Ilya Shapiro
speaker
143 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 30 Jun
Ilya Shapiro’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So we're very much in the eye of the storm with respect to higher ed generally and law schools specifically. And it goes even to the accreditor. There's a monopoly on law school accreditation by the American Bar Association, which I hope is something that the Trump Department of Education changes. But the ABA puts in all sorts of nefarious rules that even
Those deans that want to reform find it hard to do so sometimes. So a lot of challenges there. And regardless of the green shoots and the pushback that we're seeing in society writ large, which we have to keep going, even if we've passed peak woke, we can't keep our foot, take our foot off the gas.
But in educational institutions and especially in law schools or medical schools where these things are a life and literally a life and death situation, we need to pursue all of the above kind of strategies.
Well, that's seemingly what happened in the presidential election. Americans across the board of every demographic woke up, if you will, from the woke and said, this is just too much. It doesn't make sense. And so there is some hope, and there's certainly hope that the students coming in – reject some of the mumbo-jumbo that they're being taught.
But again, part of the problem is admissions officers. It's not just DEI officials or the head dean. If you write in your application that you want to change the world and revolutionize structures and change injustice and what have you, there's going to be a thumb on the scale for you rather than if you say,
Well, I want to go into corporate antitrust to make things better for the American consumer, have our markets run more efficiently, or I want to be a prosecutor to go after child molesters or something like this. So there is a lot of there are a lot of pathologies in higher ed, in law schools.
And as Bill Ackman wrote recently, the same day this essay came out that Claudine Gay resigned the presidency of Harvard. Anti-Semitism, that spur of anti-Semitism that we've seen is based in our most progressive, educated places. That is the canary in the coal mine, the tip of the iceberg that reveals so many pathologies underneath.
The academic corruption, the moral relativism, the failures of leadership. This is a... I wrote my book to show that it's not just about me, the thriller part of my story, which by the way, I also published for the first time ever anywhere, the actual full report of the DEI office that investigated me. It is just amazing. That's one of the appendix of the book.
But the moral rot in general, I've been using this opportunity starting with when I went on your show in June of 2022 to expose all of this stuff.
and make people aware and so i don't know where this ends uh we have the university of austin for example as an alternative institution just born their first cohort i'll be speaking there later this month they don't have a law school uh but there's centers and institutes starting up in various institutions across the country to teach excellence and rigor and civics all of these things that dei trainers consider to be white supremacist tropes and uh and even deans at yale for example i i uh
tally a lot of Yale's missteps, Yale Law's missteps. Heather Gerken, the dean there, wants to be president of one of the Ivy League institutions. And she recognizes that what's gone on is not good. And so she went out and hired scholars, including a former Alito clerk, to kind of right the ship a little bit.
So we are seeing some progress, but we need to keep pushing and not accepting this rot, this degradation, this illiberalism in law schools and beyond.
I'm hiring. Absolutely. Young lawyers want to come work for the Manhattan Institute. Send your resume.
Conservatives and libertarians get great training. They are exposed to lots of ideas. They know how to see every different argument. And... You know, this is the this is one of the ironies. These law schools are doing a disservice to their progressive students by not teaching them what the argument is from the other side. And then they go into federal court and they don't know what to do.
They don't know how to argue.
Sidebar, Your Honor, I need to cry for a moment.
They're graduating students who aren't qualified to do much of anything other than to be HR officials or DEI deans or what have you. I hope that some institutions seize on the market opportunity that's created, and I think some are. For example, University of Chicago, University of Virginia are generally better their law schools on these metrics than than Yale and Stanford, for example.
Or, you know, Georgetown is particularly bad. Harvard. Well, Harvard is an institution writ large. Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, recently gave them a zero for the second consecutive year for their education. But anyway, there are gradations.
And so a talented entrepreneurial dean or other educational leader who doesn't have to be conservative or mega or anything else, but just doing their job, trying to attract higher quality faculty and students and donors just by not being crazy can capitalize in this moment. And we see bits of that here and there.
Judge Cannon generally has been – had a thoughtful approach to the litigation. So if she sees that it's justified to release parts of it – I haven't started to study the legal issues as closely as she has. I'm sure she has some reason to do so.
Showing 121–140 of 143 · page 7 of 8
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