Hawaii: Dean Shooting Hypothetical Lands Law Prof In Hot Water

The Fire reports

Law professor challenges university after campus ‘shooting’ hypothetical changed in lesson plan

The University of Hawai’i violated academic freedom and set a dangerous precedent with unilateral revisions to a law professor’s presentation on a legal concept.

Those concerned that law schools are shying away from teaching some areas of law to avoid controversy just got more reasons to worry, this time courtesy of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and its absurd treatment of law professor Kenneth Lawson.

Lawson, an accomplished faculty member at UH, used a simple hypothetical to teach the idea of “transferred intent,” a legal concept invoked when a defendant intends to harm one person, but ends up harming a second person instead. As is common in law school, Lawson offered a hypothetical to convey this idea: Imagine if a dean at his institution tried to shoot another dean, missed, and hit Lawson instead.

Here’s a screenshot from part of his lesson:

Slide with an image of law professor Ken Lawson alongside two other administrators at the University of Hawaii

Those who have been to law school will understand that using campus figures to illustrate hypotheticals is not at all unusual, and is intended to add a bit of levity and grounding to what can be pretty esoteric topics.

But when an anonymous student filed a complaint, calling the hypothetical “extremely disturbing” and citing the context of some shootings near the university’s campus, administrators summoned Lawson to a meeting near the end of last semester. Though they acknowledged he had not violated any university policy, they nevertheless mandated that he remove the thought experiment from a posted video of the class — or they would change it for him.

The ability of administrators to forcibly alter course materials is positively ripe for abuse.

Lawson hadn’t thought twice about including the example, and had been using the example for years, not simply because it wasn’t unusual but because the protections of academic freedom give faculty wide latitude in determining how to approach controversial or potentially difficult material. When Lawson refused to alter the video of his presentation, given that he had not violated any policy, and using the hypothetical was well within his academic freedom rights, administrators just went on the school’s online curriculum system, where faculty submit presentations, to make the changes themselves.

Remember: these changes were being made because, supposedly, some found a hypothetical of campus figures being shot to be disturbing. So this is what the administration came up with.

Slide with an image of law professor Ken Lawson alongside generic man/woman icons

You will note that there is still a campus figure on that slide, and it’s the person who was (hypothetically) shot: Professor Lawson. Only the deans have been removed. It seems that at UH, some hypothetical victims are more equal than others.

There’s no denying that this is silly, and many will be tempted to chalk it up as just more campus craziness. But there’s a disturbing wrinkle here, which is that the ability of administrators to forcibly alter course materials is positively ripe for abuse. The university’s administrators have granted themselves unilateral authority to interfere with faculty teaching decisions, despite the fact that UH is a public institution bound by the First Amendment, which views academic freedom, which protects that right, as a “special concern.” If administrators can “memory hole” bits and pieces of curricula they don’t like, even when it violates no rule, where does it stop?

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https://www.thefire.org/news/law-professor-challenges-university-after-campus-shooting-hypothetical-changed-lesson-plan