Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Using a rural-ish metaphor to put down (some) Yale Law students

Irin Carmon wrote a big feature published in New York Magazine this week under the headline, "The Tiger Mom and the Hornet’s Nest."  The subhead is, "For two decades, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld were Yale Law power brokers. A new generation wants to see them exiled."  The story is about the two law professors, married to each other,  who've been "in trouble" with the institution for the last few years.  Rubenfeld is on forced leave, and Chua has been under investigation for holding gatherings at her home--gatherings that violate the university's COVID-related rules. Here's an excerpt with some back story.
[T]he Yale Daily News reported [in April] that Chua would no longer be teaching a small group. Students had gone to the administration with, among other items, screen-grabbed text messages between students with secondhand accounts of socializing at Chua’s house, which were then circulated over email and subsequently republished on the Above the Law blog. Such gatherings also violated COVID-19 safety protocols.

Chua has said she was blindsided by the story and denied violating any agreement, or hosting parties, though she does admit to inviting students into her home for mentorship. “I was publicly humiliated with a total falsehood,” she tells me, “and I was treated degradingly.”
And here's the "rural" part--well, rural in the sense that it uses a rural-ish metaphor (the county fair) to put down less talented students (well, those less talented according to the quoted professor, who is not identified).  The quoted professor represents one who is siding with Chua and suggesting that students who have complained about her are doing so because they are less talented than students loyal to Chua. 
Three other professors told me that Chua is the victim of overzealous zoomers who have confused the natural hierarchy of achievement — and Chua’s right to favor whomever she wants — with a social-justice outrage. “There are a lot of mediocre students at Yale who were superstars in their little county fairs, and now they’re in the Kentucky Derby and they’re not winning their races and they feel like it’s unfair because other students are doing better,” says one faculty member who thinks the dean, Heather Gerken, was too deferential to students in how she handled the small-group affair. “As Dean, I have a responsibility to create a community in which all of our students can thrive,” Gerken said through a spokesperson. “When a faculty member violates our rules and norms, it undermines all the good that comes from an environment where faculty respect and support our students.”

A New York Times story about the controversy is here.   As far as I can tell, it features no rural allusions.  

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