The Ivory Tower Huddle

One of the most thought-provoking lectures I have heard at law school was one I attended yesterday by Harvard Law School Professor William Stuntz. Stuntz, an evangelical Christian, spoke both about the current political climate and his own experience as a religious believer in the midst of the largely secular academic environment. The main thrust of his speech was a to advance a seemingly unlikely prediction: that evangelical Christians will soon align with the political left as issues like abortion and gay marriage recede in importance and are replaced by topics of economic and political justice.

While I didn’t find Stuntz’s forecast particularly believable, I did find two aspects of his talk extremely interesting. First, I was intrigued by the following statement:

“Evangelicals and academics tend to view one another as something between bizarre and evil. Although, I can tell you: my church friends think my academic friends are bizarre. My academic friends think my church friends are evil.”

I myself am very moderate politically (I’d call myself a Tom Kean/Rudy Guiliani New Jersey Republcian) and far from an evangelical (went to Church for the first time in over a year on Christmas eve). Yet, I have frequently noticed and spoken out about the staggering lack of ideological diversity that exists here at Yale Law School. The School obsessively and reflexively resorts to the mantras like “diversity”, “tolerance”, and “anti-discrimination.” Yet its actions often embody precisely the opposite of these words. Although great strides have been made to attract a faculty that “looks different” in terms of gender and race, the overwhelming majority of them still think the same. I know more than a few students who carefully keep their more conservative viewpoints “in the cloest” because they are petrified that they will be ridiculed or looked down upon by their professors and fellow classmates. I know of not a single Professor who openly and consistently advocates conservative views (I can think of dozens who advocate liberal ones).

Which brings me to the second interesting point of yesterday's lecture: Stuntz described a phenomenon known in religious communities as the “holy huddle”. The phrase is basically a pejorative term that evangelicals use to refer to other evangelicals who associate only with other believers, never challenging or questioning their own viewpoints. Stuntz suggested that preventing such huddling will be crucial to lessening the divide between red and blue states.

Based on my experience here over the last two years, it seems that evangelicals are not the only ones who need to quit huddling. Professors at Yale Law School and in ivory towers across America have been engaged in their own version of the “holy huddle” for years. Within their “ivory tower huddle”, it is considered the highest form of heresy to question any of the three assumptions that make up what I will call the “holy trinity of the ivory tower”:

1. If there is a problem, the government should fix it.
2. If the government doesn’t create a solution, then the courts should impose one.
3. Anyone who denies 1 and/or 2 is either a) unintelligent or b) heartless.

I would hypothesize that the reason George W. Bush’s defeat was such a devastating defeat for many of the "progressive", educated types I interact with daily is because it effectively dismantled the first two prongs of their holy trinity. For these knee-jerk liberals who view the courts and government as the only legitimate outlet for social change, nothing is worse than the prospect of handing off control of your only political outlets to the enemy (ie the ignoramuses who occupy America’s Red States). For the rest of us thoughtful moderates, liberals, and conservatives however, neither an election nor a change in political leadership could ever signal such a truly tragic defeat. That's because we realize that the true source of America’s greatness and the best instrument for social change is not this country’s institutions or politics, but rather its people.