The Illinois Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) gives the public broad access to public documents. On Tuesday,
someone made a formal request under FOIA for all course syllabi in Spring 2018
classes. My hunch is that someone is looking to troll law faculty, perhaps
because of our academy’s open resistance to Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Bring it on.
My law professor, Bill Murphy, was
born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee but earned his law degree from Yale.
Prof. Murphy’s first job was at the
University of Mississippi Law School. The school was officially segregated, and
had not yet admitted a black student. Murphy was an outspoken critic of Jim
Crow and the University of Mississippi.
Prof. Murphy got into serious trouble
after he added Brown v. Board of Education to his constitutional law syllabus.
Yes, that is the Supreme Court case that overruled the separate-but-equal
doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson.
He was pressured by his dean and
university administrators to keep teaching Plessy. He refused. His defense?
Brown v. Board of Education is the law of the land. And we will teach the law of the land here.
Politicians made a huge deal over
this liberal professor. The state legislature passed an appropriation bill that
withheld funds from the law school. Privately, they told Ole Miss officials
that funding would be restored after Prof. Murphy’s employment ended.
Ole Miss’s loss was our gain at the
University of North Carolina School of Law.
Thank you, Prof. Murphy.
At Illinois,
our situation is incomparably better. But our times are falling back to the era
of McCarthyism and Jim Crow. Take our syllabi. We will not bend to trolling or other pressure tactics.
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