Legal educators tussle over politics in faculty honors

For persons interested in the ongoing tumult at the University of Arkansas Little Rock Law School over the renaming of a professorship after President Bill Clinton (e.g., TaxProf Blog, Wash. Times, Ark. Dem.-Gaz. (subscription)), apparently without faculty approval and with dubious official imprimatur, an August 19 legislative hearing on the matter is online on video.  On the Agenda tab, cue item F, at 2:06:39.

Citing, inter alia, named professorships awarded upon "cronyism" rather than merit, a police officer-student barred from open-carrying on campus in uniform until the legislature enacted a remedial statute, and refusal to permit a political conservative to teach constitutional law, Professor Robert Steinbuch concluded:

It saddens me to say but the law school is no longer an environment for unbiased legal education.  It's a hot bed of crypto leftist wokism unwittingly funded by the great people of this state being used by a select few who pocket a drastically disproportionate share of the resources to pursue their political agendas.

Dean Theresa Beiner testified that the law school decided after 20 years to honor the wishes of the donor who funded the professorship, and then, apparently, did so erroneously.  When a newspaper columnist asked for pertinent records under the state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law school discovered that Clinton had "withdrawn" permission amid the investigation of his conduct in the Lewinsky affair.

Three cheers for the Arkansas FOIA.  Full disclosure: I was a co-author with Professor Steinbuch and University of Arkansas Law School Professor Emeritus John J. Watkins of the sixth edition of the treatise, The Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. 

A cheer more for the legislator in the hearing who probed the process for awarding named professorships and compelled the dean's admission that the selection occurs substantially in secret under the statutory personnel exemption.  My recollection of the selection process for named professorships at that law school many years ago accords with Professor Steinbuch's more recent experience.  When I worked there, one professor—the same one who raised a red flag over the "Clinton" name—was stripped of his named professorship when he fell out of favor.  A past dean represented that the professorship here at issue had to be awarded to one professor—the one who kicked off the present controversy by using the "Clinton" name—because of the donor's intent, rather than merit, a contention unsupported by the donor.

At the same time, my experience as a law professor suggests that very little in the American workplace works on merit anyway, legal education and the work experiences of my law students informing my conclusion.  The dean's insistence to the contrary is quaint and typical of persons in power, whatever their politics.

The fireworks show (item F) runs about 48 minutes.  The referenced exhibit, a letter from the university chancellor to the committee, is available online.

'Clinton' honorific draws fire at Arkansas law school

"The Clinton Law School"
was not to be.

An op-ed in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette by Mike Masterson on Saturday reported a mess at the "William H. Bowen" law school at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, since a professor there started calling himself the "William J. Clinton Professor."  The ADG quoted an email from my friend and colleague, Distinguished Professor J. Thomas Sullivan, obtained under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act (FOIA):

I don't recall when the Law and Public Policy Professorship was re-named for President Clinton.... I first noticed this reference in the signature block on an email sent by ["Dean Emeritus and William J. Clinton Professor of Constitutional Law and Public Service"] John DiPippa in March.

This professorship was originally designated as the Law and Public Policy professorship and was created, as I recall, after we moved into the current building. There was discussion that the Law School itself would be named for Clinton, but that was scuttled because there was serious concern that he would be subjected to some adverse legal action ... for giving false testimony in the civil action brought by Paula Corbin Jones....

I couldn't find any reference to the professorship as the "William J. Clinton Professor of Constitutional Law and Public Service" on the Bowen web site. In fact, John's faculty page describes him as: Dean Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy.

It may be that I missed an announcement ... but I am not aware of the re-designation of the professorship in the name of William J. Clinton or the reference to "Constitutional Law and Public Service." Had this been brought to the faculty for discussion ... I would have opposed the change in designation for a number of reasons:

First, President Clinton was disbarred from practice before the United States Supreme Court and the Arkansas courts following the impeachment trial, in 2000 or 2001. I believe that John took the opportunity to defend him against disbarment at the time, but conceded that some form of censure was appropriate, being quoted at the time by The Washington Post: ... "But DiPippa also said Clinton should be punished more severely because of his position. He suggested a suspension of his license for some period of time. Disbarment ought to be reserved for what I've called incorrigible lawyers—lawyers who are just going to repeat their offenses and continue to harm clients, he said." ....

I simply do not think it appropriate for a law school to honor a disbarred lawyer—it strikes me as hardly sending a deterrent message to law students or practitioners. But beyond the disbarment, I have grave concerns about Bowen being aligned with significant policy decisions taken by Clinton that have [caused] irreparable damage to our legal system.

