They Will Never Reform Themselves

I've commented frequently on the deterioration of academia and its inability to reform itself, most recently in An Urgent Problem.  Here's another example.

In March of this year, Yale Law School terminated the contract of Helyeh Doutaghi, an Iranian-Muslim, after it was alleged she was associated with a terrorist network.  An embarrassed Yale then did enough investigation to decide to terminate her. The Law School hired her to be Deputy Director the Law and Political Economy Project and an Associate Research Scholar. But here are the bigger questions.  Below is Doutaghi's Yale bio.  Why would anyone hire someone with this resume?  What need did it fulfill?  What intellectual contribution would be made to a law school by someone with this background?  Who did they reject in the hiring process?

The Yale bio: 

Her research explores the intersections of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), encompassing Marxian and postcolonial critiques of law, sanctions, and international political economy.  Helyeh's doctoral dissertation draws on the mechanisms, harms, and beneficiaries of the sanctions regime imposed on Iran, centering questions of value transfer and wealth drain. Additionally she is interested in International Humanitarian Law (IHL), having written about its history, practice, and the production of knowledge (and ignorance), particularly in the context of the U.S. military. 

Doutaghi received a Doctorate in Legal Studies from Carleton University in Canada.  She came to Canada because her father worked at the Islamic Republic's embassy in Ottawa before being expelled in 2012 by the Canadian government because “the Islamic regime is using its mission here to monitor the activities of Iranian-Canadians.”  He is currently acting head of the Iranian consulate in Hong Kong.  His daughter remained in Canada after he left. She does not appear to be an American citizen.

Just within the past few days, Doutaghi tweeted in response to a tweet saying "Iran has a right to defend itself":

"including targeting all US military bases in the region, the occupied Palestinian territories, and any state that enables aggression by allowing its airspace or territory to be used for attacks on Iran." 

When Doutaghi was let go by Yale, many "scholars" came to her defense, claiming she was "an internationally recognized and published scholar of international law, political economy, and armed conflict" and that "she has always advocated for the rights and self-determination of oppressed people, including Palestinians".

Doutaghi is indeed internationally recognized and published, which is an indictment of the extent of corruption in the disciplines of international law and political economy. 

This is how the Yale Law and Political Economy Project describes itself, using all the usual cliche phrases of progressive thought:

The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project brings together a network of scholars, practitioners, and students working to develop innovative intellectual, pedagogical, and political interventions to advance the study of political economy and law. Our work is rooted in the insight that politics and the economy cannot be separated and that both are constructed in essential respects by law. We believe that developments over the last several decades in legal scholarship and policy helped to facilitate rising inequality and precarity, political alienation, the entrenchment of racial hierarchies and intersectional exploitation, and ecological and social catastrophe. We aim to help reverse these trends by supporting scholarly work that maps where we have gone wrong, and that develops ideas and proposals to democratize our political economy and build a more just, equal, and sustainable future. 

And this is its Manifesto:

This is a time of crises. Inequality is accelerating, with gains concentrated at the top of the income and wealth distributions. This trend – interacting with deep racialized and gendered injustice – has had profound implications for our politics, and for the sense of agency, opportunity, and security of all but the narrowest sliver of the global elite. Technology has intensified the sense that we are both interconnected and divided, controlled and out of control.

New ecological disasters unfold each day. The future of our planet is at stake: we are all at risk, yet unequally so. The rise of right-wing movements and autocrats around the world is threatening democratic institutions and political commitments to equality and openness. But new movements on the left are also emerging. They are challenging economic inequality, eroded democracy, the carceral state, and racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination with a force that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

Meet the Executive Director of the Project:

Corinne Blalock is the Executive Director of the Law and Political Economy Project and a Lecturer and Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Her research draws on her education in both law and critical theory to explore how our political economy and market logic transform and limit the ways we imagine our society and the role of government in it. 

In other words, the Law and Political Economy Project is designed to expand the role of government so that people like Blalock and Doutaghi and their acolytes can dictate how we should live our lives and ensure no one has "bad" ideas.

Ah, now I know why they hired Doutaghi.  She's now gone but the LPE Project is still there. Yale Law School is fundamentally anti-American.  Why should it receive one dollar of public funding?  Not seeing much diversity in thought in this corner of academia. 

This is also a reminder of the need for a strict vetting process for visas.  Doutaghi, who appears to have entered the country in 2023 when hired by Yale, should never have been admitted to the United States.