Should the government be able to tell a private university what to teach and how to teach it?
Is there a libertarian left in the house?
This is the letter that former and current Trump lawyer (officially the Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney) Ed Martin sent to the dean of Georgetown Law School:
It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote DEI. This is unacceptable. I have begun an inquiry into this and would welcome your response to the following questions: First, have you eliminated all DEI from your school and its curriculum? Second, if DEI is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?
And then he went on to threaten Georgetown students:
At this time, you should know that no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship, or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize DEI will be considered.
Martin and his boss want to tell law schools what they can teach and how to teach it. And he is willing to punish their students — and deprive his office of top talent from top universities — if they don't comply.
The dean of Georgetown Law School responded strongly, as he should.
"Given the First Amendment's protection of a university's freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University's mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution," William Treanor wrote in his response to Martin.
I spent more than 30 years as a tenured law professor at Harvard Law School and USC Law School. During most of those years, I taught a course originally titled "Sex Discrimination" and later called "Gender Discrimination."
The course covered the history of women's rights, legal precedents under the 14th Amendment, and federal and state statutory law. We looked at various areas of law covered in other courses — like criminal law and property law and tort law — where issues of gender must be considered.
I used to think, in the early days, that a time would come when issues of gender would be addressed in all these other classes, and we wouldn't need a separate course. I believed that the law and society would one day produce gender justice; that there would literally be nothing left to teach except history.
It never happened. The last class I taught before stepping down to practice law full-time was a seminar on diversity in the legal profession.
There was a great deal to teach, unfortunately, and much of it grew out of the absence of diversity, particularly at the highest levels of the profession. This was only a few years ago.
Would my course be banned by Martin? Presumably so.
And so would my criminal law class, which I began teaching in 1981, which was the first criminal law class in the country to incorporate rape as a major topic in criminal law, something I urged other law professors to try in an article I wrote for the Yale Law Journal in the 1980s. Maybe that should have been banned, too?
I told my students about my own experience as a rape victim, before I started law school, and how it shaped my view of the criminal justice system. I taught them about the history of racism and sexism that had shaped the development of rape law.
My students, some 40 years later, have told me how much they remembered those classes and how much they learned. Should such discussions also be banned? Shall we only look at the law from the perspective of a white man?
The law schools are ready to fight Martin. My Facebook feed is full of promises from law professors ready to challenge Martin's right to dictate the subjects we teach.
We will win this fight, but the idea that we need to have it, in 2025, is both shocking and frightening.
Susan Estrich is a politician, professor, lawyer and writer. She has appeared on the pages of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. Ms. Estrich has also appeared as a television commentator on CNN, Fox News, NBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Her focus is on legal matters, women's concerns, national politics, and social issues. Read Susan Estrich's Reports — More Here.