There’s a debate in my home state about this bill, which apparently tracks very closely a model you could read here, if you were a member. The bill stands no chance of passage this legislative session (which ends in about a week), but it ought to focus the minds of my colleagues in public institutions.

I’d rather there not be legislation, but, if there has to be, then this seems to be a good way to go, focusing on information and exhortation, and requiring that university authorities find some way of accounting for openness to multiple points of view in classrooms and programs.

MOJ’s Rob Vischer calls attention to this piece on Regent University’s law school and reflects on what those involved in Christian legal education can learn from the case of Regent Law alumna Monica Goodling.

Rob’s suggestion is to think about Christian lawyers as prophets, calling corrupt human institutions to a concern with justice. Does this mean that Christian lawyers (or perhaps Christians simply) ought always and everywhere to be in an adversarial relationship with the powers that be? Should they never be "judges" or "kings," but only prophets? I mean that question somewhat seriously. A judge or a king has a responsibility for the less than savory work of administering a fallen human order; prophets don’t. Do we want to train lawyers who are "too good" for the normal workings of a secular state, who are so pure in their pursuit of justice that they’re perhaps impatient with the rule of (imperfect human) law?

I’d like to think that I have my prophetic moments, but they occur mostly at the seminar table or at the keyboard. I hope my students and readers squirm at least occasionally. But I’m neither making law nor administering (or participating in) a flawed (albeit somewhat meliorable) legal system.

Rob is right to point out that it’s tempting to be overconfident in your ability to "do good" by your lights and get sucked into the tawdry politics of Washington, D.C. (or Richmond or Atlanta or Albany or Sacramento or Springfield). As a Regent Law student tells his classmates, "Sin is so appealing because it’s easy and because it’s fun." We can’t help but be tempted, whether we’re working for the man or righteously (self-righteously?) bearing (true or false?) prophetic witness.

NBC news anchor Brian Williams make an ass of himself. Dean Barnett has the details.

This Inside Higher Ed article summarizes a study about the effects of racial and opinion diversity on people’s opinions about access to college. The "newsworthy" finding is that racial and ethnic diversity in a discussion group are more likely to lead to changes in opinions than is opinion diversity (which may not be manifested if the "outliers" don’t speak up). The study’s authors and the IHE reporter want the big takeaway to be that racial and ethnic diversity matter in education, and that, by itself, "mere" diversity of opinion doesn’t have the same sort of effect as the former sort of diversity. If you want to change people, change the complexion of those with whom they interact.

Well, I dunno. A one-time discussion isn’t a very good proxy for a classroom relationship that extends over a semester or a campus community that goes longer than that. People who are initially silent may gain the confidence to speak up over time.

Unless, perhaps, their opinions are clearly and consistently disfavored by the dominant (student, professorial, or administrative) voices. I’d be interested in a study of what it takes to get the silent to speak up.

Update: On reflection, there are all sorts of other things wrong with this study, at least as it’s reported. First, let’s raise the question of whether changing people’s opinions is, absent everything else, a good thing. If the opinions are bad, sure, but if not, why? Second, why not be open to the possibility that the result of exposure to "diversity," however understood, might be to confirm opinions? Openness to evidence and argument may produce confirmation rather than change. Third, the bare argument for intellectual diversity is almost (but not quite) as reductionist as the argument for racial and ethnic diversity. Proponents of the former who go no further assume a kind of intellectual and moral equivalence among arguments, leaving it to the "marketplace of ideas" to sort out quality. But absent considerations of quality, a diversity of arguments can’t be expected to produce anything good, especially if the folks who are supposed to sort them out aren’t all young Socrateses.

Acton’s Jordan Ballor calls attention to this study by Steve Hayward’s colleagues at the Pacific Research Institute. I may have more to say, once I’ve chewed over the study, which estimates a "total annual accounting cost" of over $865 billion thanks to our system of torts. Lest you think that the authors believe that we should kill all trial lawyers, consider this from the executive summary:

Not all tort costs are “excessive” or “wasteful.” Some tort costs are necessary as part of a thriving free-enterprise economy operating under the rule of law. To determine the percentage of U.S. tort costs that are excessive, we compared the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) that is consumed by the tort system in the United States to the percentage of GDP consumed by tort systems in other industrialized countries.

The United States spends 2.2 percent of GDP on direct tort costs. Other advanced countries spend an average of 0.9 percent of GDP on direct tort costs. The difference of 1.3 percentage points is the best estimate of the excessive costs of the U.S. tort system; it measures how much more expensive the U.S. tort system is relative to the tort systems in comparable countries. This comparative international approach yields the result that 59 percent of U.S. direct tort costs are excessive (1.3 percent of the 2.2 percent is excessive).

If we apply this percentage to the appropriate tort costs and add the figures..., the results show that America wastes $589 billion each year from excessive tort litigation. This is roughly equivalent to losing the entire annual output of the state of Illinois.

Dennis Prager writes about Britain’s shameful last few weeks pointing, especially, to the soldiers’s seeming lack of shame in taking money to speak to the media. But his conclusion was most disheartening because of the obvious parallels:

I’m on the road today (Montgomery, Alabama) with some time to kill, so I can blog for a change. Let’s see, what’s in the news:

I saw a squib yesterday, I think in Newsweeks latest "green" issue, that the UPS folks are using a new computer program to plan routes so that their trucks never make any left turns. They will make three right turns instead. They say this is to save fuel--who knew that holding for left turns wastes a lot of fuel and therefore contributes to air pollution and global warming--but this sounds like an esoteric homage to our namesake, Mr. Ashbrook. And another example of how solving these problems will come from the Right!

What’s all this about Don Imus? I’ve never found him either funny or interesting, but isn’t the Jesse Jackson-Al Sharpton gleeful sack dance just a little bit much? I watched the egregious Lou Dobbs spend almost his entire segment on CNN last night on this story, giving Jesse Jackson enough air time to roll out several new rhyming schemes.