Legal Insurrection: Professor Jacobson’s job at Cornell Law School is threatened by cancel culture
[UPDATE: Professor Jacobson will be appearing on the Laura Ingraham show on Fox News at approximately 10:45 Eastern time.]
Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection (a blog for which I also write periodically) has announced that there’s a campaign to get him ousted from his post as a law professor because of his critiques of Black Lives Matter:
There is an effort underway to get me fired at Cornell Law School, where I’ve worked since November 2007, or if not fired, at least denounced publicly by the school.
Ever since I started Legal Insurrection in October 2008, it’s been an awkward relationship given the overwhelmingly liberal faculty and atmosphere. Living as a conservative on a liberal campus is like being the mouse waiting for the cat to pounce…
The impetus for the [current] effort was two posts I wrote at Legal Insurrection regarding the history and tactics of the Black Lives Matter Movement:
—Reminder: “Hands up, don’t shoot” is a fabricated narrative from the Michael Brown case (June 4, 2020)
—The Bloodletting and Wilding Is Part of An Agenda To Tear Down The Country (June 3, 2020)Those posts accurately detail the history of how the Black Lives Matters Movement started, and the agenda of the founders which is playing out in the cultural purge and rioting taking place now.
From Saturday, June 6, through Monday, June 8, over 15 emails from CLS alumni were received by the Dean of the law school, demanding that action be taken against me ranging from an institutional statement denouncing me to firing. I don’t know whether and to what extent that number has increased since Monday. The Dean properly has defended my writings as protected within my academic freedom, although he strongly disagrees with my views…
My clinical faculty colleagues, apparently in consultation with the Black Law Students Association, drafted and then published in the Cornell Sun on June 9 a letter denouncing “commentators, some of them attached to Ivy League Institutions, who are leading a smear campaign against Black Lives Matter.” While I am not mentioned by name, based on what I’ve seen BLSA and possibly others were told it was about me. The letter is absurd name-calling, distorting and even misquoting my writings, to the extent it purports to be about me.
Please read the whole thing. Another article to read is this one.
This is not at all surprising, but it’s tremendously disturbing. If you would like to spread the word, that would be good. Also, letters to Cornell would be good, particular from Cornell alums – but Professor Jacobson has strongly requested that all letters remain polite and kindly. If you’re not going to be polite and kindly, please don’t write.
Thanks!!!
Harald Uhlig (University of Chicago) is facing strong criticism for his comments on Twitter, and Gordon Klein (UCLA) has been suspended for failing to change his schedule to meet the demands of activists, while David Collum (also at Cornell) is being attacked for various recent statements. This has all happened within the last week, and one can be certain that it will continue until checked (highly unlikely), as it is an iron law of human nature that misbehavior, left unpunished, is incentivized to continue.
Related, but most likely a day late and a dollar short:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/abandoning-liberalism-will-destroy-social-peace/
H/T Powerline blog
Most disappointing is that his colleagues didn’t do him the courtesy of talking to him before joining this effort. Prof. Jacobson says, and I believe him, that he has always been very careful to keep his opinion writing at Legal Insurrection separate from his teaching. These days, just doing a good job isn’t enough.
Would it be polite to write, as an Cornell alum, to “politely” insist that the Maoist tyrants win so that the inevitable sacking and burning of the Campucracy out of their “safe spaces” gets underway as soon as possible?
These folk don’t do humour, irony, or even understand normals any more. Fauvism was named for its supposed wild and beastly aesthetic.
How about some reality testing for the Ivy Walled off traitors? They ain’t seen real protest Willard Straight Hall occupation, if even then.
I’ve emailed my daughter, who is a Cornell Law grad.
I met ProfJ during her graduation, he’s a nice guy.
Actually, I think this piece, from 2008, is particularly prescient.
Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html
You’re seeing its fruits even now.
I already wrote before coming here and I WAS NOT polite and kindly. But I do not look forward to the long distant day when “polite and kindly” writers may wish they had been more aggressive.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
? Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Ok so polite, one might argue, is how we should always be. But does anyone think that a bunch of polite and kindly letters will have any bearing on this case. The Cornell apparatchiks will do what they think they can get away with.
Bill M:
Well, it’s Professor Jacobson’s request, so it should be honored.
Eight of the other 17 clinical faculty signed the denunciation letter. Among them was Sandra Babcock, whom I knew long ago in a galaxy far away. She didn’t have a problem with opposing viewpoints 35 years ago.
Art Deco:
Maybe she’s just virtue signaling now so the crocodile doesn’t eat her.
Maybe she’s just virtue signaling now so the crocodile doesn’t eat her.
She’s about 10 years from retirement and I think she has tenure.
They apparently hired her away from Northwestern. I don’t remember the young Sandy Babcock as being a political sectary (as opposed to a person with an interest in political questions). I also don’t recall she spoke four foreign languages, either, but she insists on her page she does. She seems to have devoted almost no time to ordinary legal work. She was staff counsel in this and that nonprofit lawfare operation before she landed an academic berth.
Evidently, she’s appended to some fellow named Margulies who is also a political sectary. Evidently, they were married in 1996, but the press release announcing their arrival at Cornell Law School omitted any reference to that; the acknowledgements in his books suggest they have no children. Margulies does not admit to whatever he was doing to earn a living between 1988 and 2006. He shuffled around from Washington, to Columbia (SC) to Austin (Tx), to Minneapolis to Chicago. Ordinarily, law schools are loath to hire anyone who has spent much time as a working lawyer. But, I guess they make exceptions for tiresome red-haze characters. He was given a joint appointment in the Government department at the college of arts and sciences, even though he has no research degree. Evidently, he’s a 2d generation lawyer and his father had a mess of positions in the federal government from 1956 until some point past 1983; his father was at age 93 still alive in 2018.
My guess would be that she and her husband are the linchpin of the problem.
Gvdl: “What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?”
And in the end, Stalin lucked out. Maybe I’ve been taken in by Soviet propaganda but to me it appears that a substantial proportion of the population resolved to sacrifice themselves, if necessary, in order to defeat Germany.
This is not at all surprising, but it’s tremendously disturbing
I guess when its in the news… when i reported from the front line of a college i worked for before being laid off after 15 years… it wasnt… not really..
but they will eventually force the form to fit the container they make
when that happens, they may regret the larger, better skilled monster they create
The Prof is always very shrewd — he seems to have been ahead of most press reports.
The Bloodletting and Wilding Is Part of An Agenda To Tear Down The Country
Posted by William A. Jacobson
Wednesday, June 3, 2020 at 9:05pm
“The next push is to defund the police.”
No amount of evidence will convince people whose minds are made up.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/06/reminder-hands-up-dont-shoot-is-a-fabricated-narrative-from-the-michael-brown-case/
Even if some reporter did mention that little caveat, the spin would undoubtedly be to neglect to mention that it was Obama’s DOJ making that determination.
Frankenstein’s monster escapes…
Academia in many ways with feminists created this
In many ways, they deserve to be visited by the outcome of their own work.