April 18, 2006

Oh, How I Love Law School Ruckus

I'll admit it, I hate having drama in my own life but I *LOVE* having drama in other people's lives that I get to watch from afar. Obviously, I hate to see personal friends in traumatic situations, but I do love a good ruckus. Oh, and there's a good one going on now.

Professor Livingston, a tax and international law professor at Rutgers Law - Camden, started a blog in the last several months and recently wrote a post where he expressed his dislike of affirmative action, particularly in the hiring of new law professors. I'm not sure what the chronology of events was, but his post got picked up by the Volokh Conspiracy and a few other mainstream conservative sites. At some point this post found its way back to Rutgers Camden and spread through the faculty, including Imani Perry, a black professor and recent addition to the Rutgers faculty. She evidently wrote an email response to Professor Livingston expressing her offense at the perception that he intended recent "diversity hires" as the target of criticism. This, in turn, got picked up by Blackprof.com, and at some point was emailed to the student body by "Justice Forall" of the Equality Forum 2006. I'm not sure, but I think that *might* be a pseudonym. Since this started there has been extreme outrage by some at the school, with at least a few calls for his dismissal and a few more references to his "obvious" bigotry. At some point after this Prof. Livingston wrote a followup to his original post after this kerfluffel started.

Well, that's some fine drama!

So, read the posts, decide for yourselves, and post your thoughts in the comments. I'll hold off on giving my opinion until we've got something like a conversation going...Man, I love ruckus!

1 comment:

Rob said...

I received the "Justice Forall" email. It didn't include Prof. Perry's email. I responded and requested that the sender identify himself. No response yet.