UMich Law School Helping Make Wusses of its Students
Thinks They Need Bubbles and Play Dough to Cope With Trump’s Election
WASHINGTON, DC, November 14, 2016 – The law school at the University of Michigan thinks its students are so fragile that they need a room full of bubbles and play dough to cope with the stress of not having their favorite candidate win the presidential election.
UMich Law
Photo by DFID – UK Department for International Development
This is just further evidence that law schools are raising a generation of wuss lawyers, unable to stand up to judges for their clients, by agreeing to demands not to teach rape or other topics the students might find “disturbing,” cancelling classes and exams by students disappointed with Trump’s election, etc.
The many consequences for society could be very serious, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf, who has twice been called a “radical feminist.”
This “perverse and unintended side effect of the intense public attention given to sexual violence in recent years” is a “tremendous loss – above all to victims of sexual assault,” says Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk. She says law students complain even about the classroom use of the word “violate” as in “does this violate the law?”
Banzhaf notes that he has received similar complaints even though he teaches civil Torts law where the topic is peripheral, but students still complain that he is not sensitive enough to rape victims, even after he proposes ways to make the campus safer, and an app he is designing with female law students.
UMich Law students who complain they are too traumatized to study – or, in another manifestation, to even take exams because of election outcomes – have no idea of what real trauma is, said Banzhaf, who notes that judges have threatened him with arrest as well as huge fines – “that’s real trauma,” he argues.
“Trauma” is what happens when your client is sentenced to death, or a widow who should have recovered from his husband’s death at the hands of a drug or auto company is condemned to a life of poverty – not when sitting in the sterile setting of a classroom you hear words like “rape,” “violated,” etc. or you are concerned about what a president who is not a liberal might do.
If UMich Law professors cannot teach controversial topics like rape, affirmative action, police shootings, etc. because students find it disturbing, they logically will cease studying them, and society will be denied a major source of information, policy analysis, and ideas from independent experts, says Banzhaf.
“If the law – and the related facts, arguments, etc. – cannot be taught or otherwise even discussed in the one place in society where freedom of speech and debate are supposed to be bedrock principles, how likely is it that the problems can be addressed in a meaningful way?” Banzhaf argues.
