Flirty emails got Mark Schlissel fired. A deeper history weighs on Michigan’s flagship

This is a rather sad case. To be a bit corny about it, Cupid's arrow strikes unpredictably. Sometimes you just know that a person you meet is one whom you can communicate with in a totally easy and enjoyable way. It happens to me on rare occasions. Though I am perhaps lucky to have autistic tendencies and so have always had no difficulty staying on the strait and narrow with my partner at the time. I think Prof. Schlissel was punished for being simply human. There appears after all to have been no affair, just lovelorn emails. I feel sorry for him

He is a lonely, bearded scientist who has an important job in the Midwest. A Brooklyn native, raised in a traditional Jewish household, he is amused by a satirization of the sexual fantasies of New Yorkers.

He is married with children. But he dreams at work about a sojourn in Paris with a woman other than his wife — someone who enjoys a good bistro; someone who makes his heart hurt.
He asks saucily if he might “lure” her with a knish.

This is the portrait of Mark S. Schlissel that emerges from 118 pages of documents that the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents made public on a Saturday evening in January, shortly after they had removed him as president.

In this collection of cringey communications between Schlissel and a subordinate, the university’s former top executive is stripped of his veneer of esteem, reduced instead to a lovestruck buffoon. All of it was so unbecoming of a man in Schlissel’s position, the regents agreed, that he should be summarily fired with cause.

Schlissel’s termination ranks among one of the more profoundly embarrassing firings of a major university leader in modern memory. Instantly memeable, excerpts from the emails quickly wound up on T-shirts and stickers. Before the Sunday sun had risen, some prankster had chalked the word “Lonely” on a campus sidewalk above a Michigan “M,” referencing one of the messages Schlissel had signed with the first letter of his name.

Turbulence around Schlissel was nothing new. He had, since 2020, worn the scarlet letter of a Faculty Senate vote of no-confidence, drawing the ire of professors for his handling of the pandemic, among other things. His tensions with the board, whose members are elected by statewide vote, had begun to bleed into public view. Even so, most expected this to end just as it often does for people in Schlissel’s rarified air: The president walks away with warm regards from the board and giant fistfuls of money. Schlissel’s transgressions upset this timeworn choreography.

But his story is about more than a president getting crosswise with his board, or what appears to have been a workplace romance. The university’s recent history imbues his downfall with a complicated resonance that people in Ann Arbor are still sorting through. His firing came less than two years after Schlissel dismissed the university’s [black] provost, Martin A. Philbert, who was accused of sexually harassing multiple women over the course of 15 years at Michigan.

Taken together, the two cases sent a message that the the university’s problems with sexual misconduct go all the way to the top. It isn’t that simple. There is nothing in the public evidence that would definitively establish that Schlissel engaged in sexual harassment. Even so, he gave fodder to a more systematic criticism that Michigan’s leaders still don’t get it. After all of the apologies, the legal settlements, the training sessions, the promises, and the shame, something has yet to sink in at the highest levels. Something is left to understand.

Since Philbert’s firing, in 2020, the university has signaled its willingness to turn over every rock, hiring an outside law firm to investigate how the system failed. As president, Schlissel was a visible champion of this work. But new reporting from The Chronicle suggests that the job remains unfinished.

A retired professor, who has not previously discussed with the news media her role in the Philbert case, told The Chronicle that she was met with intimidation and indifference more than 15 years ago, when she first reported allegations against the future provost. Another faculty member, who has not spoken with news reporters about the case before, said she was twice told that decision makers at the university believed in Philbert’s capacity for “rehabilitation.”

The University of Michigan’s administration considers the matter of Martin A. Philbert settled. But Schlissel’s firing cracks open history, inviting still unanswered questions. When powerful people cross the lines of propriety, who renders the final verdict on what really happened? Whose memory counts? Who is burdened by history, and who is allowed to forget it?

