Ljubrication Mentioned (I Think?) In Slate (Sort Of)!

The great Adam Chandler has written an awesome post for Slate's blog, XX Factor. (Motto: What women really think. Conclusion: Adam thinks like a girl. Ooooooh.) He discusses how the Sotomayor hearings and other public combings of prominent people's minds can discourage students from voicing their beliefs. And he is so right. This fall, our Con Law professor made us post on a discussion board once a month (an aspect of the class I generally appreciated), but there were at least a few times when I thought of posting something controversial and realized very quickly that if I said anything verboten in that group of people, it would undoubtedly come back to haunt me later if I were ever publicly vetted for anything (probably in the form of polite but cutting questions from Secretary of Defense Geltzer). When a professor canvassed our class to see if anyone wanted to write a paper on drug legalization with him, one friend warned me that I might not want to apply to jobs with that article as my major academic publication. And, come to think of it, if you search for my full name on Google, one blog post (moderately NSFW) on page four of the results is titled, "These Will Come in Handy at the Confirmation Hearings." The author is talking about the men I photographed, not me, I imagine, but it shows how much we now think of everything we say and do in terms of how it will kick us in the butt 30 years down the road. And how "confirmation hearings" have become the central symbol of this.

And Adam's affirmative action example is spot on. If you want to do a scientific analysis of affirmative action, you'd better hope it comes out in a non-controversial way. And if you're hoping that hard, you're probably not the right person to do the science. We read Richard Sander's law school affirmative action study in a class this year, and while there are certainly valid criticisms to be made about his study (although I didn't find the central Ayres/Brooks contention extremely compelling), did he really need to descend to pariah status? It may be that he now spends so much time defending AA stuff that he's not a credible researcher, but this would seem to be a fallout of the constant berating he gets for an imperfect but pretty good piece of work (you should see how bad econometrics studies can be) on a controversial topic. I'm getting off track here, but the point is that bright students can't explore interesting and under-researched questions because the reputational stakes are so, so high. If you touch affirmative action with anything but the deftest hand, you're not making it anywhere near those confirmation hearings.

I almost forgot! The (possible) mention! Adam writes: "I even read a perfectly innocuous blog post about the writings of several law school classmates that ended with a disclaimer: If anyone mentioned in the post wanted to 'clear it from their record,' it would be taken down." I'm not positive that he was referring to this post (chime in in the comments Adam?), but it seems at least plausible, even though I didn't use the phrase "clear it from their record." Emma's comment on Noorain's link to Adam's post (phew!) hit on truth: the comment about embarrassing Google searches was referring more to the fact that I was talking about the authors' desirability as mates than to the views they were espousing. But even before I decided to write about their singleness I gave the authors nicknames, partially to be cute, but also to break up their first and last names so the post wouldn't show up in searches. But now it is too bad for you, Adam! Your names are together in my post FOREVER. And you're the only Adam Chandler in the world! And this blog is first on every Google search! Well, now I'm just making stuff up. Which means it's time for bed. Goodnight!