What’s In a Name? Uproar Over Renaming the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University

The left must be in disarray over at George Mason University. It took the faculty senate almost a month to adopt a resolution expressing “deep concern” over the university’s decision to rename the law school after the late Justice Antonin Scalia, following grants of $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation and $20 million from an anonymous donor. That’s slow by today’s academic standards, especially in this year of protests across the country.

What’s worse, the National Law Journal reports today that fewer than 140 faculty members have thus far signed a letter opposing the renaming. Their concerns, however, will surprise no one. It seems that Justice Scalia was less than solicitous of identity politics. Moreover, the resolution claims, he “was a significant contributor to the polarized climate in this country that runs counter to the values of a university that celebrates civil discourse.” And perhaps of greatest concern, this decision reinforces “the external branding of the university as a conservative institution rather than an unaligned body that is a comfortable home for individuals with a variety of viewpoints.” Oh the horror, at intercollegiate colloquia, to have GMU on one’s name tag.

Notice the apposition in that last concern: “a conservative institution rather than an unaligned body that is a comfortable home for individuals with a variety of viewpoints.” We’re invited to believe, first, that the average American university is an “unaligned body”—like Princeton, for example, where in the 2012 presidential election, 157 faculty and staff donated to Barack Obama’s campaign, 2 to Mitt Romney’s—a visiting engineering professor and a janitor. For a broad picture of the ideological complexion of American law schools, see the splendid article by Northwestern University Law School’s Jim Lindgren in the current Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. GMU’s law school is anomalous only in having a fairly broad ideological distribution of faculty members, where any student can find any number of sympathetic professors.

But note also and especially the implication that liberals could not be “comfortable” if GMU were, in fact, a conservative institution. Funny how that concern doesn’t seem to go both ways, as many a conservative student at your average liberal institution can attest—the evidence for which has been richly documented by the scrappy Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). But that concern is deeply revealing as well, and goes far toward explaining why our college and university faculties are so overwhelmingly of the left: They, indeed, are uncomfortable with opposing views. Witness this very incident. Does anyone believe that such conservatives as there are at GMU would come out of the woodwork in protest if a liberal justice’s name were given to the law school?

Res ipsa loquitur.