The preposterous rise of law students who grow queasy at the ring of truth

If Jordan Peterson’s conversation with Richard Dawkins taught us anything this week, it’s that the answer to the crisis of our time will not be found in either man’s lofty ideas.

While Dawkins and Peterson argue over the dental records of Cain and Abel, our educational institutions are crumbling, because they have abandoned truth.  This is where the fight needs to be.

Dawkin’s obsession with “facts” simply can’t account for the chaos and neither can it offer any kind of solution. Peterson is closer, but the splinters from the fence he has been sitting on are starting to cause him visible discomfort. “If there was a fence between heaven and hell,” Johnny Cash sang, “it would be owned by the Devil himself.”

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth” wrote Pope St John Paul II in Fides et Ratio, and “truth is a person”.

The voices we need in education today are those who know that person, who know what they are about, where they come from, where they are headed to, and why.  We need Catholics to lead the charge, modern day St Thomas Mores and St John Henry Newmans.

When Catholic leaders abdicate responsibility and step out of the ring, it becomes a bloodbath. 

Marcus Cole, the Dean of Notre Dame Law School, Indiana, said in an address to the House of Lords last week that the role of Catholic educators in shaping a better future is essential.

“Cancel culture,” he said, “has taken hold of college campuses, turning places that were once bastions of spirited and respectful debate and the exchange of opposing concepts in the marketplace of ideas into repressive gulags where only groupthink and conformity are deemed acceptable.

“We have seen invitations withdrawn before events could take place, violence break out before a word was uttered and suspension of faculty for expressing unpopular views.  The message to students and protesters is clear – you have the power to silence those with whom you disagree and disagreeable ideas will be met with force.”

The vision for higher education led by Catholics “has been shaken to its foundations”, he continued.

“It has turned even the most elite colleges and universities into little more than credential mills where students hope to escape with a diploma if they are able to keep their thoughts to themselves.  What was once dismissible as the rude and uncivil behaviour of poorly raised children has spilled over into graduate and professional schools and especially law schools.”

At a time when Christians are being arrested for praying silently in their head, Cole explained the particularly grave implications of this perversion in law schools.

“What’s at issue is that legitimate but unpopular ideas are being targeted and silenced – most shocking is that they are taking place in law schools – if there is any place where we should be training students to challenge ideas with other, better, ideas it’s in law schools – students are supposed to be learning how to craft arguments not just on behalf of the causes in which they believe but also on behalf of those in which they do not.”

Notre Dame is one of the only Universities in the US that is not facing the same problems going on at other elite campuses. 

Cole explains why: “As long as people are at Notre Dame, they are free to say whatever is on their mind within the bounds of the law. Freedom of speech matters – as Frederick Douglass [the American abolitionist] once said ‘to supress free speech is a double wrong – it violates the rights of the hearer as well as the speaker’. Why is Notre Dame able to maintain some level of dignity and respect when others can’t? Because we are a Catholic University bound together by a core set of values.”

Those values include recognition of what Pope St John Paul II taught In Veritatis Splendor, that “the abuse of freedom can lead to a reaction that takes the form of a totalitarian system … and the contemporary crisis of freedom is rooted in a crisis of truth”.

In his welcome address to students Cole builds on the educational vision of St John Henry Newman to explains what it means to be a Notre Dame Lawyer.

“Whatever we do, whether public interest law or corporate law, transactional work or trial work, for large organisations or individuals – Notre Dame lawyers have one thing in common, they are dedicated to seeing law as a vocation in service to others in a way that lets others experience the power of God in their lives,” he tells them.

“This education  … is not for you – it is for those who you will go out and serve”, he says,  adding: “Your clients are not interested if you happened to be offended by something a classmate or instructor or invited speaker says – they have real problems, discrimination, racism, job loses, bankruptcies, plant closures, and because they have real problems you cannot wait until you are out into the real world to confront what they have to confront – there are no trigger warnings in law school – you must face the ugly realities of this world in law school because those whom you are called to serve will face them in real life.  Ideas, including offensive and unpleasant ideas are what we deal with as lawyers.  A lawyer or a law student that is afraid of a word or idea is like a medical student who is afraid of the sight of blood.”

As Cole drew to a close and asked for questions, I was relieved that neither Dawkins nor Peterson were in on this discussion.  We cannot hope to heal the wounds of a fractured world by placing bits of it under a microscope, and neither can we do so by being the eternal Pilate, always asking, what is truth?  “I am the truth” says Jesus and “Whoever does not gather with me scatters”.  

(Getty Images)

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