WTW10: Law Professor BANNED from Campus for Exam Question
Part 1: Anatomy of a Bull Shit We begin a new series at last! UIC Law Prof Jason Kilborn was BANNED from campus due to the woke left not being able to handle seeing a redacted racial slur in an exam question. He was forced to undergo sensitivity trainings and write essays. At least... that's how Bill Maher and every anti-woke clone present this one. But is it true? Well, you'll have to wait for that answer, but in the meantime, we go through the origins of this wokelore. And we see how it spreads far and wide in an instant. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 10.
I'm Thomas Smith.
That over there is my official hot co-host.
It's Lydia Smith, my amazing wife.
How are you doing?
Is that how you want to start your?
No.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Am I out of here?
You're just doing the Heath.
Heath will be really happy that you did that.
Okay.
Well, good.
No, I'm so excited to be doing this series.
So I did a Patreon thing where I kind of talked about the process of the last major undertaking and certainly learning as we go here a little bit, because this is definitely a newer type of podcast for me, newer format.
If you are a patron, you heard me emphasize how many different ways it's impossible for me to record with another person when I do these.
But I love Lydia that much.
And so do you all!
So many requests to keep Lydia on.
It's very difficult with my extremely ADHD approach.
It's like if you watched an animated film and then you're like, yeah, just have Lydia on for that.
That's fine.
It's like, no, I'm sitting there drawing every frame of my thing.
Like she would just be sitting there while I'm drawing every single Animated frame of my show, but I've I'm gonna try to make it work because it's definitely worth it to have Lydia on and it You know probably makes me get my shit together more.
Although I just I don't know if I can but I'm gonna try I'm aspiring to do that and what better way to do that than with a story that is finally episode 10 Let's start the show.
Let's start where there's woke because this is- Back to basics.
What I had in mind when I thought of starting the show.
I've already covered many elements of what I've wanted to do on here.
You know, a lot of the themes were in the James Webb episodes.
A lot of the tactics of this anti-woke propaganda movement, I guess I would call it.
A lot of the tactics, I've covered a lot of them.
So it's not like I've been doing stuff that's entirely unrelated or something.
But this is like just the prototypical story that I had in mind.
And I've been wanting to get to it, wanting to get to it.
I had to first I had to pick one, because how do you pick just one?
There's so many.
And then why did I start with that one or that one?
And that was I was like, finally, fuck it.
No, no, don't got to stop doing battle with myself.
I picked a good one is perfect.
So spoiler, it's going to come from reliable source of information, Bill Maher.
Just the God's honest with Bill Maher.
He definitely just reports it as Walter Cronkite over there tells it like he sees it.
Yeah.
We're going to say a lot about Bill Maher later because if I start talking about all that, if we start talking about all that, I'll never get to the actual story.
It's already hard enough as it is to get to the actual story, let alone if I have to start talking about that fucking guy.
But just to tell the tiny version of the story, I saw this video floating around.
I don't know.
It could have been Facebook or Reddit or some shit.
You know, it's one of those things where it's just like, hey, you probably like this because both of our algorithms are completely ruined at this point.
It's so bad.
Yeah, and I even thought ahead.
I was like, you know, I'll make sure I do separate accounts for everything.
But like, you just forget.
You can't be perfect at that.
There's no way.
And so before long, now I have separate accounts, but they're all half and half.
So instead of like having done a good job of like, okay, this is my normal stuff.
Like my algorithm is not fucked.
Nothing's fucked.
Half ruined both of them.
So I go in the history.
I'm like, oh, shit, my YouTube history.
That's on the other account.
No.
So now they're both suggesting me.
And because the algorithms just bias toward this exact bullshit anyway, they're both just now they're both anti-woke.
So I'm fucked.
But anyway.
So I saw this Bill Maher thing, I watched it and without looking it up at all, I was like, oh, that sounds like complete bullshit.
I was like, I'll cover that at some point.
Lost track of it.
And then I didn't know how to find it.
That was the worst part.
I don't know when it was.
I don't know what the title of it is.
And so then I'm looking through fucking Bill Maher videos, which is the, God, I cannot recommend anything less than looking through Bill Maher videos.
I would rather, I think I would rather watch Ben Shapiro.
Yeah, it's that bad.
Like, I'm not saying... I don't know what I'm saying, actually.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure, because Bill Maher is more smug than Ben Shapiro.
That's how smug his fucking face is.
And he has the fake, like, I'm actually still on the left thing, which just... At least Ben Shapiro is like, no, I'm just fucking Nazi.
Hi, I'm a Nazi, Ben Shapiro, coming at you.
He's somehow a Jewish Nazi, which is weird, but he has Nazi-esque views.
It makes it worse when it's somebody doing that fake left routine.
And so it just absolutely hurt me to my core to try to find, on purpose, click on Bill Maher videos.
God, it was hell, but I did it for everybody.
Did it for you guys.
Hope you appreciate it.
And I eventually tracked it down.
It was one of those, like, I'm never going to find it.
I'm never going to find it.
I'll kill myself first because I can't handle watching this guy.
But then I found it.
And I was like, perfect.
So here we go.
I'm going to bring you this clip from Bill Maher.
And again, I'm going to just play select parts because if I play any more than the very select part I need to play, I can't go on because it's so dumb.
I have to yell at it for an hour.
So I won't do that.
But I will say just to tease this series, this story launched a thousand ships or whatever the fuck.
This story, I was going to debunk this one, obviously, but this came with not one bonus debunk, but two bonus debunks.
This led to just a chain reaction of debunks.
And so this series, by the time it's all said and done, folks, it's going to be three or four parts.
We will have debunked, not only the main story, but we've taken a real side quest stop.
That's not just a minor side quest, like a pretty significant side quest to do a major debunk.
