As you may have heard by now, the Edmund Burke Society at the University of Chicago Law School tried to go full #MAGA and trash immigrants. Their letter touting an upcoming immigration “debate” is a classic example of hate speech, disguised as free speech, and of course the “free speech” crowd fell for it because those people live to defend Nazis and no one else.

The event has since been called off, at the request of the student group, not the university. Chicago, it would seem, is still fully on board with suborning hate speech, because #AllTakesMatter, I suppose. The inability for academics to distinguish between valuable yet unpopular speech (for instance, “Fascism and Nationalism are mere policy choices and as such have coherent aims”) and hate speech designed to belittle and intimidate other members of the campus community (say, “Immigrants are trash, Heil Hitler”) is something that will plague universities forever. But for whatever reason, UofC has decided to hitch its wagon to the anti-intellectual position that such nuanced distinctions are impossible.

That decision is not without its consequences, at least for a top-flight law school that hopes to attract bright students of color and international students. I am, of course, assuming Chicago wants to attract the brightest students of color and international students. They might not; doubling down on just white people certainly hasn’t hurt the Republican party.

The kinds of kids Chicago attracts are going to have a lot of options for law school, and, after this controversy, I’m not sure that Chicago is really giving non-white kids a compelling reason to matriculate. For one student at least, an immigrant, this controversy alone tipped the scales. The student took the extraordinary step of informing UofC Law of exactly why they were withdrawing their application.

The school’s response was… curious. The student put up the response they recieved from Ann Perry, Associate Dean for Admissions at UofC Law. I’ve redacted the student’s name:

Go soon-to-be Yale student!

Now, I know a lot of people are thinking something along the lines of: “Pretty easy to take a moral stand against UofC when you have Yale in your back pocket.” I’d just point out that to non-Americans, Yale’s preeminence isn’t as obvious, in part because it doesn’t play that way back home. When you travel outside this country, especially if you go outside Western Europe, Yale Law isn’t as big of a name as you’d think. It’s just another really good school. University of Chicago Law on the other hand… Barack Obama taught there. It has his Presidential Library. Going from UofC to Yale is a no-brainer for a lot of kids, but for international kids the calculus is very different. Make no mistake, this student gave up a good option in order to tell UofC to shove it.

With that out of the way, can we get back to the part where UofC even knows where this student is going to go to law school? Here, we have a case of a student saying “hey, the way you handled this situation makes me not like your school,” and the school responding by doing some Google searches and some mild stalking of the kid’s profile.

Where the student is going instead is irrelevant to the issue of what Chicago is going to do to make this student feel comfortable.

And the answer to that larger question seems to be: nothing. Not one damn thing.

As a person of color, I take particular exception to the line “Your voice would have been an important one to have in our classroom discussions.” I’ve had to say this a lot since the election, but I won’t stop saying it: It is not the JOB of minorities to TEACH white people how to be less sh***y. It’s really not.

Don’t forget what we’re talking about here. In their literature, the Edmund Burke Society at the University of Chicago Law School described immigrants like this:

The RAISE Act solves our immigration woes: cut quotas, break immigration chains, and court only the best. Instead of being a porcelain receptacle for other nations’ wretched refuse, the United States should again put America first… If the essence of a nation is its people, allowing foreign bodies to enter is inviting disease into the body politic.

It’s not ON international students to explain to these white people that they are not LITERAL TRASH bringing DISEASE to the American body politic. It’s not ON me to explain to President Trump that Haiti is not a s***hole.

The parents of the kids in the Edmund Burke Society had the duty to teach their children how not to be racist embarrassments. Since they failed, that onus falls to the educational system. As that fails, it’ll eventually be up to a cop should one of these people commit a hate crime. And when the cop fails, all you can hope is that the children of these people are not hobbled with their parents’ bigoted beliefs.

The minority students… all WE have to do is stay black and die.

We reached out to the UofC and Dean Perry about her email, but they haven’t responded. And, based on the letter, I know they read this publication. I’d particularly like to know if any other international students have spurned UofC since it tacitly consented to letting the Edmund Burke Society disparage the immigrant community, but I somehow doubt they’ll tell me. Maybe they’ll get back to me later. Maybe, they’ll get Barack Obama to say something nice about the law school because I think it would literally take that to wash the stink of the Edmund Burke Society off of the law school in this admissions cycle.

But the information is out there now and minority and international students can at least make more of an informed choice about matriculating to the University of Chicago Law School. It’s a fantastic school, but you’ll have to put up with a lot of jerkoff white people who think they own the place. That’s true of nearly every elite law school anywhere, though some of them at least do a better job at pretending to feel sorry about that.

Earlier:

Controversial Event at Chicago (Yes, Chicago) Called Off [Inside Higher Ed]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.