SADOW: Bad and Good of Unprofessional Professor Incident

Just what Louisiana higher education needs, another black eye that invites only more disdain and scorn when it needs to reassure the public it’s there to teach critical thinking and all various theories and information to achieve that, not as a platform for proselytizing.

It turns out the reelection of Republican former Pres. Donald Trump proved somewhat unnerving to one special snowflake in Louisiana State University’s School of Law. Assoc. Prof. Nicholas Bryner shortly afterwards loosed a diatribe to one of his classes in which he asserted (1) if you voted for Trump, you have to prove you’re a good person because apparently that behavior makes you otherwise suspiciously evil and (2) a vote for Trump is a “rejection of the idea that we are governed by a people with expertise.” Not only are these statements easily falsifiable, but they also drew the ire of GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, who fired off a note to LSU’s president, law school dean, the LSU Board of Supervisors, and Republican Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill suggesting some kind of legal violation may have occurred requiring some sort of punishment.

There is quite a bit of self-deception and/or lack of awareness by Bryner in his screed that careens to the hypocritical. He claimed “my job is not to teach you about politics” while clearly making politicized statements. Even more laughably, his comments included a summation of an administrative imperative for government to make “rational” decisions “ideally based on evidence” – risible because in at least one public forum he opined in a way that explicitly rejected that in the most ironic way.

This came in comments he made about the “environmental racism” movement’s inability to rewrite unilaterally U.S. environmental law because, to be more specific, statute clearly doesn’t empower the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing environmental law using racial criteria. Referring to one of the more recent judicial articulations of that, Bryner said “In my view, that is a real weakness in the law, and courts should be doing more to fulfill both the letter and the intent of civil rights laws when it comes to environmental matters.”

In other words, forget the law and Constitution, the judiciary should serve as an activist agency in imposing a certain agenda, one of which holds an expansive view of the law into which an ideological agenda may be inserted. And to Bryner and his ilk who think this way, adherence to this view defines “expertise,” regardless that a rational, evidence-based reading of the law and Constitution states otherwise.

Whether making this kind of statement in class constitutes any legal or procedural violation I think is a hard row to hoe, but it’s a slam dunk that it’s boorish and unprofessional. Sadly, in both academia (as well as journalism) far too many of the younger crowd find this mode of operation acceptable – activism in word and deed as a sine qua non in practicing their professions – which particularly interferes with successfully inculcating the ability of students (or people generally) to think critically. In fact, rejection of presentation of all information with bias towards none by this influx of doctrinaires has become so pervasive that those fewer and fewer of us in teaching who present all theories, facts, and information and in the course of trying to develop a student’s critical thinking skills try to empower them to develop whatever conclusions they like from that have become conspicuous enough that we are rendered suspicious to those others become we don’t preach their party line in the classroom.

If that observation discourages the reader, and in the particular context of this incident makes one less likely to support public higher education in Louisiana, take heart from how the incident became public: clearly a student in the class recorded it with the intent of revealing the academic bankruptcy of the monologue. In doing so, no other approbation is necessary: it is enough that Bryner made himself look like a fool and amateurish to the wider public, and the incident sends out a warning to those like him that students fed up with instructors who propagate rather than inform and who create a model of didacticism rather than of free inquiry are to be shamed. May such students proliferate and prosper to keep us accountable, and may those deserving of the shame see this as a lesson to be avoided and apply that to their future class management.

That you have students in Louisiana higher education out there hungering for inclusivity and intellectual challenge should brighten your outlook on our state institutions, and certainly keeps someone like myself, almost 40 years in the trenches now, eager to keep going in assisting them.

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