FP:  Andrew Peyton Thomas, welcome to FrontPage Interview.  It is a pleasure to have you here.

Thomas:  Thank you for inviting me.

FP:  Tell us what inspired you to write The People v. Harvard Law.

Thomas:  Over the years, I’ve realized there’s great public fascination with Harvard Law School.  Among those on the right, there’s also a great deal of distrust of that institution—which is well-founded, given the consistent ideological product of the school.  Harvard Law has a faculty stocked almost entirely with left and far-left academics and a student body who, when they graduate, carry that same orientation into the nation’s courts.  I thought it was time for a book that explains how liberalism has corrupted Harvard Law School—one told by a graduate of the school who is sympathetic to the great traditions of the school, traditions that in recent decades have eroded to the point of vanishing.

FP:  How do you think what happens at Harvard Law influences America at large?

Thomas:  Harvard Law sends forth a regular stream of graduates and writings from its law professors that shape American law and society.  Five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, a majority, are either alumni or former students of Harvard Law.  One Harvard Law professor, the mercurial Laurence Tribe, has been quoted in sixty-five separate Supreme Court opinions, on matters as disparate as terms limits for congressmen, nude dancing, racial gerrymandering and federalism.  Harvard has sent more of its law school graduates to clerk for the Supreme Court than any other law school.  These clerks research and write the court opinions that become the law of the land. 

Harvard Law is also a powerful cultural symbol in its own right, having inspired numerous popular books and films.  The dean of the school once presented the actor Tom Cruise with a certificate of appreciation for portraying not one but two Harvard Law graduates in different hit movies, A Few Good Men and The Firm.  All of which is to say that what happens at Harvard Law matters a great deal, because it is a school that holds tremendous sway over the courts and popular culture of the nation.

FP:  Can you tell us briefly about the series of events beginning in 2002 that led Harvard Law to the brink of instituting a speech code?

Thomas: In 2002, a sixteen-year-old Filipino-American student named Kiwi Camara posted his class outlines on a school Web site,   For reasons unclear to everybody but him, Camara had used racial slurs as shorthand in summarizing one of the cases discussed in class.  When his notes were read, a furor erupted, leading to demands for a full-blown speech code at the school.  The administration created a “Committee on Healthy Diversity” to consider imposing a speech code as well as other proposals.  Ultimately, national ridicule and internal opposition from conservative and libertarian students—as well as some principled liberals such as Professor Alan Dershowitz—brought this movement to a halt.  But these and related events revealed starkly how hostile to free speech the school had become.

FP:  Illuminate for us some examples of how our nation’s oldest and most prestigious law school silences student dissent.

Thomas:  Students who are right of center who dare to speak up in class are routinely hissed at.  This is a form of intellectual intimidation that the left practices with impunity, as professors never discourage it.  Students who dissent from the far-left orthodoxy of Harvard are harassed in Harvard Law chat rooms that continue classroom discussions; they see their posters or notes advertising upcoming meetings of their student organizations destroyed or effaced by vandals; and hear student opinion leaders dismiss their concerns about this mistreatment as groundless.  In March 2003, the student newspaper, the Harvard Law Record, encapsulated nicely this groupthink when it devoted an editorial to disparaging these concerns.  The title of the editorial captured its thesis—and the sentiment predominant in the student body:  “Conservatives Should Shut Up about Silencing.”  Needless to say, right-leaning students at Harvard Law are in for a tough and often lonely walk.

FP:  What happened to the career of Professor David Rosenberg?

Thomas:  He saw his career at Harvard Law crippled as a result of a single ill-phrased comment.  Rosenberg is a brilliant if crotchety scholar (and a traditional liberal).  In 2002, as the Kiwi Camara controversy started to brew, Rosenberg stumbled into the minefield by criticizing Critical Legal Studies and its related theories (Critical Legal Studies is an offshoot of Marxism).  He told his students, “Feminists, Marxists and the blacks have contributed nothing to torts.”  He later tried to explain his statement better but would not retract the heart of it.

