Like many parents this time of year, my wife and I have begun to look at colleges with our son (there's a really good book about this). But a lot has changed since we both graduated—for instance, tuition. Take our alma mater, Georgetown University, which cost $23,000 a year in the 1990s. Annual tuition has skyrocketed to $71,000. Georgetown Law is even higher, at close to $76,000 per year. And you don't even get good professors like Ilya Shapiro!
The good news is Shapiro has chronicled his experiences and the dismal state of our law schools in his new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites. Weekend Beacon contributor Tal Fortgang gives us a review.
"Shapiro had been hired to run a center-right outfit from within Georgetown Law, but sent a questionably worded tweet that his new employer met with a sham investigation and character assassination. (You can read plenty of good coverage of the affair here at the Washington Free Beacon, though Shapiro’s full version is still revelatory.) Other Georgetown professors have also been punished for stating facts that progressives do not like to hear.
"Though law schools still profess to be what they once were—educational institutions that value the pursuit of knowledge—they are actually designed now to produce ideology rather than knowledge. That is why they could not tolerate Shapiro’s presence—nor the presence of heretics like Judge Kyle Duncan, Professor Amy Wax, or even liberals who would engage with conservative Christians—while progressive radicals feel no compunction about spouting their views from cushy faculty and administrative positions.
"Shapiro advances a syllogism so simple it is practically undeniable. Lawyers wield tremendous power across every sector of American society; law schools, especially the highest-ranked, are training students to wield that power immaturely and irresponsibly; therefore, law schools need immediate reform to avert an imminent national disaster.
"What kind of reform could do the trick?
"A demonstrated (not just stated) commitment to free speech, academic freedom, and ideological diversity is Shapiro’s preferred solution. He recommends that law schools adopt the triad of policies developed at his alma mater of University of Chicago to clarify and protect true free speech. 'It’s not rocket science,' Shapiro writes repeatedly, notwithstanding students at elite law schools claiming not to know the difference between free speech and censorship. Heckler’s vetoes don’t count; neither do other forms of disruptive conduct that involve speech but prevent others from speaking. Enforce rules governing conduct without fear or favor. Law schools should not weigh in on world events that do not directly touch their campus. And for heaven’s sake, stop cracking down on professors who say offensive things."
From the classroom to the courtroom, Robert Little reviews Drawn Testimony: My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist by Jane Rosenberg.
Rosenberg "went to an arraignment without any sell-on deal in 1980. NBC bought her image, and she began her now 40 years in court art. In her new book Drawn Testimony, she recounts quite a few trials where she sketched from a corner. John Gotti asked her to avoid giving him a second chin. Ghislaine Maxwell turned around and turned the tables, sketching Rosenberg sketching Maxwell. Bill Cosby, Sam Bankman-Fried, even Tom Brady’s deflategate hearing helped fill her sketchbook."
"The job is both challenging and an opportunity for news readers. The artist gets up at dawn to get an ideal seat, sitting through often dull hearings waiting for the witness some editor wants an image of. The artist has to work silently, usually with acrylic pencils that noiselessly scrape across paper. They bring a huge kit of material. The profession is in decline because every state now allows photography in courts.
"But the opportunity! A sketcher can pull off what Albert Camus called 'the lie that tells a truth.' There is no spot in a courtroom where the audience can see the front of a lawyer, the witness, the judge, and the jury all at once. But an artist can slide the personnel together, or merge different moments. Perhaps the judge didn’t form that expression at the exact moment the witness told her tale. But a sketch showing that combination might convey the judge’s reaction to the testimony."
Weekend Beacon movie critic John Podhoretz had a reaction to watching The Brutalist, which is up for multiple awards at tonight's Oscars. As usual, he was brutally honest.
"The Brutalist is a failure, even an offensive one, but it’s also kind of magnificent as it goes along. I’ve rarely had a more ambiguous or complex reaction to a work of cinema, and I hope I can get The Brutalist right as I talk about it so that I don’t follow director and cowriter Brady Corbet down the path of misrepresenting my subject.
"Corbet is unapologetically aiming for greatness with his gorgeously rendered portrait of a Holocaust survivor and his journey through a mid-century America that is simultaneously welcoming of his talents and viciously destructive to his soul. There are two ways to look at the story of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody). One is that Corbet is telling a singular tale about a singular fictional Jew who undergoes a singular set of experiences as he comes into contact with a difficult, complex, highly intelligent, and very rich American Gentile with the very suggestive name of Harrison Lee Van Buren (that’s the key general of the Confederacy and three presidents combined in just one moniker).
"The other is that he is our guide to the America that emerged after World War II, and Corbet is using his journey through 15 years of American life to offer an innovative and profound view of what this country was really like at the moment it assumed leadership not only of the world but as the great patron of the arts and the artistic future after Europe’s destruction in the war.
"If it’s just the story of Toth and Van Buren and their conflicts, and nothing larger, then Corbet is artistically justified in telling the tale as he does. But if this is a movie about America, anti-Semitism, and the depredations of capitalism, then it matters very much that the larger details are correctly and properly rendered. An indictment has to be based on facts and truth. In this regard, The Brutalist is spectacularly—and offensively—false."
From the archives: Congratulations to Princeton historian and Weekend Beacon contributor Allen C. Guelzo, whose book Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment has been nominated for this year's Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. James Piereson gave us a review.
"A research fellow at Princeton University and author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President and other books on the Civil War era, Guelzo is our foremost Lincoln scholar and an authority on just about everything he said or wrote. Lincoln, he writes in Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, cast the struggle for the Union as a universal cause with vast implications for future times. Can Americans find inspiration in Lincoln’s life to meet the less daunting challenges they face today? 'To those who have despaired of the future,' Guelzo writes, 'I offer this man’s example.'
"As his title suggests, he finds the example to lie in Lincoln’s faith in the nation’s Founding ideals, in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, in the common sense and good judgment of its citizens, and in their determination to maintain 'a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.' He is aware that this kind of faith is in short supply today."
"Lincoln was aware of the tension between faith and reason, as Guelzo explains, though he did not see a fundamental conflict between them. He distrusted passion in politics, seeing that it devolved into violence and mob rule. It was not an abstract proposition: He had witnessed lynchings and assaults on newspapers due to differences over slavery. 'The pillars of the temple of liberty,' he said, are 'hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.' His 'ancient faith' was hewn from that quarry. It is in everyone’s interest to obey the laws lest the breakdown of law and order should lead to a 'war of all against all.' He vowed as a young man always to act on the basis of reason, as far as he could follow it. 'Let us do nothing through passion and ill temper,' he advised friends and supporters on the eve of the Civil War. He carried through on that advice. As the war began, Henry Adams wrote to his brother: 'No man is fit to take hold now who is not cool as death.' Lincoln, as things turned out, was that man."
The winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize will be announced early this month.