And then like a bonus junior Big Mac debunk alongside that.
And it's a wild ride.
I can't wait to do it.
We've done a lot of work to try to figure out how to structure these things a little better.
And so I hope you like what we're going to do.
Really excited.
With that said, I'm going to... Okay.
Let's get into it.
Listen to this story.
There's a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago named Jason Kilbourne whose crime was that on one of his exams he used a hypothetical case where a black female worker sued her employer for race and gender discrimination Alleging that managers had called her two slur words, the type of real-world case these students might one day confront.
And knowing the extreme sensitivity of today's students, he didn't write the two taboo words on the test, just the first letter of each.
He was teaching his students how to fight racism in the place where it matters most, the criminal justice system.
But because he merely alluded to those words, again in the service of a good cause, he was banned from campus, placed on indefinite leave, and made to wear the dunce cap.
No, not really the dunce cap part, but our American version of that.
Eight weeks of sensitivity training.
Weekly 90-minute sessions with a diversity trainer.
And having to write five self-reflection papers.
A grown-ass man.
A liberal law professor.
If you can't see the similarities between that and this, the person who needs re-education is you.
Okay, so, as much as I'm gonna play my cards a little close to the vest or the chest, never know.
I'll never know which one it is.
Not me neither.
But I will say that obviously there's no fucking way that's exactly how it happened.
Like, the story as presented is he used N space and then B space in his exam and therefore was banned from campus.
Let's make sure we get the claim straight here.
They're gonna be important.
But because he merely alluded to those words, again in the service of a good cause, he was banned from campus, placed on indefinite leave, and made to wear the dunce cap.
No, not really the dunce cap part.
But our American version of that.
Eight weeks of sensitivity training.
Weekly 90-minute sessions with a diversity trainer.
And having to write five self-reflection papers.
A grown-ass man.
Yeah, so merely alluding to the words, eight weeks of study.
Banned from campus.
Indefinite leave.
Banned from campus!
Like, when I heard that, I'm like, okay, there's no fucking way.
There's absolutely no way.
The only way you would believe that story at face value is if your mind has been turned into jello like Bill Maher's has with all of these stories.
Like, hearing over and over the woke, left, campus, crazy.
Woke, left, campus, crazy.
Because me, because I live on this planet, of information, I hear he merely put N blank, B blank on a test, banned from campus.
There's absolutely no chance that that's what happened.
But in fairness, I don't know what happened.
So I wanted to look it up.
I want to go through this.
Also, minor note, but it just occurred to me, I just noticed on watch number 5,000, he said, in the place where it matters most, the criminal justice system It's actually not the criminal justice system.
It's employment law, so it's not, whatever.
But it's just funny.
Anyway, so I go to look it up.
And this is a major reason, I've mentioned it before, a major reason we need to do this show and all of you need to share it, please, as much as you can.
Because if you just Google this, What you'll find is every single source in the entire universe, in the metaverse, in the Googleverse, is all pro this guy, this professor, whose name is Jason Kilbourn.
That's the power of this anti-woke ecosystem.
You can just type in professor law question, and then it's already there.
It's that good of SEO.
It's not even like, oh, what are you talking?
Professor law question.
Anything close to that, it's like, yeah, no, we know exactly what you mean, because every single source published the same thing on this, because that's what they do.
And so obviously, Bill Maher's version can't be exactly correct.
But what's going on there?
So let's go through it.
You start the Google process.
You figure out who it is.
Jason Kilbourn, UIC.
So let's get the real story.
And we've got a lot of sources.
Naturally, I have 97 browser tabs.
The first thing I find in date order is UIC.
So that's the law school.
And at this time, by the way, Might be interesting to note.
It was called the John Marshall Law School.
Yeah.
Has been renamed.
You want to guess why, hun?
Any idea?
Cancel culture.
Is there anything that John Marshall might have been that would maybe make them want to rename their thing?
Any guesses?
Oh, a slave owner.
A slave owner, yeah.
Not just a slave owner, too.
At the time of this controversy, it was still named John Marshall Law School.
The time of the controversy, by the way, to let you all know, is December 30th, 2020, is like kind of around the time where the UIC Black Law Student Association complained.
The exam itself was like, I think, before Christmas, probably.
So that's what it was.
The name was changed Six months after that.
So at the time, it's still John Marshall.
And they had been doing an investigation for the name change for a while.
I think because, and this is another important context for the backdrop of all this, George Floyd was roughly the middle of the year.
That has happened pretty recently as our timeline is going.
And I think that is what kind of spurred the look into the new name.
But of course, they have to take 40 years to do it.
They got to meet about it, meet about it.
And the only reason I want to mention this, I think it's particularly funny that this controversy is like, yeah, of course it would be at a school that's named after a slaveholder, like obviously.
And that's not even, by the way, not even part of the controversy.
Like that was something I didn't even, I've been reading about this and reading about this and I stumble across like one of the people mentioned like, oh yeah, and obviously it's also named after John Marshall.
I was like, oh yeah, It's just the background racism that's everywhere in our entire country that was not even worthy of a mention in this story.
Like the thing is taking place at John Marshall Law School named after a slaveholder.
And I didn't find that until like 200 fucking clicks in.
So it's pretty funny.
What I love about this is they tried to make it like, oh, new information.
So they said, quote from their announcement, the vote comes after months of review by a task force that gathered input from students, faculty, staff and alumni, conducted research and proposed principles to guide the institution in evaluating a potential name change.
The task force report noted that despite Chief Justice Marshall's legacy of one of the nation's most significant U.S.
Supreme Court justices, the newly discovered research regarding his role as a slave trader, slave owner of hundreds of slaves, pro-slavery jurisprudence, and racist views render him a highly inappropriate namesake for the law school.
I'm sorry.
Pro-slavery jurisprudence?
