Lawless IV: Leadership Failures Old and New
People who study these things point to the Ferguson protests of 2014 as the discernible moment when CRT/woke ideology broke into the mainstream. I describe in Lawless how the pandemic accelerated that trend toward perceiving our nation as racially intolerant, particularly as cultural influencers retreated to their laptops. The killing of George Floyd threw gas onto that fire, as institutions decided to radically restructure themselves overnight, centered on “antiracism.” Everyone all of a sudden needed a vice president or associate dean for DEI.
Indeed, the pandemic was a boon to bureaucratic leviathans wishing to crawl even further into normal life. Anything could be justified as long as it was labeled a public-safety initiative. Any questioning of regulations would be labeled thought crime. In the resultant atmosphere, institutions seemed like organs of disorder and illogic, so it’s little wonder that anarchic elements arose that questioned the very foundations of law and order.
And so we have illiberal student mobs, coached by professors who increasingly see their jobs as training activists, enabled by spineless deans who allow and encourage DEI to swallow every other law school goal. Counterexamples are few and far between; they’re the exceptions that prove the rule because there’s not much institutional will to remedy these problems. There was some hope that things might settle down after the waning of the pandemic, but the explosion of pro-Hamas sentiment on campus after October 7 showed that the heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most “progressive” people. As Bill Ackman put it in a revelatory essay the day Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned, antisemitism is the “canary in the coal mine.” It’s a leading indicator of underlying pathologies, which here means everything from cancel culture to ideological indoctrination, intellectual corruption to moral decay.
In summer 2022, when Justice Clarence Thomas withdrew from teaching at GW Law School, it was one more example of the poisonous atmosphere that makes it impossible to have a free exchange of ideas. GW administrators had stood up to the mob demanding that he be canceled for his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, but that only shows their failure to inculcate a spirit of open inquiry. It’s a shame that Thomas f
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