The mass incarceration of Americans, particularly affecting the poor and African American communities, was accelerated during the Clinton administration in an effort to deflect potential Republican claims that Democrats were/are soft on crime....

Second, the 1994 law shaped Democratic Party politics for years. Under the leadership of Bill Clinton, Democrats wanted to wrest control of crime issues from Republicans, so the two parties began a bidding war to increase penalties for crime. The 1994 crime bill was a key part of the Democratic strategy to show it can be tougher-on-crime than Republicans.

Of particular importance, Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 which effectively eliminated federal habeas corpus as a protection against state court criminal convictions tainted by procedural irregularities and failure of state courts to correctly apply U.S. Supreme Court precedent in disposition of claimed violations of federal constitutional protections.

Sullivan is right about the naming of the law school; I was there then, too.  The money was coming from Bowen, an Arkansas banker—over faculty objections that UALR was selling itself to a donor for less money than any law school had ever taken for the honor—and Bowen's name was substituted when Clinton's became politically problematic.  In the op-ed, Professor Rob Steinbuch, a colleague of Sullivan's and co-author of mine on transparency research, confirmed Sullivan's take on the unilateral impropriety of the name change.

Sullivan wrote further:

Of general importance is the usurpation of faculty governance by the law school administration. At a minimum, the question of re-designating a named professorship should be announced to the faculty for purposes of eliciting legitimate concerns. The faculty originally adopted the rule regarding named professorships that was altered to give the dean sole authority for designation—apart from specific directions given by a donor.

I don't recall whether there was faculty input in altering terms of the original rule, but I do recall the faculty were generally notified of the current rule, as published. In either event, the legitimate authority of the faculty to advise and consent, if not promulgate, a policy that may have significant consequences for the law school in terms of our mission and reputation, shouldn't be dismissed by expediency or political interests of a dean, advisers or supporters answering only to the dean.

Sullivan has his own history with named professorships at UALR.  He was stripped of his in the past for the sin of dissent.  The professorships are better measures of academic-political compliance than of merit.  They're awarded only for five-year terms so as to incentivize continuing obedience to the dean among tenured faculty who otherwise might be hard to wrangle.

Such is academics.  My school, too, punishes anyone who dares not be a "team player," or fails to dumb down her or his own performance to the median.  The problem of "workplace mobbing" to enforce group-think and tame high achievers is so severe in academics that sociologist Kenneth Westhues wrote books about it.

Remembering journalist Paul Greenberg, 1937-2021

pxhere CC0 1.0

In April, our world lost a great American writer: Paul Greenberg died at age 84.

Long a nationally syndicated columnist writing from "small town" Arkansas, Greenberg won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for editorials on civil rights.  In D.C. Beltway circles, he is maybe best known for having given Bill Clinton the moniker "Slick Willie."  But Greenberg was no dogmatic partisan.  He described himself aptly as an "ideologically unreliable conservative."

Greenberg's politics were difficult to pin down, because he resisted labels and simply called the world as he saw it.  His parents immigrated from eastern Europe early in the 20th century, and their experience infused his morality and writing with a libertarian savor.  The same 20th-century-immigrant experience forged me, so I identify with the motivation.  An embrace of liberal immigration policy alongside a relentless insistence on conservative work ethic strikes some in America as a vulgar inconsistency, but, to me, strikes a sonorous chord.

Notwithstanding his famous wariness of Clinton politics, Greenberg was so much more than a political pundit.  A Jew from Shreveport, Louisiana (near my wife's home town), growing up during and after World War II, he was stocked with ample source material to inform comment on the American condition from a peculiar perch of simultaneous detachment and investment.  His writing exuded cultural fluency, from ancient wisdom to contemporary "fadtalk," as he termed it.  A Greenberg column could invoke the prophet Isaiah, philosopher Foucault, and Leonardo the mutant ninja turtle in one incisive analysis and scarce recognition of any juxtaposition.  Greenberg lionized early 20th-century editorialist William Allen White, whom he credited as having said, "A great editorial is one that says something everybody knows but nobody has said before."

A writer's writer, Greenberg wrote thoughtfully and lovingly, but always with profound humility, about the craft of editorializing.  In a column on the legacy of H.L. Mencken, Greenberg wrote of writing:

The first steps in the writing process may be painful as one watches what seemed a great idea fail the test of words, or turn into something entirely different.  But it is satisfying to watch something of form and substance emerge from the inchoate mass.  When it's well done, the writer feels like a sculptor chiseling away deftly at a block of stone.  If done poorly day after day, stroke after stroke, the effect on both writer and reader is more like that of the Chinese water torture.

