Don't Let Speaker Events Be Hijacked

I refused to let my first ever visit to UMass-Dartmouth law school turn into a struggle session after a faculty commenter proved less interested in exploring "controversial" ideas than the students.

Last Thursday, I participated in an unusual event that I’m still processing. It was a Federalist Society lunch panel, one of dozens I do each year at law schools across the country. This one was at the University of Massachusetts School of Law, the state’s only public law school, located in Dartmouth on the south shore, near Rhode Island.

I was quite excited to speak there because it’s one of the few ABA-accredited law schools where I hadn’t spoken. (For those of you keeping count, or who might be able to finagle an invite, here’s the full list: Appalachian, Arkansas-Little Rock, CUNY, Howard, Inter-American (San Juan), Lincoln Memorial (Knoxville), Oregon, Southern, SUNY-Buffalo, Touro, UC-Irvine, UDC, Western New England, Wayne State, Western State.)

After discussing several possible topics with the chapter president earlier this year, we settled on “DEI, Free Speech, and the Higher-Ed Crisis.” That makes sense; my forthcoming book covers that subject, some variation of which has been probably the most popular thing I’ve been asked to speak on in the last year. Then, after weeks of effort, the chapter president told me he was unsuccessful in finding a professor to debate or comment on my presentation. That was unfortunate but unsurprising; it’s become the norm for law school faculty to be unwilling to engage speakers with heterodox viewpoints, particularly if sponsored by the Federalist Society.