attempt, about 55 students showed up for my lecture, including (to their credit) some students who were well-known members of the campus Left.
Like many of the members of the Volokh Conspiracy, I have spoken at Federalist events all over the country, at law schools all over the prestige rankings. But this was the only time I have ever been sniped.
WNEC charges its students $29,000 a year in tuition. Perhaps the administration might offer the students a better value for the very hefty tuition if, instead of sniping Federalist events, the administration celebrated intellectual diversity, and stopped trying to distract its students from hearing non-Left points of view. Why not schedule campus programs so that students can attend both events, rather than having to miss one?
After all, a good lawyer is comfortable with being confronted by the best arguments of her intellectual opponents. A law school which tries to shield students from speakers who dissent from politically correct ideology does a very poor job of training lawyers to engage in intellectual combat, which is an essential skill of a lawyer.
UPDATE: I was wrong in my claim that WNEC does not graduate a December class. And although political correctness may be rampant at many law schools, there are still schools–including those in the fourth tier–which continue to respect intellectual diversity.
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