A JUDGE FROM AN ERA LONG GONE: Federal judge Richard Stearns, a Clinton appointee, has dismissed a discrimination lawsuit filed by Jewish students against MIT. Boston judges have a history of protecting the local elite institutions (MIT and Harvard) from lawsuits, so this isn’t a great surprise, though shows extremely dubious legal judgment to dismiss a case like this on a motion to dismiss before there has been any discovery. This is especially true given that Stearns acknowledges that MIT Jewish students have faced serious discrimination.

That aside, though, what really struck me about the opinion was why Judge Stearns determined that MIT could not be held responsible for the harassment and so forth that MIT students meted out on their Jewish classmates. I literally laughed out loud when I read this, and wondered whether Stearns was gaslighting, or whether he simply had a weirdly naive and outdated view of what elite universities have been like since the era of political correctness began in the late 1980s. So I looked up his bio, and discovered that he graduated college in 1968(!) So I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he really believes that “tolerance and respect for others” are the value “that modern liberal university education seeks to instill,” and that MIT administrators therefore could not have been expected to anticipate that many of its students had not internalized those values.