Was that discovered in a chest?
It's jurisprudence.
In the name, that means it's in the fucking record, right?
And if he was such a prolific justice, then in reading decisions, in cases, that would have come forward, right?
I mean, you're entirely right.
That's not new information.
Unless the new research is like, oh, he actually was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Slaveholder or something, or the other way around.
Not only was he, back then, there was no Facebook.
You couldn't keep anybody straight.
He was Chief Justice John Marshall, but he also was Chief Schmosh-ish Schmosh Marshall that would come in and be like, oh yeah, hi, I'm here to argue in favor of slavery.
Unless you discovered a persona that he had, I'm pretty sure this isn't newly discovered.
This is just how it is.
So I love that.
Yeah, new research.
We actually didn't even know who he was before It was just, we thought the name sounded good.
Like John Marshall just sounds cool.
New research.
So that's funny.
Very minor part, but I just wanted to talk about it.
And so as I was reading through the story, I'm keeping an open mind.
I want to make sure we're a hundred percent accurate.
There is something to be said for the fact that I think part of the fallout could be that because he used N underscore underscore, you know, like kind of blank and B blank, blank, blank.
Because of that, everywhere where people talked about it, it actually kind of made you think he used the real words.
Because it's like, oh, he used the derogatory terms, ends by blank, B, blank, blank, on the test.
I will say, to make the best case for Professor Kilbourne here first, that I do think that was a part of the ingredient here.
Now, there's a lot to the story, but I do think some of the public complaints, like when people saw the story, I do think they thought he used the real words.
And then I think people, if I'm making the best case for him, maybe this is a big misunderstanding.
It got reported, They think he used those real words.
They get really mad.
And then humans being humans, they're not going to back down, you know, like when they find out like, oh, he used it.
Well, still, still, it's not good.
So like that would be like the best Jason Kilbourne version of the story.
That's a big misunderstanding.
You can definitely tell there's some people who thought he did use the real words and stuff.
So that's part of it.
So again, I want to keep his best version of the story in mind.
The first thing that I see is on Twitter, it's the Black Law Student Association.
They've written a letter.
There's some signatories.
This is just students, though.
This is just a group of students writing a letter, being upset about this.
Some of them seem to be under the mistaken impression that he said the actual words, but that's the complaint.
So at 1230, I see that Black Law Students Association tweet thing, and to put it mildly, this is a very small reach.
Nobody is seeing this.
This thing has no followers.
The next thing we see, the first coverage this gets, like actual media coverage I can find anywhere.
I've done numerous searches.
The first one I can find is January 13th.
Now, there is the bit you heard Fuckface McGee say about him getting banned from school campus instantly, blah, blah, blah.
That did kind of happen.
That happened on the 12th.
To the best I can tell, this is released on the 13th and it doesn't talk about that at all.
So I think maybe this was written kind of, you know, it's not like an instant, you know, this is an article someone took a minute to write.
I feel like this was written before that because it just very much doesn't mention that.
Just giving you the context, this article is written Without that piece of it.
And I want to read you some of this because it's pretty telling, it's pretty funny.
First off, it has a really good start, which I think is important to say.
So this is Catherine Rubino on AboveTheLaw.com.
I spend an unfortunate amount of time writing about law school professors' use of the n-word.
Oh my God.
And that's hyperlinked?
And I was like, oh my God, okay.
You click on a hyperlink and it's just, it's just AboveTheLaw with the tag n-word.
Oh my gosh.
So she's not making that up.
There's like an index of everything with n-word tied for above the law.
So I see a picture, the title, and then that one sentence description, and then the byline.
And most of these are Catherine Rubino, the same person.
But my dead husband's black, not an excuse to drop the n-word in court.
That's the headline.
Let's see another headline.
Judge being investigated over use of the n-word.
And then just the one sentence summary is, why can't people stop saying the n-word?
So she's not wrong.
She's telling the truth there.
Here's another one.
Law professors saying the N word is like a damn epidemic at Emory Law School.
That was the title.
And then the one again, the little one sentence summary.
How hard is it to not use a slur in class?
Judges out of a job after admitting to using the n-word in conversation with court employees.
Yikes.
And that wasn't the judge's only misconduct.
General counsel uses the n-word during a lecture.
Loses her job.
Can professors please stop already is the one sentence there.
Like she's being punished for this.
It does read like, I hope I'm trapped in a computer.
I'm only allowed to type stuff about professors using the n-word.
Yeah, it does read like that.
You're totally right.
Oh, here's another one.
I want to click on this one, but I won't get us too sidetracked.
Professor at top law school uses n-word and won't apologize for it.
And then the one-sentence summary updated with a response from the professor.
Oh, I'm not gonna click on it.
I'm not gonna click on it.
Okay, last one.
God, it really just keeps going and going.
Wow, okay.
Law professor suspended for using the n-word in class now says he was discriminated against for being white.
Okay.
The prof is fighting over the right to use the n-word without consequence.
Oh my god.
What a mess.
Check this out, hun.
And I can tell this is about the same person because it has the same picture.
Yeah.
In case you were worried the world is a good place or anything.
N-word using law professor gets to keep his job.
Oh, yeah, of course.
The sentence is, resolution isn't always satisfactory.
So Catherine Rubino, like I was a little suspicious, like, OK, this is very early for someone to be reporting on this story.
This is not a major issue.
You know, like this is just one student association.
They're causing a ruckus.
They got a change.org petition.
I think they've, maybe they've tried to talk to news outlets, like possibly they talked to channel two news, but I can't, I can't find any video dated.
It's at least not showing up in a Google, any kind of Google search for the dates.
So, so far I was wondering, okay, did Jason Kilbourn, you know, call Catherine Rubino and be like, Hey, you gotta, cause this reads like a bit of an advocacy piece.
