Anatomy of an elite law school quasi-scandal
I am just going to apologize for this column at the outset: This is a column about whatever is going on at Yale Law School (YLS). To be honest I do not want to write it, and I am not sure you want to read it. Unfortunately, however, the ideas industry is one of my beats and apparently the Discourse demands that we talk about it.
Lest this sound like hyperbole, on Tuesday not one but two mainstream media outlets published stories about the controversies swirling around Amy Chua, the John M. Duff Jr. professor of law at Yale Law. Readers familiar with the world of academia know Chua as a professor who writes a lot about world politics and, curiously, little about the law; readers who have a richer interior emotional life will instead be aware of Chua from her “Tiger Mom” memoir. [Full disclosure: I interviewed Chua and her father for Foreign Policy a decade ago at the peak of Tiger Mom-mania.]