Low expectations may well be a key to happiness, so perhaps it helped that I wasn’t expecting a lot when I traveled to Yale law school yesterday to discuss “The Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement?” at an event organized by the law school’s Federalist Society chapter. Indeed, when I saw the surprisingly large turnout for the event—we had to move to a larger room, and even that ended up being very full—I wondered whether some sort of protest was going to take place.
But the event proceeded smoothly and pleasantly. Probably well over half the students who attended, I’m told, didn’t share my general perspective, but they were thoroughly civil. I also enjoyed a cordial exchange with Yale law professor Samuel Moyn, whose politics and legal views, I gather, are well on the Left but who has earned an excellent reputation among conservative students for engaging with them and their ideas in a fair and level-headed way.
From the event and from my conversations with conservative law students (as well as with one other law professor), I have the strong impression that Yale law school has dramatically improved the speech climate on campus from the ugly low of spring 2022. It appears that the measures that law school dean Heather Gerken implemented a year ago are working. Having faulted the law school’s leaders when I think they have deserved blame, I am happy to praise them when they deserve credit.
I don’t mean to depict too rosy a picture. As one student put it to me, the underlying structural problem at Yale law school remains: there is very little ideological diversity among the professors. And while there are many professors who display something akin to Moyn’s admirable intellectual temperament, there are many others (especially in the younger cohort) who are very hostile to conservative students and snidely dismissive of conservative ideas.
While I’m at it, let me also mention that I very much enjoyed my Buckley Institute event at Yale College. As I told the students, having sent four kids off into the madhouse of the modern American university, I am deeply grateful that they have benefited from the havens of sanity at their schools, and I am glad to see that the Buckley Institute is such a haven at Yale.