Library of Congress Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (1950)

Greenberg lamented the gradual disintegration of journalism in the late 20th century and, as a student of Marshall McLuhan, fretted irascibly about the corrosive effects of ephemeral television.  He railed against the anti-intellectual condescension of the bullet point.  He wrote columns to a thousand-plus-word length that felt cordially readable, though a blog adviser today would animadvert as excessive.  (You're 450 words into this blog now; am I not tiresome?)  He insisted, "I remain convinced that anyone will read an editorial if it's irresistibly written."

I knew Paul Greenberg only by reputation and a degree of separation.  To me, mostly, he was a visage of halftone dots gazing into the world from the top of a broadsheet.  Greenberg's son, Dan, is a friend of mine, and a lawyer with whom I've been privileged to collaborate on many projects over the years.  Dan is possessed of obstinate integrity, humble yet profuse intellect, and earnest devotion to family.  So I always have appraised him as an apple that fell close to the tree.

When the news came that Paul Greenberg had died, I had a yearning to read more of his work, especially work that was not tied to the messy milieu of politics.  So I borrowed from the library a 1992 collection aptly titled, Entirely Personal.  The book compiled some of Greenberg's more intimate writings in chapters such as "family," "religion," "the writer," and "the small town."  These works predated my familiarity with Greenberg, so they were all new to me.  They were a treasure to unwrap.

I asked for, and Dan gave me, permission to share one his father's works from the book.  I had trouble choosing which.  I've read Entirely Personal twice now, and I've been struck time and again by how prescient the writings were, and how salient they remain.  There are superficial tells of their place in time—Ronald Reagan, Russians in Afghanistan, and appointment TV—yet, from these circumstances, Greenberg derived timeless observations that are equally meaningful in a world of Donald Trump, Americans in Afghanistan, and mass media overload.  There are surprisingly poignant pieces on family that speak eternal truths.  But, at this time of loss, they make me sad and seem intrusive—too personal. 

I was captivated especially by Greenberg's chapter on religion.  In the introduction, he recounted, "Someone once asked me how much of my writing was influenced by my being Jewish.  The immediate, spontaneous response that formed in my mind was: 'Every word, including and and the.'"  Besides his Jewish heritage and parents' immigrant experience, Greenberg grew up contemporaneously with the Holocaust.  Consistently with his proclivity for self-definition, his views were shaped invariably by witness.  He was, at once, spiritually conscious in his personal life and fervidly committed to the exclusion of religion from public life.

Thus, though it might be an unconventional choice, I found my favorite writing in the book in a column imitative in style.  In 1990, the Supreme Court issued a pair of key decisions on the religion clauses of the First Amendment.  In a case on the Establishment Clause, the Court permitted a Christian student club to meet in a public school over the objection of the school board.  One might expect a "conservative" and staunch advocate for the freedom of religion to applaud the decision.  To the contrary, Greenberg saw the decision as a threat to religion, specifically, to the freedom of church from state, an underlying theory of the Anti-Establishment Clause.  With devilish ingenuity, he wrote a cheeky retort as an addendum to The Screwtape Letters.

In memory of Paul Greenberg, great American writer, here is, "Letter from Below (With Apologies to C.S. Lewis)," published in June of 1990, and reprinted in Entirely Personal in 1992.  I'm not certain I agree entirely with Greenberg's absolutist stance on separationism.  But I understand and deeply appreciate the reckoning of his conviction.  Just as importantly, and characteristically, his witty observations speak also generally, and still today saliently, to the danger of majoritarian usurpation of individual self-determination.

Please note that this republication is made possible by special permission of Dan Greenberg.  The work is copyrighted by Paul Greenberg and is not covered by the Creative Commons license to this blog.

Enjoy.

---

Letter from Below

(With Apologies to C.S. Lewis)

June 4, 1990

My dear Wormwood,

The best of news. On the first anniversary of another of our great victories, the one in Tiananmen Square, your affectionate uncle happened to be glancing through the public prints, which are second only to television in promoting our cause, when my eye fell on the latest decision of the U.S. Supreme Court concerning church and state, both of which have been our province from time to time. It seems the distinguished justices have been busying themselves blurring the distinction between the two—a work that would be most dear to my heart if I had one.

This time the justices aren't deciding just when a religious symbol has become sufficiently irreligious to be displayed on public property (may they never tire of such work!) but rather how to make religion an extracurricular activity, which of course is what it should have been all along. What better way to keep it from being essential?

It shouldn't be long before the happy impression spreads that religion requires the support of the state, or at least the occasional use of a classroom. It's a start. Experience has shown that the more official a creed, the less appealing. See the paltry interest in the established churches of Western Europe. Or note the disaster that has befallen that most established of pseudo-religions, Communism, in the eastern part of the continent. It's enough to make you weep. 

