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Note to the Reader The genesis of this book dates to the winter of 1968. Kathy Boudin,a graduate of Bryn Mawr and a student in my contracts class at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, walked into my office to announce she was withdrawing from law school. Kathy mentioned that it was time to think about going underground and added that she was in trouble for something that had happened in Chicago. In my naiveté, I assumed that “underground” meant Kathy was taking the rapid transit to the airport. I gave her my best wishes and offered to provide any help I could. She gave me a quizzical look, smiled, and left. Kathy had been indicted for disrupting the Democratic Convention in Chicago during the Four Days of Rage. She was a founding member of the Weather Underground and the daughter of the prominent civil rights lawyer Leonard Boudin.She left law school to become a fugitive.I next heard about Kathy from a news report that identified her as one of two naked women seen running from the explosion of a house in NewYork City. One of her Weatherman colleagues had set off the explosion while making bombs to blow up randomly selected buildings at Columbia University. The two women got clothes from Henry Fonda’s ex-wife, who lived in the neighborhood . Both escaped.While on the run, Kathy and her accomplices committed numerous violent acts,culminating in a shootout in upstate NewYork where a Brinks guard and two police officers were killed.Tried for her role in the murders, Kathy is serving time in prison until the year 2001. Kathy became the outsider as revolutionary. She and her Weatherman comrades were determined to reject their privileged liberal bourgeois status by using violence to free the oppressed. Instead, as Lucinda Franks wrote in 1981, they perverted “every purpose they ever had: the children of the rich killing the less privileged in the name of revolution.” Two years after Kathy went underground, Kent State University, a twohour drive from the CaseWestern Law School,erupted with a confrontation xv that resulted in the shooting of four students.Within hours the conflagration spread to other schools in the region, closing classes with sit-ins and riots. The stars of the radical chic circulated among Ohio schools, appropriating student radio stations to demand revolution and the end of meritocracy. While the University canceled classes and ceased functioning, the Law School remained open for exams.This was the national pattern; law schools were not seriously affected by the passions and upheavals of the 1970s. Law students, who had impending careers to consider and had more to lose than a B.A.in literature,stayed on the periphery of the insurrection.But the most formidable obstacle to radicalization was cultural.The core values of legal education—analytical evaluation,rationality,and objectivity—do not tolerate intellectual populism. Ideological gamesmanship is anathema to the Socratic method—the symbol of individualist merit. Unlike the fad-conscious arts and humanities, the law academy adhered to the rule of law. Through the 1970s, legal education remained a monolithic institution beyond the reach of the revolution. While law schools remained aloof, the undergraduate sector was radicalized according to political correctness—a set of rules designed to terminate Liberal principles.In the 1980s academics replayed the consciousness-raising lyrics of the 1970s. Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild became required reading in History 101. Adopting George Orwell’s Newspeak strategy, radicals subverted the Liberal vocabulary.To be rational and objective is to reject the positive influences of emotion and empathy. Hierarchy denies the existence of equality.Authoritarianism translates into male dominance and oppression. Individualism connotes materialism and greed,while white male implies homophobia and patriarchy. Speaking for outside consumption, PC academics call for multiculturalism and racial and gender diversity.This is for show; inside the tent they impose race and gender separateness. PC Newspeak decrees that oppression by Liberal white males has given females and people of color victimhood status , providing them with the experience to produce distinctive scholarship valued on its own terms. Guiding the PC apparatus is the principle that everything is political; scholarship had better be ideological or it doesn’t exist. We in the law academy were living on borrowed time.By the mid-1980s, law schools were no longer monoliths of Liberalism, having been infiltrated by young post-Woodstock instructors of a different culture.As products of PC...

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