Why exactly was Schlissel fired? On a recent afternoon at Zingerman’s Delicatessen, a storied sandwich shop in Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown District, Jordan B. Acker confronts that question over a chicken-pesto sandwich. Acker, a 37-year-old lawyer from the Detroit suburbs, is chairman of the Board of Regents. On the subject of Schlissel’s termination, Acker stays mostly on script. He circles back continually to a letter that the board sent to Schlissel in January, stating the regents’ rationale for firing the president with cause.
“I think the letter kind of speaks for itself,” Acker says. ”It’s a judgment question at the end of the day. And I think it’s clear from the letter, what was lacking here was judgment.”

Strictly speaking, Schlissel was fired for violating a morals clause in his contract, which stipulated that he must at all times comport himself in a manner that promotes the “dignity, reputation, and academic excellence of the university.” Nevertheless, the board saw fit to invoke the past, calling Schlissel’s conduct “particularly egregious” in light of his commitment to stamp out sexual misconduct at the university. The letter lets the reader decide exactly what’s being charged here. Is the board calling Schlissel a hypocrite or accusing him of harassment?

“Mark Schlissel is not a monster,” Acker says. “He’s not an evil, evil guy. Mark Schlissel was guilty of extraordinarily poor judgment. But I put him and Martin Philbert in very different categories. Martin Philbert was engaged in sexual harassment. I can’t say the same about Mark Schlissel.”

https://archive.ph/4od8N

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Ex-school official sues Virginia board over anti-racism training

A former assistant principal is suing a Virginia school board, claiming that she was forced out of her job for a “slip of the tongue” during a mandatory “anti-racism” training based on Critical Race Theory.

Emily Mais, who was the assistant principal at Agnor-Hurt Elementary School, accused the school district in a lawsuit filed Thursday of pushing her out in fall 2021 after she mistakenly used the words “colored people” as she railed against the training session.

Though Mais apologized for the “slip of the tongue, ”a teacher’s aide, who is black, verbally attacked her in front of all training attendees, the lawsuit filed in Albemarle County claims.

The aide accused her of “speaking like old racists who told people of color to go to the back of the bus,” the complaint claims.

Following that training, Mais said that multiple colleagues told her that the teacher’s aide and her friends were openly calling her vulgar names at work, including ‘that white racist b—-h” and “that two-faced racist b—-h”

Mais complained to the principal that the harassment was causing her “substantial emotional distress, preventing her from focusing on her job, and making it impossible for her to effectively manage the employees involved in the harassment.”

But the principal refused to take any action to address her concerns, the complaint says.

Mais submitted her resignation on Aug. 29 and left her job on Sept. 10, after being forced to apologize to her colleagues in what her lawyers described as “ritual shaming.”

“On information and belief, from beginning to end, the apology meeting was carefully orchestrated by district officials to humiliate, shame, and traumatize Ms. Mais for an accidental slip of the tongue in order to make an example of her and to communicate to other district employees the type of punishment that would occur if anyone dared question the new reigning anti-racist orthodoxy, which is racist at its core,” the filing says.

The 45-page lawsuit filed by conservative Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom on her behalf is seeking back pay, compensatory and punitive damages, as well as attorneys’ fees.

“Instead of training faculty members to embrace students of all races, Albemarle County school officials are using a curriculum that promotes racial discrimination,” Kate Anderson, director of the ADF Center for Parental Rights, said in a prepared statement.

“The training sets up a classic Catch-22: It encourages all staff members to ‘speak their truth,’ but when a white person like Emily raises concerns about the divisive content, she is deemed a racist in need of further ‘anti-racism’ instruction.

“Emily believes every person is made in the image of God and entitled to equal treatment and respect and refuses to participate in using harmful ideology to indoctrinate students, teachers, or staff.”

Phil Giaramita, a district spokesman, told The Post in an email that officials have not yet been served with the lawsuit and have not had the chance to review its allegations.

“We are looking forward to the opportunity at some point in the future to responding to the suit’s claims in the appropriate legal forum,” he added.

https://nypost.com/2022/04/19/emily-mais-sue-over-critical-race-theory-training/

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Are Law Schools Now Woke Factories?

Students at three recent college events threatened violence against conservative speakers, along with the student groups that invited them to speak on campus.