I loved Sandra Day O'Connor's formulation for the majority of the court: "A school that permits a student-initiated and student-led religious club to meet after school, just as it permits any other student group to do, does not convey a message of state approval or endorsement of the particular religion." Do you think she has any inkling of what it does convey—namely, state approval of religion in general? And a state that can approve religion can disapprove it, too. Indeed, I think approval is much the more effective way to stifle the thing.

Religion-in-general, my dear Wormwood, is our great ally. It should be encouraged at every turn. I can just see the kiddies sitting around homeroom now, deciding which after-school clubs to join. ("I just can't make a choice, can you, Rebecca Jo? Chess, scuba diving or religion, they all sound like fun. Maybe I'll take religion. They say it improves your communications skills. ") It shouldn't be long before faith is treated as a nice, constructive after-school activity.

Religion, the real thing, can't be practiced in general—any more than language can be spoken in general. You have to choose a specific one. Religion-in-general has all the moral authority and emotional impact of Esperanto. Our mission is to replace belief with some safe, state-approved substitute. Once we extend a veneer of religiosity over the schools, the genuine article can be expected to fade away. Better to have the little suckers pray in school than in church or, even more dangerous, at home. Civil religion, that's the ticket, my dear nephew.

John Paul Stevens may represent something of a problem. Thank hell, he was the only dissenter from this lovely little ruling. Only he recognized that it comes "perilously close to an outright command to allow organized prayer … on school premises." Do you think he's on to our game, namely more and more organization, less and less personal prayer? We have to reduce prayer to something else—an extra-curricular activity, another government benefit, an opening ceremony, a public convenience … anything but an intimate experience. That's when it's dangerous.

Only when prayer and Bible study are officially recognized as wholesome activities conducive to better grades and order in the halls will we have defanged the saving thing. The trick is to make it an instrument—a technique, an extra-curricular activity, never a state of being, or all our subjects will be left open to the Enemy. We'll know we're succeeding when school Prayer Clubs start having their own letter jackets. What a great day it'll be when we make religion utterly dependent on peer pressure.

Justice O'Connor says a school can still ban disruptive groups. That's precisely the kind of prayer we want to encourage, Wormwood, the kind that doesn't disrupt anything, especially not our stock in trade: ordinary, routinely accepted, unnoticeable evil. Real prayer can be a powerfully disruptive influence. It can revolutionize the most stable society; never forget what befell poor Nineveh when its people unaccountably listened to that Jonah person against all reason. Yet prayer can also be the one thing that holds people together when everything else has collapsed around them. Perverse, unpredictable thing, prayer. It needs to be put in the care of the proper authorities, namely the state.

Isn't the name of the law that the court upheld perfect? The Equal Access Act of 1984. I love it. The great problem with the First Amendment, which so long has stood in our way, is precisely that it does not provide equal access to religion. Government is explicitly barred from passing any law having to do with its establishment. Religion is set apart, as if it were something holy. Government is told not to touch it or even come close to it. This is intolerable, Wormwood. Only by bringing religion under the state's authority, by rendering unto Caesar what isn't his, can we blur the essence of religion, which is the separation of the holy and the profane. This decision should help.

The great challenge facing religion is not equal access to the world but how to retain enough integrity to stay distinguishable from the world. My fellow demon Glittercut did a good night's work when he invented Success Theology. Our job, my young protege, is to make religion indistinguishable from the world, one more extra-curricular activity. The last temptation—mastery of the powers and principalities—is still the most effective. As the world giveth, so give we.

What we've got to do is get people thinking of religion as something educational, beneficial, a means to some greater social end, an institution wholly worthy of a little government support—a tuition grant here and there, or a place to meet in the schools. We've got to get it on the dole. That way it won't go off on its own with unpredictable results. It needs to be woven smoothly into the social fabric so it can be corrupted with everything else. Left alone, there's no telling where it may spread. The Enemy can be dangerous when left to His own strange devices. Be warned, young demon, He is never stronger than when He appears weak in the eyes of the world.

Have you noticed the enthusiasm this ruling has kindled among many of the faithful? It's an inspiring sight. They've been handed a stone and think it's bread. Delicious.

That's about all the news from down under. I'm still vying with my old rival Gallclaws for the next GS-16 rating in the bureaucracy. The competition here is, of course, hellish. But news like this cheers me.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

© 1992 Paul Greenberg

---

Read more from Paul Greenberg at Jewish World Review, in one of his books, or in your preferred news archive.  The Greenberg family plans to archive his papers.