Well, I suppose my career as a writer is picking up. I have received my first angry response to something I wrote. The letter to the editor I sent to the Harvard Law School Record (school paper) last week was published, and right beneath it was another "letter to the editor" written by a staff member of the paper, responding to my letter (as a staff member, he could read my piece and respond to it before it was published). In fact, it's the same guy who wrote the article that inspired me to write in the first place. So I guess we're having a dialogue.

If only it were an intelligent dialogue. Since that was the last issue of The Record for the year, and since I wouldn't want to continue this debate in public anyway, here is my brief response to Jon Lamberson's response to my response to Jon Lamberson's article. (Got it?) For full context, you should probably read another related piece that was published on the same page (to the left of Lamberson's piece), anonymously presented as the official editorial of The Record. I like to think my letter inspired the Record editorial, and Lamberson got in a tizzy at the editorial meeting about it, and went off and wrote his own letter. [Update: I just got an email from the guy who wrote the Record editorial, informing me that he had the idea before I submitted my letter, and it was approved without a meeting. Oh well. I can still pretend, can't I?]

First of all, I didn't say that one kind of diversity is "better" than all other kinds. I said it was more relevant to law school education. I didn't say gender and race diversity were worthless. Lamberson cites a couple of good examples where various gender and race views would be educational. But those are only a few isolated instances. You only talk about rape in crim law class for a day or two of the three years you're in law school. Professors' ideology affects what they have to say every single day. It's far more ubiquitous and therefore relevant to the quality of educational experience.

I'll admit that Lamberson has a good point that a conservative who opposes affirmative action calling for more conservative professors is a hypocrite. I didn't exactly call for affirmative action, but I guess it's true that I want the Dean to look at a little more than bare qualifications to teach when hiring new professors. Maybe what I should be calling for is for more conservatives (um... me?) to become elite legal academics, qualified to teach at elite law schools. Dean Kagan seems to indicate that conservatives are rare everywhere, perhaps because they are rare in the applicant pool.

But I'm not even going to touch the bulk of Lamberson's response, except to say that I think it sure makes me look good. I am proud to have inspired such vitriol. Suffice to say one liberal person I know got mad at me because I made Lamberson make liberals look so bad. Hee hee. It makes me want to carry on.