A law school forces Maoist re-education on a professor who ran afoul of Black students By Andrea Widburg
Mao’s deadly Cultural Revolution germinated in academia when students embraced it and began to terrorize their professors by accusing them of anti-Maoist wrongthink. The movement lasted for a decade, during which hundreds of thousands to millions of people died, while China’s irreplaceable cultural and historical heritage was destroyed. We are experiencing a Maoist revolution in America and, as in China, academia is ground zero for the great terror. The latest example is being visited upon Prof. Jason Kilborn, a law professor at U. Illinois-Chicago John Marshall Law School, for using the “n” word, literally, as in “n____.”
Legal Insurrection has the whole story and I urge you to visit it for the details but I’ll give the short version here. I will precede it, though, with a short anecdote from my own years a few decades ago at law school.
In my torts class, the professor called upon an extremely shy young man to discuss a medical malpractice case that involved a woman complaining about injury to her vagina and anus during childbirth. When the student summarized the case, every time he came to those anatomical words, he choked. I’ve never forgotten the teacher telling the student, “When you represent a client in court, you must be able to speak firmly and without shame about anything that advances your client’s interests. There is no place for shyness or sensitivity if you’re to be a good lawyer.”
How things have changed.
Here, verbatim, is the test question that Kilborn presented to his students, as he has for years, including the polite dashes:
Image: Prof. Kilborn test question. YouTube screen grab.
Apparently, in 2021, even an allusion to these words was too much for the Black Law Student Association (“BLSA”), which viciously attacked Kilborn, complaining to the school’s Dean and Chancellor and putting up a Change.org petition. The petition called those elided words “dark and vile verbiage” that “caused unnecessary distress and anxiety” for students. It’s impossible to imagine these students handling an actual case in an actual court although I guess they’ll make up in mindless viciousness what they lack in intelligence, toughness, and skill.
Later, the BLSA put out a tweet asking any student who was ever offended by anything Kilborn has ever said to speak up. Thanks to this effort, they were able to add that Kilborn had called minorities “cockroaches,” a highly unlikely accusation, and to accuse him of “diminishing” a student’s accent, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Image: John Marshall School of Law entryway (text added) by Mrtoren. CC BY-SA 3.0.
Kilborn, stupidly, offered a groveling apology, which fed the complaining students’ sense of power. From vague demands about accountability, the students escalated to insisting he be fired. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education represented Kilborn in his dealings with the school and, in September, announced that Kilborn had reached a final resolution that, among other things, did not involve mandatory sensitivity training.
Typically for academic institutions (I’ve seen this before over the decades), the law school apparently didn’t mean what it said. It’s now barring Kilborn from teaching unless he is enrolled in Cornell University Center for Teacher Innovation’s “Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom Online Course.”
The required course consists of eight weeks of leftist indoctrination, with 20 hours of coursework, mandatory Maoist “self-reflection” papers, and weekly 90-minute sessions with a trainer, who must assess “whether Professor Kilborn is gaining insight, learning, and competencies….” Even after the course ends, Kilborn must work on additional supplementary material and have another instructional advisor for more self-reflection.
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Additionally, “the letter let Prof. Kilborn know that if he sued, the university (funded by taxpayers) would fight him to the death”—which is how Legal Insurrection’s Prof. Jacobson characterizes a warning that any litigation would be a serious problem were Kilborn to pursue it. (He should still pursue it.)
The day I left U.C. Berkeley, I began expressing the wish that it would one day be razed and the ground salted. In the intervening years, academia across America has become infinitely worse than Berkeley ever was. Berkeley’s liberal arts teaching was lousy because it was skewed by leftism but there was still intellectual freedom. Today, though, Maoism—coerced ideological thinking that one must embrace with deviation lest there be brutal and humiliating punishment—is the rule of the day on university campuses.
We are raising a generation of frightening, power-mad morons who operate in an environment in which faculty members are either complicit or intimidated. These young monsters then leave academia and spread their toxins into the business world and, magically, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and Transgender Theory follow them. We must clip their wings before there are even more gulags than the one in D.C., a place in which people guilty of exactly what Democrats argued for four years—namely, that an election was tainted—are relentlessly persecuted for their “wrongthink.”
You can hear Prof. Kilborn tell his story in this video:
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