I know, I was like, did they go to law school together?
Yeah, who knows?
Conspiracy theory.
I don't know.
Having read through all those, like, I actually believe her when she says this next part.
Anyway, so when above the law received word, don't know from who, but received word about UIC John Marshall law professor Jason Kilbourn's dark and vile verbiage in quotes on a civil procedure to exam.
And that question at issue contained a racial pejorative summarized as followed and blank and be blank.
I fired up my keyboard and got ready to go after the prof. But as I dug into the issue, it became clear there was a lot more going on.
So I almost believe her that because part of her is doing the like, I used to be an evolutionist until I saw Jesus.
Like I sometimes I'm skeptical of those like, oh, I was ready to get mad at him.
Believe you me.
But I kind of believe it, given that she writes 800 apparent stories about professors and judges using the n-word.
So maybe we'll take her at her word for now.
But this does read like an advocacy piece, so I'm a little suspicious.
But anyway, she writes about the petition.
It's a call to action.
And she says, when I initially read the petition, my impression was that the professor had used the full slur on the exam.
And I bet a lot of other people that read and potentially signed the petition By the way, even today, the petition, if you click on it, it's still at 430 of its 500 signatures.
Oh, wow.
And this is two and a half years later.
So again, put stuff in context how big of a fucking thing this even is.
They never even hit their goal of signatures.
But no matter, but the petition does not summarize the exam as it purports to do.
It provides the direct quote.
And by that, I mean the exam did not use the full N word or the B word for that matter, opting instead for the euphemism, which is The exact sort of adaptation and awareness of potentially traumatic racial issues that folks have historically asked for when professors claim the right to drop the full n-word just because it's an academic setting.
No one wants to be in a place where discussing the way racism shapes the legal system is off limits.
Turn on the news, and it's very clear that white supremacy is far from behind us and continues to impact the law.
Legal education needs to have these admittedly difficult discussions, but finding the right balance is essential.
And so, she does have a quote.
She clearly talked to Kilbourne, which is, again, a little suspicious that, like, he kind of called this in.
And he tells his sob story.
In fairness, at this stage, he was saying some good things.
He was saying, like, I didn't mean that.
I think this is a misunderstanding.
I never was trying to blah, blah, blah.
And at this stage, this is where I'm thinking, like, oh, yeah, OK, maybe this is kind of a misunderstanding.
At this point, I haven't heard anything about being banned from campus or any of that stuff.
But like, At this point I'm wondering, is this a case of people legitimately thinking he used the real word, being angry about it, and then not wanting to kind of back down when they find out he didn't?
You know?
Because I could totally see that dynamic being part of it.
So, she didn't talk to anyone from BLSA.
She did link their statement, the one I already talked about that was on Twitter, but she didn't talk to them.
But she does say this.
Here's an interesting one.
Unlike other professors who have been confronted with inappropriate language, Kilbourn did not trot out the academic freedom trope or insist he knew what's best for students or sue the law school.
Ah, pin in all those, by the way.
way, for reverse discrimination.
All actual reactions from professors.
He seems genuinely distressed about the entire affair and has apologized for using the abbreviated form of the word on the test, something else law professors aren't known for.
Kilbourne told Above the Law, to illustrate the privilege and the asymmetry of these things often, we've got a black law student association that has like two fucking followers posted And then he gets to get a full puff piece and above the law and be interviewed and quoted at length, you know, and get his side of the story out there.
I think that's a key component of all this.
It's a theme I come back to often, but he gives a good statement.
I'm fully prepared to accept the responsibility.
For using a context and first letter abbreviated reference that caused anyone to feel distressed.
I did not, do not want this.
I've expressed regret for it.
I've learned something valuable here.
Point is, when you first read this, it's like, okay, yeah, maybe not so bad.
They also get a statement from the law school.
Again, they have not quoted anyone specifically from the class or from the student association.
Maybe they couldn't get to them, but usually they'll say that, like no one agreed.
Yeah.
They didn't say that.
She says here's what the school said.
The law school recognizes the impact of the issue.
Before winter break, Dean Dickerson apologized to the students who expressed hurt and distress over the examination question.
The law school acknowledges that the racial and gender references on the exam were deeply offensive.
Faculty should avoid language that could cause hurt and distress to students.
Those with tenure and academic freedom should always remember their position of power in our system of legal education.
The law school is working with UIC's Office for Access and Equity to conduct a thorough review of this matter, and Dean Dickerson and other law school and university leaders have scheduled a meeting with student leaders.
We remain committed to ensuring that all our students have a safe and supportive environment, and that all members of the law school community live up to our shared values.
Catherine Rubino concludes the article by saying it seems like an honest and open, I think she means and, and open conversation is exactly what's needed.
Whether you think Kilborn should have included that particular detail in the exam is a fair question, but at least he tried to be aware of the sensitive nature of the topic and seems committed to doing better.
So case closed?
We done?
I mean, clearly this isn't the end because we heard Bill Maher talk about what happened or whatever.
But I mean, from everything we know, it's like, all right, there's definitely some tension, but it seems like he was pretty apologetic and, you know, that should kind of blow over, right?
So the reason that wasn't it is actually the day before that article.
But again, I think that article just was published as is.
Otherwise they definitely would have mentioned this.
Jason Kilbourne was banned from campus.
And he was told indefinitely don't come to campus, suspended with pay, obviously, as a matter of campus safety.
When that happened, I believe that Kilbourn probably lost his fucking mind and did a campaign of contact everyone in the world.
Because once again, he is a privileged white guy with connections in the legal profession and all this stuff.
And so that's when you see a real blitz of articles.
They're all from the perspective that everything that's happened to him is because of this exam question.
And that takes it down the path of how can these crazy fucking kids cancel this guy because of the exam question?
How can they do it?
Now we got Reason, the Volokh conspiracy or whatever.
Eugene Volokh.
And I want to I want to read this Volokh one.
So this is January 15th.
So on the 15th, you see a slew of articles where clearly he's contacted people, you know, two on the 15th, one on the 19th.
I don't even know if I've gotten all of them, but you've got.
Yeah.
Fire is involved on the 19th of mere days later.
We'll talk about fire.
Oh, we will talk about thefire.org.
I got to read this Volokh conspiracy one because this is just so fucking typical.
This is so illustrative of what happens, the anti-woke panic.
Volokh describes a bunch of the stuff and blah, blah, blah.
And then, then he says, this makes me wonder.
And I imagine it makes other faculty members wonder.
The Dean's statement that faculty should avoid language that could cause hurt and distress to students by its term isn't limited to exams.
Is it an echo of the students' general demand, but not limited to exams, that the school must implement an unambiguous policy with guidelines prohibiting offensive and culturally insensitive language in the classroom by professors?
Will there likewise be thorough review by the Office of Academic Equity whenever it's alleged that a professor's hypotheticals are, quote, offensive and culturally insensitive, in the petition's words?
Or, quote, could cause hurt and distress, even with expurgation, to students, or perhaps just some group of students?
If, quote, the racial and gender references on the examination were deeply offensive, unquote, it seems likely that they would be offensive off the examination, too.
And if this slope is a little slippery, I bet it's a bunch slippery, too, is basically what's happening here.
What exactly will the rule be when teachers want to talk about racial or sexual harassment or other mistreatment of people based on race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, and the like?
Have we reached a point That one can't even quote epithets in expurgated form?
Or is it that all discussion of deeply offensive conduct by defendants is itself deeply offensive, regardless of the words or letters or underlines that one uses?
The Volokh Conspiracy, by the way, this is on Reason.com, and it says, mostly law professors, sometimes contrarian, often libertarian, always independent.
So you see where they're coming from.
Yeah, pretty soon you won't even be able to mention race at all.
Just that slippery slope to like, you can't do anything.
So it's very quickly panicking that way.
Then we get Andrew Koppelman for TheChronicle.com.
So this one develops the facts a little further.
January 19th, four days later after that last article.
We're seeing the epicenter of this phenomenon, where eventually this spreads to where this is the whole internet.
If you search this topic, of course, is just all of these assholes, like quoting each other, linking each other, creating this entire ecosystem of anti-woke takes on it.
And so it's interesting.
I thought a fun part of this is kind of seeing that process.
So we're on the 19th and here's, here's some of the critical parts of this one.
Andrew Koppelman is a professor at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law.
It does feel like, circling the wagons, white dude, probably law professors are either because he called them or not, or because they're just worried about they'll be next.
Yeah.
You know, they're circling the wagons.
Every one of them who has a bullshit blog or writes for papers basically starts writing all these takes.
Here's a relevant section, maybe.
This is the sort of overreaction that calls for firmness on the part of the administration.
John Marshall Law School, which was founded in 1899 and recently merged with UIC, is the only public law school in Chicago.
If lawyers are going to be competent to do their jobs, they must be able to cope with the fact that humans sometimes do and say very bad things.
Discrimination is among those bad things.
Students must thus be able to see the facts of discrimination lawsuits and be able to perform legal analysis in the face of those facts.
In the real world, racist slurs are not bowdlerized, which I guess is just a synonym for expurgated, which is whatever.
Not bowdlerized as they were on Kilbourne's exam.
He did nothing inappropriate.
A sensible and responsible administration would have told the students that.
Here's what it did instead, according to Kilbourne, and this is a quote.
In a two-minute Zoom meeting at 8.30am Tuesday, my dean placed me on indefinite administrative leave and all my classes were cancelled, hours before one was set to meet for the first time with 70 students curtly told to find another course, I'm told.
My committee memberships were cancelled, including university promotion and tenure, to which I was unanimously elected by my faculty peers, and I'm barred from campus and from all faculty communications.
Killborn was given no explanation for these sanctions.
This is very misleading.
Although the law school told Above the Law that it acknowledges that the racial and gender references on the examination were deeply offensive.
Faculty should avoid language that could cause hurt and distress to students.
So notice what happened there.
So I told you that Above the Law article does not reference this being banned from campus thing at all.
And now what this asshole has done, has written about the banning, And said, oh, he was an indefinite leave, classes were canceled, I'm barred from campus.
And then paired that with the quote from the article that was essentially written before that happened.
Yeah.
I'll read that again.
The law school told above the law that it acknowledges that the racial and gender references on the examination were deeply offensive.
Faculty should avoid language that could cause hurt and distress to students, unquote.
So that strongly would lead you to the impression that that quote was like in response.
By putting those one right after the other, A not careful reader or not insane person like me who's had to open 47 million tabs and read every single thing about this, definitely a casual reader would think, okay, so they barred him from campus, canceled his classes, and then the statement they said about it was, You should avoid language that causes hurt and distress, right?
You absolutely would think that if you didn't know anything about this.
But then Koppelman goes on.
But Kilborn did avoid the language that could cause hurt and distress to students.
He censored the words.
He did conceitedly allude to the words in a way that made it easy to know what they were.
But if that is deeply offensive, punishable behavior, how is it ever permissible for a professor down here?
Let's all get on our slippery slopes, everybody.
Start your engines.
Start your ice skates.
How is it ever permissible for a professor to take note of the fact that racial slurs exist?
How is one to teach a course in anti-discrimination law?
What's funny then is that this article now kind of spills the beans on what really happened on the being barred from campus.
And it starts with, then a twist!
When I asked Dean Darby Dickerson, okay, that's great.
That's fantastic.
