University is 'incubator of bigotry,' say 13 federal judges boycotting its grads
Thirteen federal judges, all of them appointees of former President Donald Trump, have announced that they won’t hire clerks who graduate from Columbia University or Columbia Law School. (Photo from Shutterstock)
Thirteen federal judges, all of them appointees of former President Donald Trump, have announced that they won’t hire clerks who graduate from Columbia University or Columbia Law School.
The judges say they won’t hire future Columbia grads for clerkships because of the school’s handling of campus disruptions caused by pro-Palestinian protesters, report Reuters, Bloomberg Law and the Volokh Conspiracy.
How Appealing posted the judges’ May 6 letter explaining their stance to Columbia University’s president.
Columbia has become “an incubator of bigotry,” the letter says, and the judges have lost confidence in the institution. Their future boycott will apply to the entering undergraduate and law school class of 2024 “absent extraordinary change.”
The letter says Columbia “has become ground zero for the explosion of student disruptions, antisemitism and hatred for diverse viewpoints” since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas. Professors and administrators have been “on the front lines” of the disruptions, showing the school’s “ideological homogeneity,” according to the letter.
Lead signers are Judge James C. Ho of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New Orleans, Judge Elizabeth L. Branch of the 11th Circuit at Atlanta and Judge Matthew H. Solomson of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
In 2022, Ho and Branch announced that they would not hire as clerks incoming students at Yale Law School, and in 2023, they announced that they also wouldn’t hire from Stanford Law School because the schools stifle views.
The new letter calls on Columbia to:
• Impose “serious consequences” for students and faculty who “participated in campus disruptions and violated established rules.”
• Eliminate favoritism for certain viewpoints in enforcement of campus rules. “If Columbia had been faced with a campus uprising of religious conservatives upset because they view abortion as a tragic genocide, we have no doubt that the university’s response would have been profoundly different,” the letter says.
• Establish viewpoint diversity on the faculty and across the administration.
Other judges who signed the letter are Judge Alan Albright, Judge David Counts, Judge James W. Hendrix, Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, Judge Jeremy D. Kernodle, Judge Tilman E. Self III, Judge Brantley Starr, Judge Drew B. Tipton, Judge Daniel M. Traynor and Judge Stephen Alexander Vaden.
