May 15, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: A Texas Military Vet Dropped Out of Penn State Law School Rather Than Submit to Its Mandatory Anti-Racism Course.

David Blackman, a native of Plano, Texas, was thrilled to be starting law school at Penn State in the fall of 2025.

A former 911 call operator and a veteran of the Texas State Guard, Blackman, 26, loved the university’s football team and its location in the Appalachian Mountains.

“I’ve been a fan of Penn State since I was a teenager,” Blackman told the Washington Free Beacon. He arrived on campus in August 2025, a 50 percent merit scholarship in hand, excited for game nights in Beaver Stadium and a three-year reprieve from the Texas heat.

Then he sat through his first anti-racism class.

On the first day of “Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws,” a required course for all first-year law students, Blackman listened as a transgender faculty member, Emily Spottswood, explained why the course was mandatory.

“It’s not optional,” Spottswood said, because “being a lawyer is about recognizing and combating injustice.”

In audio of the session obtained by the Free Beacon, Spottswood said that this “institutional message” was “baked into” the law school’s “DNA,” adding that, as a “trans woman,” the course’s focus on “combatting oppression … is meaningful to me.”

Spottswood’s remarks followed a presentation by Jeffrey Dodge, the law school’s associate dean, and Shaakirrah Sanders, who was introduced as “the first associate Dean of anti-racism and critical pedagogy in the country.” The presentation made clear that Blackman wasn’t in Texas anymore; he and his classmates were now conscripts in a political “coalition” that, as Dodge put it in his talk, was dedicated to “building a more anti-racist” future.

“We are taking action to disrupt and dismantle systems that racialize, subordinate, and oppress,” Dodge said. “We … want to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism … as a foundation for this course.”

Thus began a series of struggle sessions in which professors demanded students affirm activist talking points and ultimately drove Blackman, whose first-choice law school had been Penn State, to withdraw from the school after just one semester. (The Free Beacon reviewed Blackman’s transcript.) Over the course of three 150-minute lectures, speakers described all white people as “privileged,” called to “eradicate patriarchy,” and asserted that the justice system is “about keeping black people in their place.” One assignment said students should “consider” framing their essays around “the reality of systemic racism,” implying that doing otherwise could affect a student’s grade.

PJM alum Tyler O’Neil adds, “This is an important reminder of how deep the woke rot runs in many professions — it’s not just that professionals are biased, it’s that they’re forced to marinade in leftist-saturated institutions to get the credentials to do their jobs. Even the sanest will get infected to some degree.”

Exit quote from Blackman:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll