The Lysenko Award is given out yearly by the National Association of Scholars for the worst piece of academic writing. Selecting a “winner” among the many atrocious screeds is a hard task, one entrusted to attorney Louis Bonham.

This year’s winner is Leah Terranova, an associate dean at Kansas University School of Law. Read all about it here.

The controversy involved the invitation of Jordan Lorence of Alliance Defending Freedom to speak on campus. Naturally, the intolerance zealots went berserk, demanding that the event be canceled because Lorence would probably say some hurtful things. What happened then?

The students went ahead with the event, despite attempts by the administration to get them to disinvite Lorence. Could the administration just let it go? Of course not. Bonham writes, “In response, shortly before the event our winner sent an e-mail to the entire law school (students, administration, and faculty), proclaiming that the ADF’s positions ‘do not align with the values of the law school’ (query: who anointed this associate dean to determine and announce the ‘values of the law school’?) and labeling the presentation ‘hate speech.’ (As others have pointed out, our winner’s email could conceivably be a deliberate effort to ‘incite hatred’ toward anyone who agrees with the ADF’s positions, and would thereby be ‘hate speech’ under the university’s definition.)”

It is sad that people involved in the running of law schools (as well as the students) don’t seem to understand that the way to deal with controversy is with reasoning, not by throwing fits.