After the Black Law Students Association protested to the law school administration, the administration announced that Rosenberg’s students would no longer be required to attend his classes.  They could watch them instead on videotape.  In doing this, Harvard Law effectively repealed the “Socratic method.”  This teaching method, which features an expansive question-and-answer dialogue between teacher and students, had been a Harvard innovation and trademark for over a century.  Rosenberg’s reputation has never recovered from this unprecedented humiliation.

FP:  What solutions do you think there are for the Left’s chokehold on thought and expression in our institutions of higher learning?  What do you think about David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights?

Thomas:  David Horowitz is on precisely the right track.  He has pointed out that the left, having captured American higher education, now uses the nation’s prestigious universities for their own financial and professional advancement and to the exclusion of all who dissent from this orthodoxy.  The Academic Bill of Rights would be an excellent corrective by injecting greater diversity—ideological diversity—into higher education. 

We would have a long way to go to bring balance to Harvard Law.  My survey of the faculty there—200 professors strong—in 2003-04 revealed not one professor who would qualify as a conservative in the Antonin Scalia/Clarence Thomas mold.  Only one is willing to criticize affirmative action publicly (Charles Fried).  Only one is pro-life (Mary Ann Glendon).  I could find not even one professor who is an advocate of originalism, or the view that judges should interpret the Constitution consistent with the original intentions of the Framers of that document.  When asked why there were no originalists on the faculty, one left-wing professor, Frank Michelman, simply chuckled and said, “It’s such a ridiculous doctrine.”  Originalism, of course, is the philosophy shared by President Bush, Justices Scalia and Thomas, and most members of the Supreme Court throughout its history.

FP: Why do you think the Left has such a stronghold in our institutions of higher learning?

Thomas:  In the case of law schools, the left has actually targeted certain institutions for hostile takeover.  Consider the "Crits," or advocates of Critical Legal Studies.  They are a Marxist-inspired legal movement that applies postmodernism to the law and argues that all law is a sham, an instrument for white male capitalists to oppress the rest of society.  Since its inception in the 1970s, Critical Legal Studies has always been as much as cause as a legal theory.  Crits have worked to promote the hiring of more Crit professors, to grant them tenure at leading law schools, and to colonize still other law schools--all in the name of advancing their agenda.  One of their leaders, Harvard Law Professor Duncan "Funky Dunc" Kennedy, has called Crits "guerrillas with tenure" because of their militaristic dedication to self-promotion and stifling of the opposition.

FP: Why do you think Conservatives are such failures in fighting political war and in protecting themselves from intellectual discrimination? Why were all Conservatives sleeping while the Left took over the campuses and instituted its suffocation of thought and speech? Why did it take a former radical like Horowitz to fight this problem on a real level?

Thomas:  Conservatives actually believe in the First Amendment and fair treatment of those with opposing viewpoints.  The left has taken advantage of this commitment to freedom of expression while refusing to reciprocate.  In exposing such hypocrisy on the left, David Horowitz is one of the latest in a long line of former radicals who have shown that the best critic of a system often is an apostate (e.g., Whittaker Chambers in Witness). 

FP: True enough, and as David has also pointed out in the Art of Political War, Conservatives also lack the skills to fight political war in general. He has single-handedly taken the tactics of political war that he learned on the Left and used it to turn the tables on the Left itself. Moreover, he has provided priceless advice to Conservatives on how to fight political war.

Let’s move on. What do you think: can the Left allow intellectual diversity within its ranks and remain “the Left”? In other words, is the progressive faith and intellectual pluralism mutually exclusive?

Thomas:  To the extent the left remains captive to Marxists and other such intolerant interest groups, it must and will remain hostile to the marketplace of ideas.  By definition, totalitarians cannot abide opposition.  True liberals, by contrast, understand that a free exchange of ideas is not only a basic human right, but essential to the betterment of society.  I remain hopeful that the latter camp will ultimately triumph over the former, and we will once again have true freedom on our campuses.

FP: Let’s hope. And it’s work such as yours that will bring us to that day sooner. Mr. Thomas, it was a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for joining us.

Thomas:  Thank you. It was my pleasure.

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