Topic: WorldNetDaily
There are lots of reasons no respectable institution of learning should hire Ellis Washington as an instructor -- his propensity for exaggerating his resume and getting things flamboyantly wrong being just two of them (not to mention merely being a columnist for WorldNetDaily).
Still, Washington is upset by this -- so much so that he took to his personal blog a couple months back to issue a manifesto on the subject. Of course, he doesn't blame his own shortcomings for this but, rather, discrimination against conservatives.
Washington begins by outlining what he believes are his qualifications:
Dear Law School or University Dean X:
This unsolicited letter expresses my enduring and strong desire to apply for any open faculty positions at your law school, college, or university within my areas of expertise, scholarly pursuits, and teaching experience which include—Natural Law, Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence, Legal History, First Amendment, International Law, Legal Ethics, Law & Education Policy, Critical Legal Studies, Family Law, Juvenile Law, Critical Race Theory, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Contracts, Business Law, Administrative Law, Law & Politics, Law & Humanities, and Law & Literature.
Due to my numerous and unsuccessful efforts for almost 20 years in obtaining neither a real, fair, or good faith interview for a law faculty or college position, this year I have elected to pursue a new, novel, and proactive strategy which I am convinced will cause a paradigm shift inside the Academy… and beyond. I will write an original Manifesto which outlines some of my scholarly accomplishments while addressing what I consider to be the endemic, racist, discriminatory, and frankly irrelevant criteria most American law schools and universities use to pick essentially the same vanilla, ideological-minded Leftists for all of their faculty appointments while others like myself of an “other” ideology; a different but equally relevant experience and scholarly achievement has for 20 years been ignored and shamefully treated as, to coin a phrase from that 1970s literary/movie classic, The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
~ E. Washington
In the manifesto proper, Washington recalls his childhood, asserts that "I always knew it was my destiny to be a law professor and to thrive as a university professor," complains about "a Fabian Progressive hegemony inside the Academy dominated by Leftists," repeatedly demands that the law school or university dean at whatever place he wants a job "tell me I’m ideologically unfit to join your law school faculty" when he is such a brilliant guy, and insists that his new "opus" of a book "will revolutionize how America, Europe, and the world will understand and view the Progressive movement and the destructive effects of the Progressive Weltanschauung (worldview) which I describe as omnipresent, Machiavellian manipulation of every aspect of society controlled by a Nazis tactic called Gleichschaltung (coordination, synchronization)."
You know, perhaps smearing your ideological opposites as Nazis -- a base and juvenile tactic -- is not the way to impress a prospective employer. Neither is rejecting the foundational basis of American case law.
In his March 30 column, Washington attacked Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 Supreme Court decision that established the time-honored practice of judicial review in the American legal system. But Washington thinks that the decision turned the Supreme Court into an overly powerful body that rules essentially by fiat:
Fast forward to 1803, about 15 years after the establishment of the U.S. Constitution, and the first pivotal case by a young U.S. Supreme Court called Marbury v. Madison – a landmark case in United States law and in the history of law worldwide. It formed the foundation for the exercise of judicial review in the United States under Article III of the Constitution. This was the first time in Western history a court invalidated a law by declaring it “unconstitutional” without a demonstration that a particular statue conflicted with the language of state constitutions or federal law.
In Marbury v. Madison we witnesses the greatest power grab in the history of our republic, above even FDR’s “New Deal” and LBJ’s “Great Society,” where the majority opinion written by America’s second chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, forever expanded the court’s power beyond the bounds of the Constitution by infusing it with godlike power and authority of “judicial review.” In other words, from that point forward in our American constitutional history, a majority of five or more members of this formerly weakest branch of government could invalidate any law passed by Congress and by the state legislatures in any or all of the 50 states it decided was unconstitutional simply because a majority of members on the court didn’t like said law – We the People be damned! From that moment onward, the separation-of-powers doctrine became perverted as the court repeatedly usurped unbounded constitutional powers not accorded by the constitutional framers.
Lord Acton answered such unbridled power in a famous aphorism, “Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The headline on Washington's column reads, "John Marshall's fascist jurisprudence." Such name-calling is also hardly becoming of a would-be college professor.
Any prospective employer of Washington doesn't even have to broach the question of his ideology to reject him. All they must do is look at his slipshod scholarship and dishonest resume puffery.
And the manifesto doesn't exactly help either, except perhaps to give Washington license to portray himself as a victim in the future. Still, Washington does use it to make the narm-ish declaration: "I AM A MAN ~ I AM A SCHOLAR ~ I AM A MAN!"
Again, not the mark of a someone who should seriously expect to find employment of the kind he claims to desire.
