In this NAS article, law professor George Dent of Case Western writes about the shameful attack launched against a candidate for the deanship of the law school, Prof. Bradley Smith. Smith is an excellent legal scholar who is best known for his expertise in election law, but because he’s on the wrong side of that (he regards government interference with election finance and communications as a bad thing rather than a social benefit), he was attacked by a group for his “extreme” views. I’d bet that part of the problem those people have with Smith is that he keeps very, very bad blogging company at Division of Labour.

Smith was rejected in favor of Lawrence Mitchell, author of a book entitled Stacked Deck: A Story of Selfishness in America. As Dent writes, “his political views are farther than Brad Smith’s from the center of the American spectrum, but no one labeled him an extremist or questioned whether his political views would ‘turn people off’ or interfere with his performance as dean.”

After Mitchell was chosen, the anti-Smith site indulged in some childish antics.

Just one more bit of evidence that higher education has different standards for treating people of the Right and of the Left.