Source: Washington Post
Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh will beat the Washington heat this summer and head for Runnymede, England, a bucolic borough 20 miles from London along the River Thames.
At the site where the Magna Carta was sealed 804 years ago, laying the groundwork for constitutional democracy, the judge will teach a course on the origins of the U.S. Constitution to students at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School — 3,600 miles from the Arlington campus.
He will be joined in the English countryside by Jennifer Mascott, an assistant professor of law at George Mason. One of Kavanaugh’s former clerks on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Mascott came to his defense when his nomination was threatened last year by allegations of sexual misconduct, which he vehemently denied. “He has acted with the utmost character and integrity,” she told “PBS NewsHour.”
Some students at the university’s main campus in Fairfax see matters differently. After news of his hire surfaced at the end of March in the undergraduate newspaper, the Fourth Estate, survivors of sexual assault mobilized to demand that he be terminated.
The judge, who was first nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush and to the nation’s top court by President Trump, used to teach at Harvard Law School. But administrators in Cambridge, Mass., informed students last fall that he had decided not to return this year to teach his course, “The Supreme Court Since 2005.
” The announcement followed calls for Harvard, by hundreds of its students and alumni, to revoke his status as a lecturer.The contest over Kavanaugh’s nomination became a flash point in the #MeToo movement, as well as an illustration of the polarization and distrust poisoning American politics. Now, the dispute at George Mason has become the latest front in the campus culture wars, reflecting broader upheaval over sexual violence, political correctness, free speech and sensitivity.
Right-leaning and libertarian websites have pounced on the debate, painting students as petulant and their demands as threatening to civil discourse. “It would be a terrible blow to the principles of fairness and academic freedom if a university were to un-person one of the foremost judicial figures in the country over this,” wrote Reason editor Robby Soave.
But in appearances before George Mason’s leadership, students have not screamed and cried. Rather, they have explained why they object to the hiring decision.
“As a survivor of sexual assault, this decision has really impacted me negatively,” one student said, according to a clip of a meeting last Wednesday with the university’s Board of Visitors that was published by the College Fix, a conservative site focused on higher education. “It has affected my mental health knowing that an abuser will be part of our faculty.”
In a petition, a group that calls itself “Mason 4 Survivors” is asking university administrators to remove Kavanaugh and issue a formal apology to victims of sexual assault. It also calls for the public release of documents related to the judge’s hire, including…
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