MINDING THE CAMPUS: Gerber For Faculty Positions.

These are all cases that, prior to the outbreak of pro-Hamas festivities on campus, had already tarnished the reputations of these law schools. Doubtless if I had time and my readers had the patience, this list could be extended to many other law schools. But I’ve assembled this list not as part of a general indictment but rather to set the stage for a positive proposal.

Any of these schools could take a major step towards re-gaining public respect by showing that it is willing to hire to its faculty a recognized critic of DEI.

And I have the candidate for you: Scott Gerber.

I trust you have heard of him. But for readers who have not, Dr. Gerber was until about a week ago a tenured professor of law at Ohio Northern University. He is perhaps best known right now as the author of an article published in May in The Wall Street Journal, “DEI Brings Kafka to My Law School,” in which he recounted the frightening attempt by his law dean to fire him, by pulling him out of class under armed police escort.

No doubt the drama was meant to stigmatize Dr. Gerber in the eyes of students as guilty of some dark deed. But the issue was simply that he had raised objections to his university’s aggressive DEI initiatives, as is his legal right and academic freedom to do.

Ohio Northern University? What kind of law professor pursues his career in such a place? Judge the man, not the school. Cambridge University Press has just published his fourth academic book, Law and Religion in Colonial America. He has edited two others, and he also has had four novels published. He earned his Ph.D. and J.D. from the University of Virginia, clerked for U.S. District Judge Ernest C. Torres, and is a member of the Massachusetts, Colorado, and Virginia bars, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court bar. He is the four-time winner of the Fowler V. Harper Award for excellence in legal scholarship—five-time winner, actually, but ONU’s law dean withheld the award from him this spring so as not to make the summoning of armed police to his classroom look even more outrageous than it already did. He likewise is the three-time winner of the Daniel S. Guy Award for excellence in legal journalism, and has received awards for excellence in teaching and has lectured at universities around the country, including yours. He was a visiting professor at Brown University’s Political Theory Project during the 2018-19 academic year.

I am not going to pack his resume into this article—just enough to indicate he is a serious scholar long buried in an out-of-the-way place, where he apparently annoyed his colleagues as a rate-buster. Everything they did, he did a hundred times better—and then he refused to get on the DEI bandwagon.

Jealousy is a major part of academia.