WASHINGTON — Something very good has just taken place on a
college campus. After a two-year ordeal orchestrated by a group of
mutinous faculty members, the Ave Maria Law School has been given a
clean bill of health by the American Bar Association and can
continue with its work. I spoke on the campus last autumn and
departed burdened by gloom. I feared the mutineers might win. They
were the typical professorial grumblers, and such unhappy
philistines so often have the upper hand on campuses.
Truth be known, I spend very little time on college campuses.
The life of the mind nowadays is so rarely celebrated in academe. A
livelier cultural atmosphere can be found at a Starbucks cafe or
health food emporium. On most university campuses the bulletin
boards sulk with notices about “Rape Awareness Week,” “Anger
Management Counseling,” “The Readings of the Prophet Obama.” Half a
century ago things were different. Learning was widespread on
campus — at least amongst the profs. Free thought was encouraged,
even among the profs. In the humanities there were distinguished
professors, at least on the best campuses, where they wrote and
taught and often seemed to live the good life. Even the faculty
communists were relatively pleasant.
The university at the middle of the 20th century was a happy
place, congenial to civilized thought. Today it is gloomy,
populated, particularly in the humanities, by narrowly opinionated
adepts of identity politics and sham studies: the feminists, the
Black Studies lecturers, and other special interests too esoteric
to mention. The prevalence of these irritable sciolists explains
why in the nation today there are so few historians of the stature
of, say, Arthur M. Schlesinger or Samuel Eliot Morison; political
philosophers of the stature of Leo Strauss, or political scientists
of the stature of Hans J. Morgenthau.
Frankly, when I am asked to appear on an American campus I beg
off, protesting coyly that the place might be too dangerous. I have
not had my vaccinations. I have a date on the shooting range at the
NRA. Yet when I was asked to speak at the Ave Maria Law School I
did so with alacrity. My friend Judge Robert Bork has been a
founding member of the faculty. The incomparable Justice Antonin
Scalia advised at the founding of the school. Though it was founded
to teach the law based on the moral precepts of the Catholic
Church, I knew I would be free to say precisely what I thought —
no thought police, though of course I might not be invited
back.
The faculty was composed of intelligent minds, so far as I could
tell. The students were intelligent, polite, and not riven by the
petty discord to be found on larger campuses. What is more, the
governing administrators were generous and serious. Dean Bernard
Dobranski is a learned fellow who with Judge Bork has been teaching
an important course, “The Moral Foundations of the Law.” From what
I know of the course, most of the country’s lawyers would be
improved by it, except for those who would find the concept
inscrutable and unprofitable. The law school simply would not exist
were it not for the philanthropic founder of Domino’s Pizza, Tom
Monaghan. When he and his Board of Governors decided to move the
campus from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be closer to Monaghan’s other
project, Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, a minority of
faculty rebelled, sending a dozen or more charges to the ABA.
Their hope was that the ABA would revoke the Ave Maria Law
School ABA accreditation. The ABA boiled the mutineers’ complaints
down to one. Now after a comprehensive investigation the ABA has
found that contrary to the surviving complaint Ave Maria is fully
capable of attracting and maintaining competent faculty. With this
it is considered highly likely that the ABA will acquiesce to the
planned move to Naples in 2009, over the howls of the irritable
profs who filed their nuisance complaints.
Amongst the professoriate of the land, diversity is supposedly a
desirable value. Well, certainly a law school that teaches the law
based on Christian values adds to the diversity of the nation’s law
programs. I wish Ave Maria’s students and faculty well, and hereby
offer to speak on campus again, at least after they flee chill Ann
Arbor for Naples, by which I mean the cisatlantic Naples, the one
without the garbage problems.
