The Review: The Yale Law School — or the Yale School of Drama?

Plus, David Duchovny's aborted Ph.D. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. “Yale Law School,” as our Tom Bartlett [wrote]( recently, “has found itself in the news a lot lately.” The most recent incident, which Bartlett describes in detail, involved large-scale protests against a Federalist Society-sponsored conversation between Kristen Waggoner, a right-wing Christian lawyer who opposes gay marriage and abortion rights, and Monica Miller, a secular humanist. Protestors shouted down and in at least one instance physically [threatened]( a member of the Federalist Society in what might seem an overt violation of the Law School’s own policies. (Early reports suggesting the level of disruption had been exaggerated have been discredited, as David Lat explains [here]( — see “Update.”) For the protestors, the moral warrant of their actions lay in resisting “harm,” a harm which they figured in starkly physical terms. Objecting to a police escort summoned to accompany the Federalist Society speakers as they left the event, law students explained that they could be exposed to “[trauma]( “Even with all of the privilege afforded to us at YLS, the decision to allow police officers in as a response to the protest put YLS’s queer student body at risk of harm.” There is some evidence that law-school administrators have begun to feel such incidents threaten their institution’s legitimacy and primary social function. When Laurence Silberman, a federal appeals judge and a Reagan appointee, suggested that the students who had participated in the disruptive protests should be blacklisted from clerkships, he was making a consequential threat. Yale Law’s position at the top of the law-school hierarchy is linked to its ability to place its students in top clerkships. If made over in the vision of recent crops of activist students, the school risks segregating itself from the machinery of a judiciary whose politics look very different from the activists’. Heather Gerken, the dean of the law school, seems to have recognized as much when she broke with what had been a policy of relative laissez-faire and issued a stern rebuke to the protestors: “This behavior was unacceptable; at a minimum it violated the norms of this Law School. This is an institution of higher learning, not a town square, and no one should interfere with others’ efforts to carry on activities on campus. YLS is a professional school, and this is not how lawyers interact.” The last sentence is the crucial one: Gerken is saying that militant protest based in a theory of harm around expression is formally incompatible with the practice of the law. The error of the activists, on this view, is not political, but professional. SPONSOR CONTENT | New York Institute of Technology [The Power of Partnerships]( Diss, Interrupted In the Netflix comedy [The Chair]( onetime English Ph.D. candidate David Duchovny (played by himself) is invited by the English department at Pembroke University for a “distinguished lectureship” — part of a shameless plot by a dean to get student butts in seats. When the hesitant department chair, Ji-Yoon (Sandra Oh), shows up at David’s house to discuss the plan, he reveals long-delayed academic ambitions. Maybe, he thinks, he’d like to complete his abandoned dissertation, “The Schizophrenic Critique of Pure Reason in Beckett’s Early Novels": “I got side-tracked for a few decades, but I’ve been thinking recently about finishing it and filing for my Ph.D.” Ji-Yoon is not convinced. “This is over 30 years old. A lot has happened in the last 30 years. Like affect theory, ecocriticism, digital humanities, new materialism, book history, developments in gender studies and critical race theory. When’s the last time you picked up an academic journal? … The discipline has moved forward, and you’re still stuck back in a different era.” How seriously does The Chair intend us to take Ji-Yoon’s criticism? If David’s work on Beckett was valid 30 years ago, has “ecocriticism” rendered it invalid? Or are such questions out of place with respect to interpretive disciplines whose fruits are neither cumulative nor progressive? In The Review, the Berkeley English professor Elisa Tamarkin describes a real-life scenario not unlike the one depicted in The Chair. Five decades after taking her oral exams, a student would like to file her dissertation, which she has in the meanwhile completed. She’s a senior citizen now; all of her advisers are long dead. But according to Berkeley’s rules, she’ll need to retake her orals, which the university considers to exceed the five-year limit for currency by over 40 years. For Tamarkin, this curious incident is an occasion for a theoretical meditation on truth, validity, and what Matthew Arnold once called “the function of criticism at the present time.” Read her essay [here](. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest SPEAKING FREELY [What’s Going On at Yale Law School? A Lot of Drama]( By Tom Bartlett [STORY IMAGE]( The prestigious school has been beset by bad publicity over the last year. Some faculty members blame the dean. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [When Ignorance Is a Virtue]( By Timothy Aubry [STORY IMAGE]( Emily Ogden’s On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays does everything it can to evade the task of imparting knowledge, but in a good way. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [What Comes After Meritocracy?]( By Steven Brint [STORY IMAGE]( A system based on civics would be a welcome replacement for our beleaguered status quo. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Philosopher Queens]( By Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman [STORY IMAGE]( The four women who transformed 20th-century analytic philosophy. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [She Took Her Oral Exams. 45 Years Later, She Filed Her Dissertation.]( By Elisa Tamarkin [STORY IMAGE]( What a scholar’s delayed degree tells us about criticism now. Recommended - “Over the years, she says, doctors have repeatedly told EG that her brain doesn’t make sense. One doctor told her she should have seizures, or that she shouldn’t have a good vocabulary — and ‘he was annoyed that I did,’ she says.” At Wired, Grace Browne [on the strange case of a woman]( with a missing left temporal lobe who seems to be none the worse for it. - “Needless to say — or is it? — these images are not exotic idylls and are far from uncritical of the racial status quo.” At The New Yorker, [Claudia Roth Pierpont on Winslow Homer]( whose work is the subject of a “grand yet thematically intent” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. - "[Ketanji Brown] Jackson was signaling to her new colleagues that she speaks the same language as they, but that doesn’t limit what she will say. You can say almost anything in original-speak.” At The Hill, Andrew Koppelman [on some problems with originalists]( and why Jackson isn’t one. - “The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.” At The Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt on [what Twitter did to us](. For related discussions in the Review, see Jeffrey Lawrence on “[Who Owns Your Academic Community?]( Justin E.H. Smith on [the pernicious effects of social media]( and my conversation with Irina Dumitrescu [here](. - “Since these men had taken the form of wolves, why did they not eat the flesh raw? Thiess insisted that they cooked and ate in the manner of men, and that though they lacked hands, or for that matter knives, the werewolves would use their paws to pierce the meat on spits, and tear it off with their teeth. By the time the feast was over, they had turned back into men.” At the LRB, [John Gallagher on Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln’s]( Thiess]( Livonian Werewolf]( Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | Coursedog [The Emerging Focus on Academic Operations]( Why academic operations can no longer be an afterthought if we care about student success. FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Missing Men on Campus]( [The Missing Men on Campus]( The gender gap in college enrollment has been growing for decades and has broad implications for colleges and beyond. Explore how some colleges are trying to draw more men of all backgrounds — and help them succeed once they get there. [Order your copy today.]( NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK What did you think of today’s newsletter? [Strongly disliked]( | [It was ok]( | [Loved it]( This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2022 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037