Saturday, December 13, 2014

UCLA Professor Caves in to Race Baiters Over Realistic, Furgeson Based Exam Question

Robert Goldstein, a UCLA Law Professor, asked his upper level law students, "...to imagine that they are lawyers in the St. Louis County Attorney’s office..." and cited a report on Michael Brown's stepfather, Louis Head, who shouted, "Burn this bitch down!” after a grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown.  The students were then faced with the dilemma of deciding whether or not Head should be indicted for inciting a riot.  The question read, "“[As] a recent hire in the office, you are asked to write a memo discussing the relevant First Amendment issues in such a prosecution. Write the memo.”  Seems pretty straightforward and realistic, does it not?  Seems like the sort of thing that a lawyer would be expected to do in the performance of his or her duties, right?

Enter the professional victims.  In an article on Fox News (click here to read it), Maxiam Lott describes how some (it's not clear how few) of Goldstein's students complained, and a blogger by the name of Elie Mystal wrote that Goldstein's exam question was, "racially insensitive and divisive."  Lott writes, "Mystal also incorrectly alleged that the question asked students to “advocate in favor of extremist racists in Ferguson.”


While race certainly motivated those that were demanding Officer Darren Wilson's head on a pike, Goldstein's exam question was completely devoid of racial factors; it was exactly the sort of requirement one could expect to face in the real world.  Does UCLA not attempt to prepare their students for future employment in the real world, or do they expect them to spend the rest of their lives languishing in the artificial world of academia? 

Goldstein attempted to defend his perfectly rational intentions by stating in an email to his students, "As with many of my exams in this upper-level elective class, questions may be drawn from current legal issues in the news or from recent court reports. This helps make the exam educational and relevant.”  He goes on to cave in to pressure from the professional victims, and those that cater to them, by writing, "I clearly underestimated and misjudged the impact of this question on you. I realize now that it was so fraught as to have made this an unnecessarily difficult question to respond to at this time. I am sorry for this,”  Unnecessarily difficult?  Don't lawyers in the real world have to face situations like this on a regular basis?  

The professional victims and race baiters don't want the truth to be highlighted.  They don't want to have to respond to tough questions, like, "What should be done about the looting, arson, riots and assaults that were incited by Head, Holder, Sharpton, and the like?"  They just want us all to shut up, admit our white guilt, and do what they tell us to do (namely pay them).  What a farce.

To Robert Goldstein I say, "Grow a spine."  To his perpetually offended students and critics I say, "Grow up."