A Word Too Far : Blogger and Law Professor, Ann Althouse, teaches us how political correctness does the opposite of what it was intended to do

A Word Too Far

By ANN ALTHOUSE


Published: March 3, 2007
Recently, the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski had to grovel after one of its recruiters used a racist epithet in an interview exercise at Duke University Law School.

The recruiter was quoting a Waco, Tex., prosecutor in a 1920s murder case in which Leon Jaworski, one of the firm’s founding partners, represented a black defendant.

But never mind. One student heard an upsetting word and lodged a complaint.

Without explaining the context of the partner’s use of that horrible word, the law school’s dean, Katharine Bartlett, sent e-mail to students, saying: “I appreciate the strong feelings this incident has raised.” And before long, Steven Pfeiffer, the chairman of the firm’s executive committee, was traveling to Durham, N.C., to apologize.

As reported in the Texas Lawyer, Pfeiffer said, “There is no excuse for what happened on this campus. There is no context for which that is permissible conduct.”


Closer to home, a perplexing event took place at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where I teach.

As reported in The Capital Times: “Clearly, eloquently and sometimes tearfully, the seven young Asian women who raised the issue of a law professor’s allegedly insulting remarks about the Hmong told their story at a public forum Thursday night.”

What were these “allegedly insulting remarks”? Well, we’re only talking about alleged remarks, because even though the incident in question took place in mid-February, we have yet to hear the law professor’s version of the story of what he said to his class. Teaching a lesson about the failure of the law to take cultural differences into account, Prof. Leonard Kaplan said something about the Hmong that upset several students.

Despite the confusion about what happened, demands for apologies and remedies fill the air. The truth that seems to matter is the fact that the students felt bad.

You might think that a law school would want to teach scrupulous procedure, including a passion for the search for the truth and the need to find the facts before devising the remedy. But the notion instead seemed to be that we could simply treat the feelings and try to make everyone feel good again.

Ironically, you have to care enough about engaging energetically with issues of race to run into this sort of trouble. It’s so much easier to skip the subject altogether, to embrace a theory of colorblindness or to scoop out gobs of politically correct pabulum. It’s only when you challenge the students and confront them with something that can be experienced as ugly — even if you’re only trying to highlight your law firm’s illustrious fight against racism — that you create the risk that someone may take offense.

Perhaps students will jot down the few words you just said that made their ears perk up. What was the rest of this complicated pedagogical exercise, intrusively stirring up difficult emotions?

It would have been so much easier to teach using simple, straightforward lecturing, with every sentence carefully composed, with a sharp eye on the goal of never giving anyone any reason to question the purity of your beliefs and the beneficence of your heart.

Your colleagues may sympathize with you in private, but most likely they’ll be rethinking this idea — heartily promoted in law schools since the 1980s — that they ought to actively incorporate delicate issues of race into their courses.

Publicly, the school goes into damage-control mode. After all, it has worked so hard to bring together a diverse student body and to convey a feeling of welcome to everyone. How can we bear to hear a student say, as one Wisconsin student did on Thursday, that “unless we have a safe learning environment,” the school’s commitment to diversity “doesn’t mean anything”?

But this is madness! Our question should not be about what we can do to make you comfortable or how we can make your life pleasant again.

We owe our law students respect, but part of that respect is the recognition that they are adults who are spending many thousands of dollars and hours of study trying to acquire the critical thinking and fortitude that will enable them to serve clients and to stand up to adversaries who are only too ready to shake their nerve — like that real racist, the prosecutor who tried to intimidate Leon Jaworski in Texas in the 1920s.

Ann Althouse is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and writes the blog Althouse. This is her last guest column.