Adam Gitlin, also of Michigan Law, has also blogged his recollections of Justice Scalia's visit here and here and here. (Occasional co-blogger Heidi Bond's recollections were here). Thanks to Mr. Gitlin for asking Justice Scalia my question about originalism, reverse incorporation, and affirmative action.

It wasn't until Professor Jacob Levy sent me a copy that I had actually read the University of Chicago's famed Kalven report. But now that I have I am struck by how closely it tracks some of my earlier nervousness about YLS's choice to take a political stance rather than restricting itself to letting its faculty and students take their own.

Compare, for example, YLS Dean Harold Koh's welcoming address:

I promise that I will be scrupulously neutral on matters of politics and personal preference. But let me warn you that I will not be neutral when it comes to questions of law and justice. For example, I do not believe that this is a school that should be neutral about questions of discrimination. I do not think this is a school that should be neutral on questions of torture. I do not think this a school that should be neutral on questions of religious intolerance, or any other kind of intolerance.

Yale’s President Kingman Brewster once said, “I did not become President of Yale to preside over a finishing school on Long Island Sound.” Well, let me tell you, I did not become Dean of Yale Law School to preside over just another professional school. There is only one Yale Law School and it is us. We are not just a law school of professional excellence, we are an intellectual community of high moral purpose.

...to the University of Chicago's Kalven Report:

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby. ...

The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest. It finds its complement, too, in the obligation of the university to provide a form for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues. ...

Our basic conviction is that a great university can perform greatly for the betterment of society. It should not, therefore, permit itself to be diverted from its mission into playing the role of a second-rate political force or influence.

Emphases are all mine.

The trouble with Dean Koh's sentiment is most clear with his suggestion that a school should not be neutral "when it comes to questions of law and justice."

The trouble is that people-- especially professors and students of law-- disagree about what law and justice require. For a school not to be neutral on those questions is for it to take an institutional stance on the very questions its faculty members are supposed to be free to be debate. The role of a great university (and, I submit, a law school) should be to let, to encourage, its members to change the world themselves, not to be a second-rate political force.

UPDATE: Thanks to Professor Kerr for the link. I'd like to respond to one comment of his, though. He writes:

I wonder if attitudes here tend to reflect in-group, out-group identification more than the abstract principles they tend to trumpet.

No question. The fervency of my own beliefs in the need for neutral beliefs and commitments to free inquiry is probably related to the fact that my own political and philosophical commitments-- taken as a whole-- are not terribly popular. But I don't really consider myself a member of an outcast group, so unless the in-group/out-group identification is wholly subliminal, I'm not sure what work it does in my case.

Arguing back and forth at length in Amber Taylor's comments, the Slithery D persists in arguing-- contra me-- that it is worse to use Federal money to bribe doctors into performing abortions than it is to use Federal money to bribe them into not-performing abortions.

Having largely abandoned the action/inaction distinction, Dylan is now hanging his argument upon the notion that anti-abortionists perceive of abortion as "genocide" whereas pro-abortion advocates presumably perceive abortion bans as "mere" denials of important liberties with deleterious effects on society. It presumably follows from this that using government cash to bribe hardcore animal-rights-activists who work in government cafeterias into serving mystery meat is impermissible.

I applaud ASG/Melinda for their efforts, also in the comments, to take on Dylan's argument, but I think ASG goes astray here:

I would find Dylan's point much more persuasive if it were believable that the "other side" (the anti-abortion side) really believed what he says they do. If they really do believe that the current abortion regime is morally equivalent to Mengele's experiments, then why is there not wider support for the following policies/courses of action: ...

2. The boycott of all medical-products firms and insurance firms who sell materials to facilities that provide abortions; ...

3. An anti-abortion insurgency aimed at the physical destruction of hospitals performing abortions (note that of course some of this goes on, but even the perpetrators would concede, I think, that they are in a tiny minority even of those who agree with them); ...

4. The boycott of all medical schools whose classroom, internship, or residency programs take place in teaching hospitals where abortions occur;
The fact that these are considered outlandish and prima facie ridiculous proposals is evidence that, despite Dylan's claim, no one (or very few people) really believes abortion is akin to a program of genocide.