It wasn’t just predictable, it was inevitable: The ritual calumniation of the late Antonin Scalia has begun. A noisy scrum of faculty and students are protesting the naming of George Mason University’s law school after the recently deceased Supreme Court justice.
The university has been given $30 million—$20 million from an anonymous donor and $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation—for scholarship programs in Scalia’s memory, with those gifts to be memorialized by renaming the Arlington, Va.-based law school for Scalia. Ever-so-clever campus leftists at first mocked the plan by yukking it up over the unfortunate acronym they would deploy for the Antonin Scalia School Of Law. But that didn’t scuttle things. The university merely announced the name would be the “Antonin Scalia Law School.”
But the left’s contempt for Scalia was not about to be blunted that easily. When mockery failed, they turned to protest. In late April, the faculty senate convened, and as BuzzFeed reported, it was “a meeting full of angry student activists.” (Are there any other kind?) They pushed for a resolution denouncing Scalia for making “numerous public offensive comments about various groups—-including people of color, women, and LGBT individuals.” And then, having sought to strip Scalia of his black judicial robes and dress him instead in the preposterous white sheets of a Klansman, they had the risible audacity to denounce Scalia as “a significant contributor to the polarized climate in this country.”
The faculty senate, by a vote of 21-13, expressed its displeasure at being associated with Scalia’s memory. They worried that—ha!—the school would be seen as a “conservative institution,” and not “a comfortable home for individuals with a variety of viewpoints.”
Thus continues the closing of the campus mind. Serious and fairminded men and women are treated with contempt and then dismissed as being the divisive ones. Conservative views are redlined in the name of protecting space for diverse opinions.
That said, in The Scrapbook’s opinion, it is probably a mixed blessing to adorn any law school, even one like GMU’s that is home to distinguished conservative scholars, with the name of Justice Scalia. It was a deeply generous gesture by the Friends of Nino, but as happens all too often these days, their generosity provided an opportunity for grandstanding faculty and students to reciprocate with the gracelessness and ill will that have sadly come to be associated with the modern university.
