Being Jewish Faculty in Portland and at Lewis & Clark

On Friday, a colleague of mine who teaches at Reed invited a group of Jewish faculty (and our families) from various Portland campuses to her house for dinner. It was meant to be a place of mutual support and fellowship in what has undeniably been a tough couple of weeks. There were some young (elementary school age) kids there, and just watching them run around and have way too much sugar and scream nonsense games -- the unbridled, uncomplicated, chaotic joy of youth -- was cleansing in a way I didn't know I needed. 

I was the only Lewis & Clark attendee, but there were folks from Reed, Portland State, and the University of Portland in attendance. Inevitably, stories were swapped about various events and goings-on, and the degree to which people felt supported (or not) by their home institutions. A lot of the stories were harrowing; this part of the evening was not pleasant (though I think it was ultimately for the best that we had a space -- a "safe space"? -- in which those stories could be told in a supportive and welcoming environment). And it made me once again reflect on how lucky I am to be at Lewis & Clark, where (at least at the law school) it seems we've dodged much of the bad behavior that has afflicted some other campuses.

In fact, I want to share some of my recent "Jewish faculty" experiences at Lewis & Clark, precisely because they've mostly been good, and good in a way that stands against certain narratives that pervade about academia. To be clear, I don't offer these stories to falsify others' accounts -- as the conversations at Friday's dinner made clear, many people at many campuses are having a genuinely bad time of it. But I do think it's important to stress that academia is not a monolith and that there are places doing it right just as there are places doing poorly; and beyond that, the bright spots in academic life do not always come from the places you'd expect (at least, if you're a regular imbiber of the prevailing discourse). To wit:

• I've felt fully supported by my colleagues over the past few weeks (I'm also not the sort of person who needs much in the way of "check ins" to verify my emotional well-being). That said, the two non-Jewish colleagues who most distinctively went out of their way to "check in" on me and see how I was doing after October 7 were (1) the chair of our DEI committee and (2) the Pakistani Muslim teaching fellow in our Animal Law program.
• Speaking of DEI, I went to speak to our (staff) director of DEI issues to ask her what her sense was about how things were playing out on the law school campus. She responded thoughtfully and compassionately, in a way that clearly demonstrated she was paying attention and providing care and support where needed. Her overall report was that (a) there were more campus community members directly affected by the events than I think many would have thought; (b) there were the usual instances of 20-somethings who are professionally-argumentative but whose politics aren't fully thought out speaking in ways that perhaps was not fully respectful of the reality that many of their colleagues were directly affected by the events; but (c) there had been no major flare-ups or crises; the "problems" were within the normal bounds of what one would expect to see when emotionally-charged events occurred on the global stage.
• As many of you know, I hosted at Lewis & Clark this past year a conference on Law vs. Antisemitism, and selected contributions are being published in a symposium issue of the Lewis & Clark Law Review (which I am writing the introduction for). The law school was nothing but supportive of the conference itself, even though I was only in my second year teaching when I threw a major international conference at them. More to the immediate point, after October 7 the Editor-in-Chief of the law review reached out to me on her own initiative to ask if I wanted to revise my introduction to account for the Hamas attack or the aftermath, and assured me that if I did want to make revisions they would make sure they'd adjust their production schedule to accommodate. I'm still considering her offer, but regardless of whether I take her up or not I was extremely impressed with her thoughtfulness and gesture of inclusion.

I don't claim things are perfect -- for me, for other Jewish community members at Lewis & Clark, for Muslim or Palestinian community members at Lewis & Clark, whomever. On the upper campus, for instance, there was an instance of just a few days after October 7 of "free Palestine" graffiti on the upper campus undergraduate buildings (though -- without downplaying the significance of it -- it seems that Lewis & Clark has a bit of a "tradition" around Indigenous Peoples Day of a certain segment of the student body tagging buildings with various "anti-establishment", "anti-colonialist", and "counter-cultural" messages, and this was part of that rather than a truly spontaneous "Jews in Israel just got murdered so let's celebrate with a hearty 'free Palestine'!"). 

