Law Schools, Racism

Faced With Careful Criticism, Law Professor Just Calls His Critics Stupid

Law professor says critics can't "read, analyze, and act."

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When USD Law Professor Larry Alexander co-authored the now-infamous “Bourgeois Values” op-ed with Penn Law’s Amy Wax, he thought he was going to be popular. He got to go on Tucker Carlson and complain about those damn kids with their cuckoo open-mindedness. He tasted that sweet spotlight of real-world attention that academics crave yet rarely capture. But now Alexander is learning that the professional fallout from playing right-wing “shock jock” lasts long after Tucker Carlson and the gang have, to borrow from the song, moved on to the next schmo who flows about how much nicer it was back when minorities were seen and not heard.

Some people just aren’t built for the life of a right-wing enfant terrible. It’s not enough to have a retrograde worldview, you’ve got to spit that hot fire on social media around the clock. It’s a lifestyle for these people. It seems as though Alexander isn’t cut out for it. If you come at Charles Murray, best not miss.

So we enter the pivot, the awkward stage where Professor Alexander tries to play off how hurt he is that people “misunderstood” his op-ed, balanced with a healthy dose of victim blaming to cast his detractors as stupid. After the Women’s Law Caucus at USD Law wrote a response to the op-ed laying out pointed criticism of Alexander’s argument, he wrote a response email that he floated to some select faculty. It’s less mea culpa and more futue te ipsi:

So none of WLC’s charges have any basis In (sic) the op ed. And given our biographies, it is patently absurd to attribute the dark motives to us that the WLC letter does. I’m extremely disappointed that our law students would assert what they did. We must have failed to teach them how to read, analyze, and act.

Classy. It’s also a bold move for a guy with a high-profile op-ed that not only fails to cite any evidentiary support for its claims, but relies on a litany of assertions that are demonstrably false, to cast aspersions on the critical thinking chops of his critics.

It was with real sadness that I read the letter from the WLC. It takes either extraordinary dishonesty or lack of reason to read the Wax-Alexander op ed to be a plea to return to the limited sex opportunities and racial discrimination of the ’50s.

To the contrary, it requires both to conclude any different. The op-ed’s premise is that an era that afforded white men opportunities it denied to women and minorities produced successful white men. Wax and Alexander attribute this success to the “culture” of the dominant class in the 1950s, as opposed to, say, the wealth of job opportunities available when women and minorities weren’t allowed to work. Either Wax and Alexander contend that the financial security white men enjoyed in the 1950s had nothing to do with the economic reality of an artificially restrained job market (and, of course, the lingering devastation of international competitors after WWII) or that this success can be fully realized by women and minorities too if they just believe hard enough that divorce is wrong. That’s what requires “extraordinary dishonesty or lack of reason.” And given the severe allergy to factual citation in the op-ed, Wax and Alexander seem to realize there’s not a lot backing up their theory.

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If nothing else, our biographies should gainsay that. Wax is a woman professional. I am married to an attorney. My daughter is an attorney. And we pointed out explicitly that the 50s had the aforementioned problems. What we did advocate was a return to certain values that were much more prevalent in the 50s, values that have nothing to do with racism or sexism. The op ed makes that plain.

“Look, I’ve got no problem with Jewish people, I’m just saying a lot of Germans were pretty successful from 1933 until about 1944 — maybe there’s something to that Nazi culture of pride in one’s blood and the soil.” Unfortunately, this example isn’t too far from the thrust of Alexander’s defense. Few would suggest that the Make Germany Great Again years weren’t terrifically successful for the typical Teutonic German. But likewise, no one would suggest that such success and that culture weren’t predicated upon a genocidal drive. The point is, you can’t neatly excise racism or sexism from a defense of 1950s values.

The “culture,” such as it was, consisted of a bundle of norms white men were more likely to achieve at the time than women or minorities. When the police aggressively enforced segregation, being “respectful of authority,” to quote the op-ed, was celebrated. When the armed forces were still segregated, being “ready to serve the country” was celebrated. The point is the culture of success Wax and Alexander talk about was backward-scripted and then used as a cudgel to blame women and minorities for failing to achieve in a game rigged against them. That’s why “culture,” for Wax and Alexander, only ever matters for those who fail. When white guys in the 1950s succeeded in the face of cultural transgressions, they’re the exceptions that prove the rule. These people faced no repercussions — indeed, the literal poster boy for the op-ed is John Wayne, who was a twice-divorced college drop-out.

Nor did we denigrate the pill. We did suggest that its advent correlated with a breakdown of sexual norms, which in turn correlated with the rise of single motherhood, despite the pill’s availability. But nowhere do we denigrate the pill or its use. Nor would we.

This is false. Wax and Alexander didn’t suggest a “correlation,” they straight-up listed the pill as one of “a combination of factors” that broke down the cultural script they love so much. That’s a causation claim and while it is, like every other assertion in the op-ed, an unwarranted claim, they nonetheless made it. And he knows they made it no matter how many crocodile tears he conjures up.

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As I’ve argued before, academics enjoy great freedom to express bold and unpopular ideas, but they shouldn’t have the freedom to be bad scholars. When a professor is concocting theories without evidence and insulting critics as unable to “read, analyze, and act” when they dare point to the naked emperor strolling the halls, it’s not about viewpoint any more. USD Law is going to be a pretty lonely place for a professor who traded his academic credibility to get some cable news hits.

Thankfully, the research and critical thinking skills on display in his op-ed should be enough to land him a Trump nod for the Ninth Circuit. So we’ve got that to look forward to.

Earlier: Law Students Seek To Ban Professor From Teaching 1Ls
Dog Whistling ‘Bourgeois Values’ Op-Ed Gets Thorough Takedown From Other Law Professors
Law Professors Say White ’50s Culture Is Superior, Other Racist Stuff
That One Op-Ed By Those Two Law Professors

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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