Americans for Limited Government Calls for End to American Bar Association Accreditation of Law Schools

Americans for Limited Government has emailed a release that calls for the ending of American Bar Association accreditation of law schools.  ALG characterizes ABA accreditation as crony capitalism. They write: 

There is an inherent conflict of interest when lawyers are allowed to regulate the entrance of competitors into their field. Due, in part, to the ABA’s numerous requirements of law schools and its restrictions on the practice of law, millions of Americans are unable to afford legal services and are forced to represent themselves in the bewildering legal system. While it is hard to argue that the world needs more lawyers, the ABA accreditation system, by design, limits the number of opportunities to attend law school with the result being the capping new entrants into their field, a clear conflict of interest.  As such, the Department of Education should end the American Bar Association’s credentials to provide law school accreditation. 

As I have previously blogged, under Betsy DeVos the DOE has done too little to investigate left-wing influence on higher education.  The ALG's point is a little different: licensure is a market impediment, and a professional guild should not be permitted to limit access to a market. It is difficult to argue that the standards that apply to law schools raise the quality of lawyers to some minimum, below which malpractice would be the norm. Rather, the ABA standards are meant to restrict the supply of lawyers. 

The education system is not, on a number of levels, what it claims to be.  Yet, the DOE has done little in the way of investigation and research, much less reform.

Letter in Support of The First Lady

Ms. Melania Trump

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Ms. Trump:

I didn’t vote for your husband, but I support him now.  I wanted to voice special support in the face of the disgraceful treatment that the fake media has afforded you with respect to the White House Christmas decorations and Pamela Karlan’s mentioning of Baron. There are even uglier slanders online, which don’t need to be recited.

As a conservative professor, I have been attacked for my views in the past, most recently in the national media for remarks I put on my blog concerning my support for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

Putting myself in your place, I appreciate your toughness and resilience.  Upon consideration, you are the best First Lady of my 65-year lifetime.   Like you, Jackie Kennedy spoke five languages and was eminently graceful.  However, she had an easy time because of the media’s pro-Democratic Party bias.  No one has displayed more resilience, better taste, and more grace than you have.

Please keep up the great work. 

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

College Kids' Hard Turn Left Means Trouble Ahead for America

On Nov. 2, 2019 the New York Post ran an editorial on the lopsided, often delusional,  political beliefs of today's college students, and the editorial discusses my research on faculty political affiliation.  Unfortunately, the Republican Party has sat on its hands for decades as the radicalization of education has unfolded.  I'm not sure that the damage that left-wing control of both K-12 and higher education has done can be undone.

Letter to Betsy DeVos Re 1619 Initiative

The Honorable Betsy DeVos
Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education

Dear Madam Secretary:

Yesterday, the National Association of Scholars held a conference call to discuss its 1620 initiative, a response to the New York Times’s 1619 initiative, which is an effort to attack fact-based history and radicalize its teaching.  Today, I received an email from David Horowitz’s organization describing a radical-indoctrination boot camp in Minnesota, the Minnesota Educator Academy, in which teachers are subjected to offensive, far-left indoctrination. Whether or not federal monies are directly being used for this purpose, federal financial support to Minnesota subsidizes it. 

How federal policy needs to respond to improper use of public monies for far-left political purposes depends on how far gone K-12 education already is.  However, I don’t believe that the Department of Education has taken any steps to determine what the political biases in the states’ K-12 systems already are.    How far down the ideological-indoctrination road have K-12 state systems already travelled? How many high schools use the fake history of Howard Zinn?  What is the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among educators?  Are conservative teachers drummed out in states like Minnesota and New York?

One of my colleagues has done ample work on debunking some of the fake history currently used in high schools, but he cannot find outlets to publish his findings.  This suggests a lack of support from the DOE, which receives federal funding to set educational agendas. How much support has the DOE given to scholars who question the conversion of the American education system to far-left propaganda purposes or even to determine whether such conversion has occurred, and if so in what states it has occurred?

I do not believe that there are statistics available about state-by-state curricular and behavioral  differences with respect to use of the K-12 or even higher education system for political purposes.  I have suggested to the National Association of Scholars that a team be put together to evaluate state curricula to see how far gone the states already are and that behavioral research be done to determine how extreme biases have already become in the cultures of state educational systems. A coherent policy response needs to be developed to the 1619 initiative, and there needs to be a jujitsu effort to use it to  reinvent education along lines that support the search for truth and our common culture. 

How much is the Trump administration doing to assist or orchestrate a response to this deepest of deep state perversions?

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Cc: The President