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Schapiro: Bid to name law school for Scalia triggers injudicious debate
Schapiro: Bid to name law school for Scalia triggers injudicious debate
Posted: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 10:30 pm
BY JEFF E. SCHAPIRO Richmond Times-Dispatch
The sprawling public university in Northern Virginia that wants to name its law school for a conservative Republican was created 44 years ago this month under legislation written by a center-right Democratic General Assembly and signed into law by a liberal Republican for whom the school named a plaza adjacent to its arts center.
“I didn’t know that there was anyone in Northern Virginia who was conservative,” joked former Gov. Linwood Holton, 92, on whose watch George Mason College was spun off as a satellite of the University of Virginia to become George Mason University, now a 34,000-student behemoth and the largest in Virginia’s constellation of taxpayer-backed colleges and universities.
GMU, which on Tuesday dedicated the A. Linwood Holton Jr. Plaza, has bigger plans for its law school, announcing that it will be named for Antonin Scalia, the late associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court whose provocative originalist view of the U.S. Constitution meant he considered the legal controversies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries through an 18th-century lens. That includes co-education at previously males-only Virginia Military Institute. Scalia was the lone dissenter in the court’s 1996 ruling opening the public school to women.
The decision to re-brand the law school has triggered an injudicious hissing match between Scalia’s Democratic critics and his Republican champions, spotlighting how big money fertilizes the groves of academe; how one university — because of its proximity to Washington, D.C. — has become over four decades an intellectual hot house for conservatives but is home, too, to liberals; how a unique Virginia tradition of independently governed colleges and universities likely augurs that the Scalia law school will soon become a reality.
....
Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 649-6814. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Watch his video column Thursday on Richmond.com. Follow him on Twitter, @RTDSchapiro. Listen to his analysis at 8:45 a.m. Friday on WCVE (88.9 FM).
Posted: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 10:30 pm
BY JEFF E. SCHAPIRO Richmond Times-Dispatch
The sprawling public university in Northern Virginia that wants to name its law school for a conservative Republican was created 44 years ago this month under legislation written by a center-right Democratic General Assembly and signed into law by a liberal Republican for whom the school named a plaza adjacent to its arts center.
“I didn’t know that there was anyone in Northern Virginia who was conservative,” joked former Gov. Linwood Holton, 92, on whose watch George Mason College was spun off as a satellite of the University of Virginia to become George Mason University, now a 34,000-student behemoth and the largest in Virginia’s constellation of taxpayer-backed colleges and universities.
GMU, which on Tuesday dedicated the A. Linwood Holton Jr. Plaza, has bigger plans for its law school, announcing that it will be named for Antonin Scalia, the late associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court whose provocative originalist view of the U.S. Constitution meant he considered the legal controversies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries through an 18th-century lens. That includes co-education at previously males-only Virginia Military Institute. Scalia was the lone dissenter in the court’s 1996 ruling opening the public school to women.
The decision to re-brand the law school has triggered an injudicious hissing match between Scalia’s Democratic critics and his Republican champions, spotlighting how big money fertilizes the groves of academe; how one university — because of its proximity to Washington, D.C. — has become over four decades an intellectual hot house for conservatives but is home, too, to liberals; how a unique Virginia tradition of independently governed colleges and universities likely augurs that the Scalia law school will soon become a reality.
....
Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 649-6814. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Watch his video column Thursday on Richmond.com. Follow him on Twitter, @RTDSchapiro. Listen to his analysis at 8:45 a.m. Friday on WCVE (88.9 FM).
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