Louis K. Bonham is an intellectual property litigator. He is a graduate of the University of Texas (BA ’83, JD ’86), was an Articles Editor on the Texas Law Review, and served as a law clerk to the Hon. Edith H. Jones of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
It’s time again for the Minding the Campus (MTC) Trofim Lysenko Award for the Suppression of Academic Speech. Named after the notorious Stalinist pseudoscientist whose crackpot agronomist theories—and persecution of those with the temerity to challenge them—led to the deaths of millions, the MTC Lysenko Award calls attention to those in academia who promote or advocate […]
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At long last, some state legislatures have begun reacting to the “wokeness” epidemic that has consumed both K-12 and higher education. Unfortunately, many of these bills are likely doomed to accomplish little or nothing because they fail to address an essential issue: enforcement. Particularly in the context of public universities, expecting state employees to simply […]
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Dear Gov. Abbott, After National Association of Scholars Senior Fellow John Sailer’s bombshell report in the Wall Street Journal documented the use of “diversity statements” as ideological hiring filters at Texas Tech University, your chief of staff hastily issued a statement reminding state employees that such practices are, in fact, illegal. This has been cited […]
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Fall is in the air, which means it’s time to award the annual Minding the Campus Trofim Lysenko Award for the Suppression of Academic Speech (a Lysenko Award, for short). As detailed in the inaugural award announcement, the Lysenko Award is named after Stalinist agronomist Trofim Lysenko. Like so many in today’s woke colleges and […]
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In the wake of the recent opinions in Dobbs, Bruen, Carson, West Virginia v. EPA, and Kennedy, there is no serious question that originalism is not only ascendant but firmly in control in the Supreme Court. As a result, most seasoned court watchers and constitutional law scholars agree that it is highly likely that SCOTUS is going to overrule Grutter, Fisher II, and perhaps even Bakke, and hold […]
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Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the state of the American academy today knows that employment discrimination runs rampant on campus. Not the old-fashioned kind where women, blacks, Jews, Catholics, Asians, gays, or communists were excluded from employment opportunities, but the modern Kendian variety, in which overt discrimination against white men (and, in many […]
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Late last month, an Ohio appellate court affirmed the $31.2 million judgment in favor of Gibson’s Bakery and members of the Gibson family against Oberlin College and its former Dean of Students, Meredith Raimondo. While Oberlin and Raimondo can (and probably will) ask the Ohio Supreme Court to review the decision, that Court grants only […]
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In my last piece, I covered the recent decision in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School District, where the court declared that a new admissions process for a highly-regarded STEM-focused high school was unconstitutional, finding that scrapping the old merit-based process in favor of “racial balancing” (based on Kendian “equity” principles) was clearly illegal […]
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In the last few years, academia has utterly embraced the concept of “equity” as articulated by Ibram X. Kendi; i.e., that if a particular identity group is statistically under- or over-represented in anything, the reason for the imbalance is indisputably systemic discrimination, and thus positive discrimination to correct the imbalance is not only proper but […]
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In my last article, I detailed the cancellation of Professor Lawrence Alexander’s invited contribution to the Festschrift honoring Emory University law professor Michael Perry. As I and many other commentators pointed out, the actions by the editorial board of the Emory Law Journal (ELJ) were a shocking abandonment of fundamental principles of scholarly discourse in […]
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Editor’s Note: After this article was published, Emory University and others responded to the Emory Law Journal controversy in general and to this article in particular. To read Louis Bonham’s follow-up response to these responses, click here. Another year, another incident of fundamental scholarship principles being sacrificed in favor of “feelings” and the woke agenda—and […]
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Author’s Note: While I am a lawyer, I’m not your lawyer. Nothing in this article is intended to be legal advice from me, my firm, Minding the Campus, or anyone else. If you have a specific legal issue, I encourage you to contact counsel, particularly one familiar with the state law applicable to your situation. Since I began writing about […]
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For me and other alumni of the University of Texas, it has become less and less surprising how deeply the gospel of wokeness has permeated and corrupted the institution. Whether it is the dean of UT Law preemptively surrendering to the wokesters and neutering the newly endowed First Amendment Center before it even opened, or […]
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As Minding the Campus readers are all too aware, these are dark times in higher education. Political correctness and an enforced far-left ideology (complete with loyalty oaths, departmental diversity commissars, Red Guard-style cancel culture mobs, and cowardly administrators and regents) have created an environment where intellectual rigor and academic freedom are dismissed as the products […]
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With campus cancel culture now so commonplace and brazen that even leftist publications like The Atlantic are sounding the alarm, we are now inaugurating a new MTC award: The Minding the Campus Trofim Lysenko Award for the Suppression of Academic Speech (a Lysenko Award, for short). Who was Trofim Lysenko? The son of Ukrainian peasant farmers and illiterate until […]
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