In Lieu of a "Last Lecture," I Offer These Thoughts
Last Friday, Dorf on Law published a guest post, "A Message to Students: Fight for Democracy," which Professor Dorf described in his short editor's note as "an edited version of Boston College Law Professor Kent Greenfield's final lecture this past semester to his first-year constitutional law students." Professor Greenfield began his remarks by noting that this is the end of his thirtieth year teaching law, but his lecture was "final" in the sense of being the last of the semester, not of his career. Even so, reading his words has caused me to think about my final lecture in the more final, final sense.
Before I get there, however, I do want to encourage everyone to read Professor Greenfield's message to his students. It is inspiring, bracing, and entirely necessary to the moment in which we find ourselves. His penultimate paragraph is clear: "So let’s fight. Let’s fight for our profession. Let’s fight for our democracy." I cannot imagine improving on that. Here, I will offer some comments that echo and complement those rousing words, but any reader who has only enough time to read one Dorf on Law column today should abandon this one and click over to Professor Greenfield's now.
So what about the question of finality in a classroom? As long-time readers of Dorf on Law know, I recently took early retirement from my professorship at the University of Florida, where I taught my last class two years ago. I have spent the ensuing two years in Toronto, where I taught a 1L seminar as a visitor in Spring 2024 at Osgoode Hall and a lecture course as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto in Spring 2024 and Spring 2025. (Actually, the January-through-April semesters here are called Winter terms, because this is Canada and … ya know … truth in advertising.)
I have always ended my last class each semester with some hortatory thoughts, which I will summarize later in this column. But this semester is different for me, because it appears that my last lecture at U of T was truly my last lecture. I am not yet able to announce my next move, but my new situation will not involve teaching any courses. I will surely offer guest lectures and so on for as long as I can find people to invite me to do so, but I have consciously chosen to stop being the teacher of record for any courses henceforth. Having walked into the classroom in a teaching role for the first time in Fall 1982, this is quite a moment. I am ecstatic about never having to turn in grades again -- the wry joke, "We teach for free; they pay us to grade" was literally the way I felt about my job -- but the downside is that I will no longer teach law to new groups of students each year. That is sobering.
Some professors are able to enjoy a truly triumphant moment, a final lecture to their last class at a school where they have spent most of their careers, often attended by their long-time colleagues. My peripatetic career (not only changing schools many times but even changing fields, from economics to law) meant that that would never happen for me, which is truly not a problem. In September 2022, I was lucky enough to be honored at an event as an Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida, with lovely introductions by Professor Charlene Luke and then-Dean Laura Rosenbury, which was more than enough.
After those introductions, Professor Sarah Lawsky (who recently moved to the University of Illinois) offered some blush-inducing commentary on my work, and I was then invited to offer some thoughts of my own, which I reproduced non-verbatim (because the event was inadvertently not recorded) in "Why Universities Matter" on this blog. If I were to deliver a formal final-final lecture to any group of students, I would build on that column with an update to today's dangerous environment for universities, for constitutional democracy, and for the rule of law. I do so below.
Before getting there, I will note that my practice as a professor has always been to include a final item on the outline for my last-day-of-the-semester lecture. I label that item "Benediction," somewhat self-mockingly drawing on my status as a minister's son who long ago became an atheist. My father's church services ended with a benediction, which was a short blessing that he always infused with a "go forth and be good Christians" message.
Given how badly Christianity is being abused by some current politicians, I should emphasize that he was referring to what I described in a 2023 column as "the good stuff": the Golden Rule, the Sermon on the Mount, love thy neighbor as thyself, the whole Good Samaritan thing, and so on. It is the opposite of the hate and oppression of the weak that motivates so much of the preening and self-congratulatory false piety of the pro-Trump movement.
In any event, during my end-of-semester benedictions I essentially said two things: (1) Don't be a jerk, in your profession or your life, and (2) Remember that you have a responsibility to society at large to uphold the law and to use it for the betterment of the world. I did so with a smile and tried not to be imperious about it, but I always tried to make it clear that being a decent human being and a responsible professional (lawyer, economist, or otherwise) are truly more important than knowing how to, for example, structure like-kind exchanges or litigate the definition of a gift for income tax purposes.
More than ever, that overall message is essential for our students to hear today. And that is especially true in a world in which some of the best-paid lawyers are knuckling under to the dictatorial ambitions of an oppressive White nationalist political movement. Every lawyer will have the same incentives to be a coward and hope that others hold the line. As Professor Greenfield said: "Our democracy relies more on the good faith and integrity of our leaders than you might have realized before you came to this class." And our students become those leaders.
But I do want to return now to the question of why universities matter. In my 2022 column, I wrote this:'
Other countries can point with pride to great universities old and new, but I will make the blunt statement here that the US is the home not just to individually great universities but that it dominates the world's higher education space. Looking at any listing of top universities worldwide, using any (necessarily imperfect) metric to measure quality, we see that American universities outperform every other country even after adjusting for population, wealth, and so on.That emphatic statement is not offered from an "America is #1 at everything" mindset, as anyone who knows me would surely attest. We do some things quite badly (health care, poverty mitigation, and on and on), but boy-oh-boy do we have great universities.
That was then, and sadly, we are already seeing how eagerly the brutish vulgarians of the pro-Trump movement are moving to end that greatness. From the start, they are deliberately going after the best of the best, because they enjoy pretending to be populists by attacking the Ivy League and because they know that academia is a source of independent wisdom -- and thus power -- that can challenge the regime. Their minions have been attacking tenure in order to attack academic freedom (which is why I left Florida), because they want professors to bow down in the way that those elite law firms have prostrated themselves.
The notion of a "safe space" has been much-scorned by the right, but the university is an essential kind of safe space for the protection of those experts and scholars who would challenge those in power. The people attacking American universities today use whatever pretexts are useful in the moment -- accusations of viewpoint non-diversity, supposedly protecting students from feeling "angst" or "guilt" when taught about the atrocities that their ancestors committed, and so on -- but their goal is to stop universities from being centers that produce, sustain, and protect ideas. Or to be more precise, the ideas that are unwelcome to the powers that be.
We used to believe that there was a self-interested reason for even the most anti-intellectual American politicians to pull their punches when it comes to universities. After all, there is a great deal of national strength derived from the greatness of American academia, and who would want to tear that down? Now we know the answer.
In the end, my final thought about a career of teaching university students is that a job that for so long could seem to be removed from the ugliness of politics became one that is on the front lines of the fight over what counts as civilization. I hope that my students, that Professor Greenfield's students, and that every other professor's students understand how much hangs in the balance. Those who attack universities do so because they know that they cannot get their way if there are still people around who teach and value critical thinking.
The fight for universities is worth waging, and losing is not an option. Freedom itself is at stake.
- Neil H. Buchanan