But on the whole, as terrible as "the world" has been this past month, I've been extremely grateful for the little local slice of the world I have at Lewis & Clark. And just as we harp on the bitter, I do think it's important to give due credit and attention to the sweet.

Are Red State Universities Starting to Feel the Pressure? An Anecdotal Account

As a member of academia, I periodically get inquiries from other law schools asking if I'm interested in lateraling. This is quite flattering, though I know full well that such messages aren't only being sent to me and that there is a long road from "email of interest" to actually getting a job offer.

Recently, though, I've noticed that the schools making such inquiries of me are disproportionately located in deep red, southern states. It could be a statistical artifact, of course -- I don't get so many solicitations so as to negate the possibility of random clustering. But it does make me wonder if the decaying political climate in those states means that these schools are experiencing more pressure in terms of faculty outflow, which they're trying to replace via laterals.* 

Both the specific anti-academia initiatives (crusades against "controversial topics"; attacks on tenure), and the broader threat to political and civil rights (abortion bans, threats to democracy) that are characteristic of these states make working there -- and to be clear, I hold the universities in question in the highest esteem -- a far less attractive proposition. And from the other side of the fence, serving on our school's appointments committee this year it did seem to me like we were getting an uptick in "red state refugee" lateral applications -- though again, that's just an impression, and I have no data to back it up. For another bit of anecdotal evidence, see Sapna Kumar's recent interview explaining why she elected to leave Houston Law for the University of Minnesota.

I'm curious, though, if others are noticing this pattern as well. Other junior law professors -- are you getting disproportionate interest from "red state" schools? Any other sense that these schools are indeed facing faculty outflow pressure?

For what it's worth, I'm very happy in Portland and at Lewis & Clark, and have no interest in decamping anywhere. My wife and I have bought a house, we've settled down, I like my students and my colleagues, I've got the course package I want -- life is good and I see no need to mess with a happy status quo.** But my wife and I have also decided that, even beyond any generic inertial resistance, we're in particular not interested in moving to schools in places where our basic rights don't feel secure. We're at the phase of life where we're thinking of starting a family, and doing that in a place where pregnancy turns my wife into a vessel for the state would be horribly unfair to her. And for my part, I teach constitutional law -- a course that, rumor has it, sometimes veers into "controversial topics". I don't want to go to jail because some yahoo right-wing prosecutor decides I'm teaching Roe and Dobbs wrong.

* It might say something about my professional self-esteem that I assume the only reason these schools would be interested in the likes of me is that they're in the midst of a political crisis.

** All that said, I want to be very clear that if Harvard Law School wanted to entice me to move to Cambridge by tripling my salary, they can feel free to mess away.

An Alum Reaches Out With a Question

It is the nature of being a law professor that one sometimes fields questions from alumni, who naturally turn back to their alma mater's faculty whenever they have a question about some burning issue of the day. I'm typically happy to get these emails, as it is nice to stay engaged with the broader university community and help provide what insight I can to the areas I'm claim expertise in.

For example, just today I received an email from a Lewis & Clark Law grad, class of '80, who had the following inquiry (reproduced below in full):

Question: Why is it considered ant-semitic [sic] to point out Jewish domination of the media, international finance, and Hollywood? 

It's so nice to be recognized as a subject-matter expert.

The email came from the guy's official law firm email address, which for some reason I find tickling. (I also find tickling that he was given a stayed suspension from the practice of law in 2020, which follows a censure and a reprimand all within the past five years). Nonetheless, I think I'll decline to reply to this one.

First Day of School!

Term at Lewis & Clark starts tomorrow, though my first class is on Tuesday. It's simultaneously not a big deal -- I've taught Constitutional Law before, including last semester, and also a very big deal! It's my first class as a tenure-track professor! This is the first class of the rest of my life!

(Also, I've completely revamped my syllabus, so while the material isn't new the order and organization is. So there are some potential surprises in store).

I'm teaching Tuesday/Thursday at 8:30 AM --haze the new guy, I guess. But I can't even be mad about that, because it's my first class as a tenure-track professor!