This may be commonplace today, but what makes this hostility so much more shocking is that it occurred at colleges once considered eminent law schools: Georgetown University Law Center, Hastings College of Law at the University of California, and Yale Law School.

These future lawyers and their professors have shown us precisely what they think of free speech and open inquiry when the wrong people with the wrong views come to campus.

These identity politics-fueled attacks threaten to undermine legal education. As we have learned, nothing stays on campus anymore. Rank illiberalism in law schools will ripple through the profession and its institutions in due course.

At Georgetown University Law Center, Ilya Shapiro was put on administrative leave in January of this year, days before beginning his tenure as executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. The reason: Shapiro had tweeted that President Joe Biden’s nominee “will always have an asterisk attached” because the president promised to “only consider black women.”

Shapiro noted that Sri Srinivasan, who currently sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was the “best pick for Biden.” The “latest intersectionality hierarchy,” excluded this judge, he argued, and “so we’ll get [a] lesser black woman.”

Shapiro apologized for how the tweets were worded, and in isolation they read poorly. His argument buried behind this phrasing was obvious: We should not elevate candidates to the Supreme Court based on race and gender. Rather than contend with this claim, Georgetown Law suspended Shapiro for an insensitive tweet.

The call to terminate Shapiro has been publicly made by the Georgetown Black Law Students Association. Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor in a note to the law school community fabricated the wording of the tweets, stating that Shapiro had suggested “that the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman.”

Translation: This is a closed society, and Shapiro unartfully opened questions and debates that we will not have here.

That was a false characterization by Treanor, and it fanned the flames, leading to calls to action across campus. Treanor further stated that “Ilya Shapiro’s tweets are antithetical to the work that we do here every day to build inclusion, belonging, and respect for diversity.”

Students at Georgetown Law are learning how they should handle their disagreements with others. They should cancel them, suspend them, even fire them. Why not make arguments against his position, and teach your students how lawyers should behave?

Instead, the administration chose intolerance. Is it any wonder that some students have petitioned the school for a cry room so that they can grieve and process such manifest racism and bigotry?

Shapiro remains on administrative leave to this day.

Students from other campuses have taken their cues from Georgetown Law, including the Hastings School of Law, where Shapiro was recently shouted down at a debate with another professor about the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Video of the event depicts near endless verbal assaults, yelling, and cursing. Members of the Black Law Student Association demanded that Shapiro be removed from campus. Shapiro at one point was directly impeded from approaching the lectern.

One student said, “We can’t have a bigot on campus.” Another exclaimed, “Remove him off the f—ing campus, because that’s what we want.”

Two professors explicitly affirmed the protests, their aims, and their methods. One of those professors, Rory Hastings, was set to debate Shapiro. And in the video of the event, he stated that he was for the protest.

Another professor, Veena Dubal, said on Twitter: “For me, the central intellectual query here is not whether Shapiro can speak, but why he was invited. Why is the voice of someone who has made overtly racist & misogynist statements being elevated?”

At least the Hastings administration affirmed free speech in an email sent to the law school community, but it did nothing against the students who broke the school’s policies with their thug tactics during Shapiro’s appearance. And that omission speaks loudly to students about what is favored and disfavored speech.

At Yale, an event with Kristen Waggoner, Alliance Defending Freedom general counsel, and Monica Miller with the American Humanist Association was interrupted in a physically intimidating and violent fashion by students. Video of the event evinces high-pitched sounds of shrieking voices. The police were called and were, apparently, needed.

Waggoner left campus in a police vehicle. Students who organized the event and the speakers both reported feeling unsafe and would not leave without security.

The student mob also pounded walls, blocked exits, yelled at speakers, and physically threatened Federalist Society students who organized the event.

This is more absurd, totalitarian behavior at a law school. We are talking about representatives from two organizations of remarkably different philosophies appearing together in general agreement about free speech.

What was so explosive about the event?

The event showcased the work both the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Humanist Association performed together in the case Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, in which the Supreme Court ruled that government officials can be held accountable for violating constitutionally protected freedoms.