If I were a dean, I would want to be Dean Darby Dickerson.
Yeah.
For comment, she wrote, the university will be issuing a response.
You may want to check with Professor Kilbourne tomorrow afternoon near your deadline.
And he says, evidently, she thought that the forthcoming clarification would put the law school in a better light.
It doesn't.
The next day, Kilbourne reported this.
While the battle over the exam language continues, it turns out I was actively misled into believing my susp...
Sorry.
Into believing my suspension was related to that language.
Oh, there's the- Hey, everybody!
There it is.
The suspension, surprise, surprise, was not related to the fucking exam question.
Obviously, the thing I knew the millisecond I watched that fucking Bill Maher video before I knew anything about any of this, that obviously he was not barred from campus for doing that on an exam.
Any person, again, whose mind isn't fucking jello would know that.
I love that he has to put in, well, the re- This is his quote, by the way, quoting Kilbourne, who, again, you can tell these reporters, these people, or I say reporters, these other fucking professors with publications they write for, he's in their ears.
He's on the phone with them.
This is an asymmetrical thing.
He's got all the privilege in the world.
And it's so funny because obviously it wasn't about that exam, but he says, turns out I was actively misled into believing my suspension was related to that language.
What would be the motivation for, quote, actively misleading him to thinking the suspension was related to that language?
Do you really?
Is it possible that, I don't know, Kilbourn just fucking overreacted and assumed?
That seems way more likely to me.
I'm gonna let Kilbourn tell it in his own words rather than you hear me reading forever, because he actually did an interview.
There's so much I want to play from it, but I'll stick to bits and pieces for the time being, otherwise I'll just start yelling.
But the article goes on to say, Kilbourn says the Dean placed him on administrative leave but refused to reveal the reason why.
I can't believe how long I've already gone on because we've barely scratched the surface of all the advocacy pieces because one of the most frustrating people in the entire earth, John McWhorter, wrote one on January 27th called Black Fragility?
on John McWhorter.
Fucking John McWhorter.
He's the worst.
The neo-racism and the suspension of a law professor for nothing whatsoever at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Law professor Jason Kilbourne cited the N-word and the B-word on an exam thusly.
And B, it wasn't a question about an employment discrimination case.
He has done so for years previously to no comment, as all reading this but a sliver would suspect.
What is that?
Whatever.
He's a linguistics guy, so I think I feel like he has to play that character or something It's just a fucking weird way to write it and there's a bunch of that's the whole blog is that he goes on and on and we are and then we get to this we've Modern anti-racism is neither a philosophy nor a political program.
It is a religious creed complete with priests Original sin, heresy, blah, blah, same fucking boring take, evangelism and millennialism?
I don't know what that's... It hasn't quite gotten to forgiveness yet.
Jason Kilbourne is not being disciplined.
He's being stoned.
This is a quote.
This is real quotes.
His accusers and sanctioners are modern equivalents of the prelates, which is a word I had to look up.
I don't pretend to be smarter than I am.
That's just another word for like a fucking bishop or whatever.
Somebody, some religious-y thing.
The prelates who condemned Galileo to home arrest!
Yes, that's the equivalent.
Not using a racial slur on an exam is the same as Galileo, is where we've gotten to.
This is so long and over-fucking-written.
Not much else from there.
That caused Jerry Coyne, fucking evolutionist true guy, who's... God, he's been a persistent piece of shit forever on this.
He does a write-up of that.
I'm not gonna go through these.
We get more from FIRE again, because they're writing letters to the university.
Jonathan Turley writes an article about it on JonathanTurley.org.
The college fix!
Now we're getting into February, by the way, so we're about a month out.
So many advocacy pieces.
It is important to note that this entire controversy began with an exam question on an employment discrimination case that censored terms to avoid discomfort or insult.
As academics and particularly law professors, we have to address difficult and discomforting issues in our society.
Our students have to be prepared to work in a world that is filled with such offensive terms Instead, the university and the law school showed little concern for the impact on these actions.
On not just Professor Kilbourne, but other professors.
Few would want to risk such public humiliation and suspension.
The result is they are likely to simply sanitize exam questions.
Imagine, exam questions without racial slurs.
What will happen now?
The world will crumble.
Sorry, that was me adding.
The result is they are likely to, back to the quote, simply sanitize exam questions to avoid anything that might trip a wire or cause a complaint.
The loss is not just felt in eroding academic freedom values, but in abridging academic training for our students.
They get more and more dramatic until we get, this is not the end, but maybe this'll, I'll have to let it suffice, till we get to the New York Times.
New York Times op-ed, Bret Stephens.
Of course, yeah.
Now it is just an opinion piece, so it hasn't, you know, it didn't make it, I don't think, to Michael Powell that we know of.
We'll see.
Yeah.
This is, now we're still in February.
Now we get, he's writing a piece that's just like, in general, fucking fuck the woke people, and this is one of the references he does.
This is so good.
So, his is short.
We can read quite a bit of it because, again, it's part of two or three stories he did.
No, he didn't use the slurs themselves.
He just wrote the first letter followed by a line.
administrative leave, barred from campus and kicked off his committee assignments after students protested that he included N and B as part of his semester exam on civil procedure.
No, he didn't use the slurs themselves.
He just wrote the first letter followed by a line.
It still didn't spare him.
They're so fucking dramatic.
They're more dramatic than Phoebe.
Like, this is just crazy.
Oh, I know.
By a ton.
Quote, the visual of the N-word on Professor Kilbourn's exam was mental terrorism, claimed a petition from the Black Law Students Association.
Whatever happens to Kilbourn, every professor in America has now been put on notice.
How many professors do you think need to write a question that has the N word in it?
Is that like 80% or is it like 0%?
Anyway, whatever happens to GoPoint, every professor in America has now been put on notice.
