Law Students, Their Teachers and Our Future - The Wall Street Journal

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Your editorial “Yale Law Students for Censorship” (March 21) focuses largely on the appalling behavior of the students concerned. If there had been only a handful of them, that would be fair enough. But when a hundred-strong mob is involved, more important issues arise.

Who is teaching these students, and what are they teaching them? What conditions produce large, spiteful, anti-intellectual mobs? When these events occur, as they do with regularity across the country, our focus ought not be primarily on the students, but rather on the professors who are evidently persuading their students that any opinion contrary to their own is an evil not to be tolerated.

Shutting down dissent is something the one-party campuses have been doing by means of politicized faculty appointments for many years. Student intolerance is only a symptom of a larger and far more important underlying problem.

Em. Prof. John M. Ellis

University of California, Santa Cruz

As a second-generation alumnus of the Berkeley free-speech movement (after my sister, who was present when Mario Savio gave his famous extemporaneous speech), I never thought I’d be to the right of a Journal editorial. Your admonition is to “warn these students there may be consequences.” The disruptive students should be expelled. They broke at least two laws: disturbing the peace and attempting to block the exercising of the First Amendment rights of others. Their behavior was neither a civil-rights nor antiwar protest. They hark more to fascism than any liberalism.

Jack Knutson

Pebble Beach, Calif.

I would like to add to Senior Judge Laurence Silberman’s call for judges not to hire as clerks those Yale law students who disrupt public debates. I would further advise law firms not to hire such persons.

Do you really want such whiners and crybabies, who do not understand or appreciate the basics of the First Amendment, in your law firm? Are those the type of attorneys to whom you could trust clients’ needs when their own personal agenda is obviously more important?

A question also for Yale Law School: Do you admit these types of persons knowing their propensities toward disruption and self-importance, or do you create them once they arrive on campus?

Chris Heinrichs

San Antonio

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source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/law-school-yale-free-speech-campus-silberman-lawyers-11648404822

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