Academic Freedom in the Courts: Worth Watching

Teresa Wagner has been fighting against the politicalization of universities and the denial of her First Amendment Rights. The radical politics of many law schools is well documented, but I'm not sure that this has been tested before in court. If universities, who are paid on the public dime and the student's backbreaking debt, produce primarily ideology rather than factual education, then they should be disbanded and the schools started over from scratch with equality of opportunity and blindness to ideology.

On Feb. 13 in St. Paul, Minn., the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in Wagner v. Jones. The appeal is procedurally complex. But the legal question at the heart of the original case has potentially far-reaching implications for public and private legal education. To wit, whether a candidate for a faculty position at a state law school could provide sufficient evidence that, in violation of her constitutional rights, she had been denied employment because of her political beliefs.

In a trial concluded 15 months ago, Teresa Wagner accused the University of Iowa College of Law of violating her First Amendment right of free expression and 14th Amendment right of equal protection under the law when the school's dean, Carolyn Jones, refused to hire her for its legal analysis, writing and research program. ...

Teresa Wagner is a pro-life conservative. Her résumé showed prior employment with the National Right to Life Committee and the Family Research Council, both socially conservative organizations in Washington, D.C.

The University of Iowa's law-school faculty, like most law-school faculties, is overwhelmingly liberal. When Ms. Wagner was considered for the job, the law school had only one Republican on its 50-member faculty, according to party registration records obtained from the Iowa Secretary of State, and he had joined the faculty 25 years earlier.

In deciding whether to hire Ms. Wagner, neither her politics nor those of the law school's faculty should have been relevant. Yet the day after the law-school faculty voted to reject Ms. Wagner, in January 2007, Associate Dean Jon Carlson wrote to Dean Jones in an email, "Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it). ... Other than by looking to politics, it is difficult to explain the law school's efforts to avoid hiring Ms. Wagner. ...

Hiring decisions should be based on candidates' merits, including their ability to vigorously present in the classroom and criticize conservative as well as progressive views. If the Eighth Circuit protects Teresa Wagner's constitutional rights, the court will also bolster legal education in America by promoting its depoliticization.

The Left is totalitarian, first and foremost: toleration of any abomination which they come up with is enforced; intolerance of dissent is also enforced. The university is forced to fight in court for its right to discriminate, politically - an interesting position for the Left to find itself in.

It's especially interesting because of the courts' finding that bakeries etc. cannot discriminate against homosexuals based on moral grounds or religious grounds. Bakeries are private operations which should be able to choose their customers; universities are public institutions, at least in this case, and should be strictly prohibited from discrimination on any count other than competence or fitness to the position.