In today's Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz profiles Harvard Law School's descent into the bathos of sensitivity training (subscribers only, alas). Following several episodes of what the Harvard Black Law Students Association called "racial outrages" last year, Harvard has instituted a workshop for entering law students entitled "Managing Difficult Conversations." Rabinowitz is witheringly on target:

At Harvard Law today, skill in hard combative argument is no longer prized, nor even considered quite respectable. Indeed, first year law students can hardly fail to notice the pall of official disapproval now settled over everything smacking of conflict and argument. That perception can only have been strengthened by a new program for freshmen, called "Managing Difficult Conversations."

In the lesson books provided, students learn the importance of empathy. "Emotions need to be acknowledged and understood before people can problem solve," another lesson teaches. In a book by the program's chief creators we learn that "A Difficult Conversation Is Anything You Find It Hard To Talk About." Not the sort of wisdom that would have taxed the minds of the students. Still, the purpose of the three-hour sessions did elude one otherwise accepting attendee, who reports that the discussion leaders seemed to circle around specific issues, and that he had the feeling there was a real subject here not yet clear or acknowledged.

He was not the only one wondering about the substance of these meetings. The freshman had just gained entry to the most elite of the nation's law schools. For upward of $32,000 a year tuition, he could learn that a difficult conversation is anything a person finds hard to talk about, and that "logic/reason" have to be combined with "emotions and personal experience" in order to be persuasive. He would not have learned, at such a session, that all the negotiating strategies, all the emphases on emotion and personal history and subtext being advanced at these workshops, was exactly opposite of what legal training was supposed to teach. He would not learn here that the law deals in objective truth that it is concerned with fact. That what is said is determinative, not what is left unsaid, not subtexts, not emotions, expressed or other, not personal history.

[...]

One senior member of the faculty marveled that the school was now training law students to stigmatize conflict. Just before his own class went off to attend the workshops, he slipped them all pieces of paper -- these filled with quotes from Supreme Court Justices's opinions holding that free speech is supposed to invite dispute.

Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate, who tracks assaults on free speech at universities, describes the workshops as "an exercise in thought reform disguised as an effort to help students improve their negotiation skills." Dean Todd Rakoff, the program's overseer, stands foursquare behind it, nonetheless. The students needed these skills for their careers, he argues. As to free speech, "We are absolutely in favor of uninhibited debate, in a workable fashion."

Why the school's administration yielded to the pressure to punish two senior professors charged with racism, one because of a misunderstanding of his meaning, another because of an attempt to turn an ugly episode into an educational one -- instead of standing by them -- remains unexplained. Nor has anyone in that administration explained why, instead of a rational assessment of these hysterically inflated incidents, the school's dean was moved to give instant implicit assent to the strange notion that racism was running riot at Harvard Law. Both of these subjects would, of course, make for difficult conversations.

Indeed.

Worth noting: it's not just Harvard that is allowing advocacy groups to leverage instances of "racial insensitivity" for their own ends. At many schools across the country, such groups use these instances to make loud, unyielding, often off-topic demands for everything from mandatory diversity training for all students to more money for minority hiring to the creation of entire departments in the "problem" area. They don't always get all they ask for--but they always do get something, and it's always more than they should be getting. As one practiced student advocate at UT Knoxville said, apropos of the recent blackface incident, the list of demands made by black student organizations is deliberately excessive: "It's like asking for a dog, when you only want a fish." Among the demands were that the students who donned blackface be expelled, that all incoming students take an oath of loyalty to the goal of racial harmony, and that UT establish a black studies department. They won't get all those things--but it's worth noting what they will ge. Almost as soon as the blackface incident became public, UT Provost Loren Crabtree stated that the "fraternity clearly needs to go through some training on diversity and some training on racial tolerance and racial sensitivity, and we expect that they will have to do that." He also announced that UT would institute racial sensitivity training next year as part of freshmen orientation. Penn State did something similar a couple of years ago, forcing entering freshmen to attend a seminar on racial sensitivity after several racial incidents rocked the campus.

It's a pattern worth considering, not least because sensitivity training is often a punishment meted out to student offenders. That the same type of session can be used as a punishment and as a supposedly proactive form of training speaks loudly to both the punitive nature of the workshops entering students are increasingly required to attend (it's as if new students are paying for the "insensitivity" of others) and to their political mission (to indoctrinate in the name of educating). What Harvard and UT Knoxville and other schools who play the sensitivity game have in common is a solid, increasingly entrenched record of treating new students as proven offenders, of using the "insensitivity" of others as an excuse to try to shape--intrusively, unapologetically--the sensibilities of others.