Jerry Landay
January 31, 2000

Provocation 101

The campus chapter of the Federalist Society is far and away the most conspicuous and active of the 34 student organizations at the University of Illinois College of Law. Honoraria and traveling expenses for the right wing presenters who find their way to Champaign Urbana are underwritten by the national organization. The events attract attention, potential recruits, and, occasionally, thunderbolts.

Thunder was definitely in the air last April when Lino Graglia came to town. A law professor at the University of Texas, he is a well-traveled Federalist attraction—and a racial provocateur. Graglia was to lecture on originalism and the Constitution. But earlier pronouncements he had made concerning the “cultural deficiencies” of affirmative action recipients set the tone for his visit.

Minority groups organized, staged a sit-out, and leafleted attendees with Graglia's most inflammatory rhetoric--including a declamation that "Blacks and Mexican-Americans are not academically competitive with whites in selective institutions.” And then, as if to throw fuel on the fire, Graglia stood in front of TV cameras and affirmed what he had said before.

Campus liberals accused the Federalist Society of goading the law school’s minority students into raising hell, in part so the student Feddies could appear paragons of reason by contrast. But the president of the law school's Federalist chapter, Scott Hoffert, claimed he couldn’t understand why Graglia’s visit touched off a ruckus: “We never expected that response,” he said. “Accusations that we invited him here to deliberately insult minority students are absurd. We foster discussion.”

Former federal appellate judge Abner Mikva, an adjunct professor at the law school, expressed “amazement” over the “incredible influence” of the 140 campus Federalist chapters: “Where so many of the nation’s leaders are groomed, the Federalists manipulate the landscape. It was once held that liberals ran the law schools. The liberals had the name, but the Federalists own the game. For students on the go, there is no where else to go.”