Quote of the day: "These are people with extraordinarily thin skins who want to be treated as adults but insist that Mommy, Daddy, and the dean come to their rescue instead of debating in the market of free ideas." --Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, commenting on the Black Law Students Association's demand for a speech code that would ban--and punish--offensive speech in the classroom.

The Boston Globe had the details yesterday morning; the quote above is from the Chronicle of Higher Education's coverage today (subscribers only, alas).

This is what I had to say about the Harvard situation when it was brewing last year:

These students are supposedly the creme de la creme. They represent the nation's finest college graduates, and will become some of the most influential and powerful lawyers, judges, and law professors in the land. And yet they can't hear the "n" word without decompensating. So mortally bludgeoned are they by one professor's completely legitimate, if awkwardly phrased, comment that "feminists, Marxists, and the blacks" have done nothing to advance tort law that they can't physically attend his lectures for fear of further psychic injury (in fact, critical race theorists and feminist legal theorists such as Catharine MacKinnon have completely screwed tort law by eroding the crucial distinction between words and acts). Another law prof upset students so much that he has simply been removed from the classroom. The administration has promised to hold faculty workshops on diversity this summer (Blue Eyed, anyone?), and may even bless Harvard with a racial harassment policy.

How will these fragile young legal souls handle the gritty reality of professional life after law school? Will they sue disrespectful clients for harassment? Will they demand "time-outs" in court when they get ruffled by opposing counsel or hostile witnesses? Will they show no commitment whatever to the laws they are bound to uphold, and devote themselves instead to banning, censoring, and sanctioning everything and everyone that give them a bit of a twinge? These are neither idle nor paranoid questions. We should all be asking them. We should all be watching the anti-intellectual, hystericizing effects of universities' "commitment to diversity." And we should be extolling the virtues of thick skin, reasoned debate, and a sense of social purpose that does not get its energy from our narcissistic need to feed and feed and feed our ever so pleasurable, profitable pain.