In the game of woke, the goalposts can be moved at any moment.
The penalties will apply retroactively and claims of fairness will always lose out to the perpetual right to claim offense.
Wow.
Oh boy.
In May, UIC removed the John Marshall name, like I referenced.
And by August 31st, FIRE.org has a new defense fund for college professors.
So the headline is, FIRE'S NEW DEFENSE FUND IS HERE TO SAVE COLLEGE FACULTY JOBS AND WE JUST CLOSED OUR FIRST CASE.
WITH FACULTY RIGHTS INCREASINGLY UNDER THREAT, PROFESSORS NEED EFFECTIVE EXPERIENCE LEGAL ADVOCATES TO COME TO THEIR DEFENSE.
It's this hilarious picture of Killborn standing heroically in front of UIC.
I just, I love this pose.
It's fantastic.
And it tells the story.
And so now, now this is August 31st, an entire fucking organization has promised money to him to sue the school.
Like this is, this is the amount of privilege this guy has over and above the black students.
Spoiler!
His legal case is actually ongoing.
So I did a double take when it said we just closed our first case.
And it's because they thought they like bullied the school or something by threatening a lawsuit and they came to an agreement.
At this point, he thought it was basically settled.
Because he's quoted toward the bottom as saying, the resolution in my case was like most good compromises.
It pleased no one, so it must have been the right one, he said.
The average person doesn't enjoy fighting.
If I enjoyed fighting, I would have remained a lawyer.
I was tired of it, emotionally tired of it.
I'm grateful for FIRE's backing, both moral and financial, without which I don't know how I would have made it through the hell of these last six months.
Oh, wow.
Kilbourne lamented that he didn't get his day in court to fully vindicate his rights, but he wanted to get back to the classroom and move on to training the next generation of lawyers.
The fund puts faculty in the driver's seat.
If they and their counsel find a settlement that works, they never even have to go to court.
What FIRE and the Legal Defense Fund gave me is the ability and the credibility to go to the administration and defend my rights, he said.
I had a lawyer standing beside me, ready to act, even if we decided to take no action.
And that means a lot.
Hey, guess who's on the advisory council for fire?
Who's that?
John McWhorter.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
What do you know?
Also, David Latt, who founded Above the Law.
Really?
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
It's all, they're all fucking, it's all one goddamn group of like five white people and I guess John McWhorter.
Well, David Latt's Asian, but yeah.
So in May 2021, the investigation concludes.
They do a report.
July 2nd, they have a resolution letter.
And so that must be why they had that August 31st fire piece where they quote unquote closed their first case.
But they're still complaining about it.
And there's still just a series of articles written.
Because now it's like, oh, they got the investigation report FOIA'd, and so they read that, and now they think there's more stuff in that to, again, cause another round of...
Like, they just can't let it die.
The issue could have been over forever ago, but they're still doing it, still doing it...
Then the sort of arrangement they came to falls through and that's when Professor Kilbourne starts his lawsuit.
You can tell by the wording of that article that he wanted to do anyway, it seems like.
But that's where we get this interview with Campus Reform.
I wish I could just play this whole thing.
It's magical.
I think we can at least hear Professor Kilbourne tell his story to be fair.
This is his story over a year later, and we know how human memory is.
So this is kind of his hardened version of his facts over a year later.
It was about three days before Christmas in 2020.
My dean sent me this message.
I vaguely recall it was fairly early in the morning, and she said something to the effect of, you know, the vice dean and I need to talk to you about some concerns related to your classes this past fall.
And I'm thinking to myself, oh my God, concerns about my classes.
What in the world could this be about?
I was quite nervous, as you can imagine, but I responded right away, yes, yes, let's jump on a Zoom call, you know, whatever, whatever we need.
So several days later, maybe it was the next day, but it was either a day or two after that, we get in this Zoom call and she reveals to me, she says, you know, a number of people or something defective, it's been suggested that you used a racial slur on your exam.
I mean, let that sink in, because this is important, it seems to me.
You used a racial slur on your exam.
I mean, so my immediate reaction, of course, is to point out, I did not use a racial slur on my exam.
And I don't think that that's being a cheeky law professor to make that observation.
Any reasonable person, when confronted with, you used a racial slur, has in mind my screaming at a student who belongs to that racial group an epithet.
That's clearly not what happened here.
Not only that, the entire word wasn't spelled out because I wasn't born under a rock.
I understand full well the very deep and very painful and horrific history of that word, which is why, of course, I put it on my exam, right?
I wanted explosive evidence.
That was in the employer's possession that the employer desperately wanted to keep from the other side.
And so I wanted to really push my students to to resist their natural inclination to tell the client what the client wants to hear.
Oh yeah, we can bury that evidence.
You know, we don't have to reveal it.
The fact of the matter is the question was designed to say to get the student to go.
Look, I have to turn this over.
The United States legal system is, you know, immensely powerful, uniquely powerful in the world.
In forcing people like employer to turn over explosive evidence like this.
And so I explained this a bit and I said, look, I didn't use a racial slur on the exam at all, Dean.
What I had written was N space and then B space for, you know, this gender slur, which, you know, you can say on TV, even according to the FCC.
And so she says, okay, well, like any rational person, oh, she says, I thought that, you know, you would use the entire word.
What should we do about this?
And I'm like, listen, spontaneously, I say to her, look, I don't want to just be gratuitously challenging to people.
I'm not, you know, I understand how stressful an exam is.
I understand how stressful it has been over this past sort of COVID year for folks to be dealing with this, the racial reckoning that we've been dealing with on TV, et cetera.
So listen, Let me send a message to the class and say, you know, hey, if my indirect reference to these slurs, you know, made anybody feel, you know, bad, I regret that.
And if you want to talk to me about that or to anybody else at the school, you know, dean, the vice dean, we have a dean for students, you know, then by all means, you know, please reach out.
