"Our Job is to Teach the Children, Not be the Children"

UVA lawprof Xiao Wang exposes immature and unprofessional behavior by his colleagues

Professor Xiao Wang, director of University of Virginia's Supreme Court Clinic, litigated the case of Ames v. Ohio Youth Services. The thrust of the case was quite simple, and intuitively appealing: Heterosexual employees alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation have the same burdens as homosexual employees alleging such discrimination. Such symmetry is built into our antidiscrimination laws, which is why the laws ban discrimination based on "race" or "sex" or "sexual orientation" and not "against people of color" or "women" or "people who identify as LQBTQ." Not surprisingly, the Court reasserted this principle in a unanimous opinion.

While the case was pending, however, Wang and his students were subjected to a campaign of harassment by some of his faculty colleagues and other students. You can watch a video of him recounted what transpired, and inspired the title of this blog post, here.

Comments

[Bubba Jones]

I think (this aspect of) the US was a better place when college was a place of higher learning and not merely a gatekeeping ritual for well paying jobs.

[Dr. Ed 2]

When my father started teaching high school in 1962, the boys were required to wear a sports jacket and the girls a dress or skirt. He had to start every morning with an "appropriate reading" from the Bible. (It was usually a Psalm.)

And that was high school...

[Poxigah146]

I'd much rather have that than the status quo.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963) held that school-sponsored Bible readings were unConstitutional.

Everything went downhill from there.

[AmosArch]

College turned from a gentleman's breeding ground into a certification of minimal competence with the professionalization of the masses because HR is too lazy and incompetent to actually test for fit and skills that actually apply to the job. So a degree was a quick and easy filter even if in many cases it had nothing to do with what you'd actually be doing. All the stuff you learned very often was besides the point. The students coming in are largely not concerned about getting the gentleman's education of yesteryear and the new commie professors and admins are not interested in teaching it. So why not take the opportunity to just dump in some indoctrination instead?

Now that everybody has a degree we're right back to where we started with AI ready to deliver the fatal blow. For perhaps the majority of people college is an otherwise irrelevant extremely expensive 5 year journey to make some 1960s HR drone's workday marginally easier.

Unfathomable money and time and life has been wasted standing still and often making things worse in this decades long misexperiment that could have been much better spent elsewhere. The only thing we have to show for it is the pocketbooks of the administrator class and the explosion of opportunities for social engineering our children.

Most people realize the current 'higher education' setup is in large part a scam but if they could realize the full irony there would be a revolt.

[Dr. Ed 2]

No Amos -- it was the lawyers that did this.
Griggs et al. v. Duke Power Co. (401 U.S. 424) 1971

Griggs, and the subsequent EEOC interpretation thereof, established disparate impact discrimination and hence HR no longer could use aptitude tests or anything else that had a disparate impact on minority applicants.

But they could require "a college degree" -- from anywhere, in anything -- and that was NOT "disparate impact" because there were HBCUs. And a college degree (at least before 1990) did sorta indicate basic literacy and ability to learn things.

[bloocow2]

Yeah, this was dumb. The people attacking him should be ashamed. Even if I agreed with them, that kind of behaviour does no favours for your argument.

[Dr. Ed 2]

There was a time when they would have been disbarred -- not for their viewpoints but for their conduct.

[Drewski]

Ed, you don't know shit about shit.

[Longtobefree]

Professor Xiao Wang clearly has no idea why UVa exists now - - - - - -

[Poxigah146]

Virginia used to be a great state until it was taken over by Northern Virginia. Reynolds v. Sims needs to go. There's no reason that 80 Virginia counties populated by real patriotic Americans should be cancelled out by garbage immigrant roaches who have infested Fairfax, Loudoun, Arlington, and Alexandria.

[Longtobefree]

When I lived there, we referred to that are as 'Baja Maryland'.

[Poxigah146]

Between Mayans from Guatemala and Honduras, to worthless white bureaucrats, to pushy, aggressive and unassimilable Indians, they've turned those beautiful areas of what used to understand Southern hospitality into a third world hell hole.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Nobody on the East Coast would get the joke.

[Michael P]

Probably because, by geographical similarity, "Baja Maryland" sounds more like the Eastern Shore (of Virginia), which is pretty far from leftist.

[Dr. Ed 2]

If we really had to have DC statehood, taking those four VA counties, the Silver Spring MD (etc) area, *and* the residential portions of DC and combining it all into one state might not be a bad idea.

People forget that Maryland used to be conservative -- Spiro Agnew was a former MD Governor.

So we get VA and have a reasonable chance for MD -- that's 4 senators at the price of 2 -- I call that a "gain."

[Kazinski]

Professor Wang's education in the classics is deficient.

He should know that some animals are more equal than others.

[Oakton Concerned Citizen]

You lost me at "garbage immigrant roaches." False, coarse, and stupid!

[Poxigah146]

Walk around Alexandria and observe the Central Americans out in droves, you'll see.

[neurodoc]

Would you have preferred him to be less candid about his thinking? Now you know who that individual is. (We might wonder how he views Professor Wang, that is whether he sees him as a "garbage immigrant roach," or being from Albemarle rather than a NoVa county makes him different in Poxigah148's jaundiced view.)

[Poxigah146]

I was actually thinking of the Injuns from Central America, not the East Asians.

[DaveM]

What struck me in his video was that the few times he was able to actually have a conversation on the merits with one of his detractors, they always admitted that they hadn't even READ the decision, and thus declined to defend any of their positions in specific detail -- but they were still 100% certain he was wrong.

This is how you know the Left is a complete paper tiger. I can confirm this myself. It really takes nothing at all, just a simple question, such as, "do you have an example?", and they immediately fold.

[Dr. Ed 2]

The left knows what it believes -- but not why it believes it.