With yet another judicial nominee under fire for allegedly objectionable collegiate writings, it’s long past time to say that almost nothing one writes in college has serious bearing on a nominee’s fitness for office.
This is especially true when the writings themselves are objectionable only if taken outlandishly out of context by dishonest ideologues or by souls too pathetically hypersensitive to appreciate the virtues of intellectual jousting.
The newest victim of leftists making Kilimanjaros from collegiate ant hills is Neomi Rao, President Trump’s wonderfully qualified choice to take the spot vacated by now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. BuzzFeed has a story out Monday breathlessly reporting that Rao “wrote inflammatory op-eds in college.” The left-wing Alliance for Justice is tweeting, mendaciously, that “Neomi Rao’s record includes writings that attack sexual assault survivors, people of color, and LGBTQ people.”
Rao’s college essays do nothing of the sort. For example, the supposed “attack” against “sexual assault survivors” is actually an essay accurately titled, “Shades of Grey,” which makes the entirely cogent point that when alcohol is involved in a sexual encounter, memories might be hazy. She also argued that some modern takes on such encounters amount to an anti-feminist double standard that implies that “women are weak and helpless” and lacking moral agency of their own. Her ultimate message is that “we are all better off living with social structures which require mutual respect.”
It should hardly be disqualifying to write something in 1994 that even today should remain a rather obvious observation, even if an individual sentence therein offends someone’s delicate sensitivities.
Likewise for the other criticisms of Rao’s essays, all of which are similarly misleading. We’ve all seen, again and again, how single statements taken out of context, and then further distorted by an ideologue’s prism, are used to slander a thoughtful nominee’s name and character. No need to detail each slander here.
The larger point here is that the decades-later use of college writings (not to mention high school yearbooks) to disqualify an otherwise stellar nominee is almost always preposterous. Granted, if somebody repeatedly pushed openly and unambiguously racist ideas in college, and never recanted, or if somebody’s college writings were libelous, there might be some relevance. Otherwise, college’s very spirit of intellectual inquiry, combined with the still-less-than-fully-developed intellectual maturity, should provide something approaching a free pass. If collegians can’t explore shades of gray, what is college for?
David Lat, founder of the respected website Above the Law, explored this issue more fully last fall in the Wall Street Journal.
“College is traditionally a time of experimentation and exploration,” Lat wrote. “We adopt and discard ideas and try out different identities, sometimes in rapid succession. … Let him who did not embarrass himself in college cast the first stone.”
The “gotcha” game against nominees must end. If there is a legitimate issue about a nominee’s professional record or integrity, raise it. If not, then don’t dig up and twist a college essay to destroy the nominee’s reputation.