We're here to support you.
So how does he come across to you on that?
Very reasoned, calm, has like a really good story.
I'm glad you said that.
I wasn't, I was just checking in.
I wasn't sure because yeah, at this point I am kind of thinking like, man, yeah, is this, did this guy just kind of get screwed over by people thinking he used the actual word?
Mind you, this is over a year later, but he does speak as though he's very sensitive to what happened.
He apologized, willing to talk.
So what went wrong here?
Now, up until now, I don't know how good of a job I've done, but, but I've, I've tried to present like him in his best light, roughly.
That was four minutes in, 24 minute interview.
That was the high point for him, for his credibility.
Unfortunately, though, this is going to be a teaser.
I'm not going to go through all that now.
We've got something fun planned, which is among the many, the litany of things that then sort of reduced this guy's credibility in my mind before I then fully researched the story and knew everything.
He decided to reference some other stories.
I thought we'd check that out real quick.
Other examples that are out there.
My favorite one is there's a professor at Yale who has something to do with medical something or like maybe it's psychology or something, but she was doing a field study.
And I can't exactly recall what the subject of her study was, but she made a comment at some point in a paper about this study in which she expressed surprise that residents of rural Ohio might have a taste for artisanal coffee.
She wouldn't have expected that.
Before very long, there was an enormous firestorm from these crazy extreme leftist Yale students who characterized that comment of hers about rural Ohioans as being, quote, dehumanizing.
It was dehumanizing for her to suggest that these rural Ohioans probably wouldn't have a taste for artisanal coffee.
And you just have to read it two or three times to go, am I getting this right?
I mean, you can't believe that this is how normal people, well-educated people, at the absolute flagship of the higher education industry in the United States, Yale University, they're behaving this way.
Yeah, you're correct, Bill Killborn.
I would not believe that because there's obviously, once again, there's no fucking way that someone said a thing about coffee and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this reaction and they were murdered or whatever.
And so we're going to do something a little fun, which is I'm going to leave people in suspense.
We're not going to get the full Killborn debunk because we've got to stop along the way.
We've got to do a side quest.
Sorry, everybody.
There is a Yale professor who's surprised that rural Ohioans might drink artisanal coffee with a question mark over her head, and we've got to follow that side quest.
Lydia's watched me play almost enough video games to maybe understand what I'm saying.
Yeah.
I got to kill that notification.
I got to do that side quest first.
What this also allows me to do is allow Lydia to have a turn so we don't have to listen to me anymore.
So I will give you a little maybe slight teaser.
Only slight, hun.
I want to ask you this question.
What class do you think he was teaching and what is the area of law that that question was related to?
It was CivPro, right?
That's right.
CivPro class, and it was regarding employment discrimination?
So, kind of.
Okay.
Obviously, you're my beautiful, amazing, talented wife, smarter than everybody listening, so I bet you there's a lot of people who would have assumed he was teaching an employment law class.
But Civ Pro, for those, the uninitiated, is just civil procedure.
It's just another word, fucking phrase, lawyer phrase for like, it's just kind of the rules of stuff, you know, like how stuff goes.
It's almost like kind of meta law in a way, you know, it's like rules of evidence.
Stuff like that.
I'm not, you know, an expert.
But like, the point is, for all of the framings, you heard me read all of the framings that were like, he's teaching about employment law and you have to be able to hear that there are these things.
You're going, remember Bill Maher?
Actually, just for fun, let me let me flash back to that quote real quick.
He was teaching his students how to fight racism in the place where it matters most, the criminal justice system. - Conflated everything there, yeah. - He was teaching, this is again, I'm just giving a little teaser for the debunk just to whet the appetite.
I bet you because of Bill Maher and a lot of the other people and just the human mind, you would have thought that.
Oh yeah, he was teaching about employment law.
He was truly a hero as Bill Maher is saying.
He was teaching them how to fight the racism in the criminal justice system.
This is a question about attorney work product and whether or not you have to turn it over.
Oh, yeah.
That's all the question is about.
It's fair to use employment law.
You're going to use other cases, obviously, like you're going to use real life cases.
And I wanted to give him his say.
To hear like, yeah, he wanted something that's explosive that you're going to feel like you shouldn't have to turn over as the lawyer or whatever, but you actually do.
You're compelled to.
Okay.
But to pretend that this is some noble thing that you have to do this exact, it could be fucking anything.
It could have been, for one, you could have just, Kept things kind of neutral and had a quote that's like, I hate people like their kind, like, you know, just keep don't even use any specific.
So that's my little teaser.
That's just a mild component.
This is a fucking civil procedure class.
And the question is about attorney work product and whether or not you have to turn that over.
Yeah.
So you can use any case you want.
And so pretending that he is actually, he's a fucking hero.
Bill Maher took it to an extreme.
He is, first of all, he's literally Martin Luther King Jr.
And he is leading a rally.
He's leading a million man march to the criminal justice system of civil law.
And he is helping them fight.
It's like, no, dude, it's civil procedure.
And it's an attorney work product question.
So that's my, just a little glimpse of some of the debunking we'll be doing.
But that's in part three.
In part two, Lydia's gonna bring us the debunk over the fucking rural Ohio coffee.
Yeah.
And I can't wait for that.
So you better tune in for that.
It'll be early for patrons, patreon.com slash where there's woke.
That'll be a fun little side quest.
We're gonna hope no major characters die.
You know, maybe a smaller character might die in the side quest, but nobody important.
Obviously Lydia and I will be fine.
But our sidekick, no, we don't have a name.
That'll be a lot of fun.
That is a great debunk.
And if we have time, there's a bonus debunk that I will not even tease in case we don't have time, but there may be two debunks for the price of one in that episode.