A student was prevented from talking about the Gospel on his campus, and Alliance Defending Freedom represented the student and the American Humanist Association filed a “friend of the court” brief. So far, so good.

The ire of the students seems to have been triggered not by the actual work that Alliance Defending Freedom did in the case. Rather, their actions signal that Alliance Defending Freedom should not even be allowed to exist and participate in the legal system as a matter of right. The students screamed “protect the children” at one point.

Alliance Defending Freedom, among its many sins against the new morality, opposes the au courant indefinite extension of pronouns, an ideology that now demands even children should be introduced to it. For many students, that is the obverse of protecting students.

Protecting them now means to transgender them into the exciting malleable world of sexuality. Those who refuse this elastic notion of gender should not be allowed to speak because of the damage, hurt, and violence they psychically impose on students.

One way to become a better advocate is to listen to the other side, not shut it down. Waggoner, after all, has won at the Supreme Court, including the recent case she was at Yale to speak about to students. Her opponents might wonder what her secret sauce is. Those who are trying to launch their careers should have the humility to learn, to wonder.

But that is what these law students refused to do. The point is to crush opposing viewpoints.

And what did they learn from their supposed academic leadership on campus? No punishments of any kind were dealt to the students who verbally assaulted the speakers and the students. Yale Law School’s official statement was that the administration was “in serious conversation with students about our free speech policies, expectations, and norms.”

In other words, believe our lies. Mere words in a student handbook protect nothing if they are not enforced with official deeds. They are, at present, a dead letter.

Yale Law School denied that police were needed at the event, and the school’s official statement did not state that its free speech policy was violated. That prompted Waggoner to correct publicly this “blatant misrepresentation,” admonishing the leadership of the school that “ … Yale administrators shouldn’t be cowering to mobs. They should be insisting on embracing a culture of free speech.”

Much of the animus seems to be caused by the conservative and more classically liberal approaches certain speakers and groups take regarding identity politics and its vision for our politics and law to be defined by race and gender.

Moreover, the students seem to be taking cues from members of the administrations of their institutions. Those leaders have either led the attempt to quell speech they disfavor or they gently excuse censorious and physically aggressive behavior by their students.

This obviously should raise concerns about who our future jurists are and what type of legal culture they want to instantiate.

With Yale law students, we deal with future leaders in the profession. If blanket resistance to students or speakers who in any way question progressive pieties about identity politics becomes de rigueur and goes largely unpunished, then it would be an early sign that an official illiberalism will extend beyond campus and to our courts and politics.

Recognizing this nascent reality, U.S. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman penned an email to the entire bench of federal judges noting the event and that those who participate in this kind of activity should be barred from federal clerkships. That was a positive first step.

The American law school follows an academic model of pedagogy, instruction, and rigor. According to this model, all relevant legal questions should be open and engaged, not closed by a vocal elect, self-proclaimed tribunes of race and gender. Yale’s students instead opted to bring the methods of a closed society to campus, preventing debate where it should flow freely if the academy is to remain true to its calling.

Legal academic training will always contain an adversarial approach, along with the inevitable human emotions and passions that must be restrained while making opposing arguments.

As befits the process of legal instruction, students must be inculcated with restraint, civility, and curiosity to form the mentality of a profession vital to a republican form of government built on the rule of law, in both civil and private law realms.

Such a legal system demands that its practitioners exercise an ethic of decency within a demanding, competitive profession.

Rule of law is about form, procedure, and process, if it’s about anything. But that demands discipline on the part of lawyers, judges, and other key actors.

The pedagogical process, one that initiates students into the world of lawyering and its demands for civility, must be defended by academics and deans of law schools. Here there can be no neutrality.

That we are having this conversation is another sign that identity politics—its thorough envelopment of many law school students and school administration members—always manifests itself in an authoritarian, illiberal style. Our constitutional order needs to develop antibodies quickly to ward it off.

Some could be forgiven for concluding that to protect it we need to defund law schools.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/08/are-law-schools-now-woke-factories/

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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