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The Kaplan Thing (Updated)

March 5, 2007 1:19 AM

s you may or may not know, several students at the University of Wisconsin Law School have accused professor Leonard Kaplan of making incredibly racist remarks about the Hmong in class. Obviously, the controversy brings up a lot of questions about academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the proper atmosphere to create at an institution of higher learning. But I believe that we cannot address those issues, although they are important, until we have the facts straight. Sadly, no one involved with the issue has made a concerted effort to clarify what actually happened, and the media has utterly failed to illuminate the situation.

I first became aware of the incident when someone forwarded me an e-mail originally written by KaShia Moua (although I normally try to keep the identities of people I don't know secret, I see no point in doing that here because the names of the people involved are well-publicized). The e-mail read, in its entirety, as follows:

Dear All,

My apologies if you have received this email more than once.

This email concerns racist and inappropriate comments made by Professor Kaplan to his class last week on 2/15.

His 10-minute rant about the Hmong included comments such as: "Hmong men have no talent other than to kill"..."Hmong women are better off now that Hmong men are dying off in this country"..."all 2nd generation Hmong end up in gangs and other criminal activity"..."all Hmong men purchase their wives, so if he wants to have sex with his wife and she doesn't consent, you and i call it rape, but the Hmong guy is thinking 'man, i paid too much for her!"...

these are just some of the incredibly offensive and racist remarks that Kaplan made. whether Hmong or not, i hope you see how Kaplan's remarks are damaging to our entire law school community. I strongly urge you to attend the meeting to discuss how our student body can proceed in holding Kaplan and our administration accountable for these comments. kaplan has violated our rights as students. he made the unfortunate choice to turn his classroom into a public platform for him to spew his racist and close minded beliefs about the Hmong. we will not tolerate his actions!

please attend the meeting that will take place immediately following the "multicultural pre law day" meeting on Weds. night. also, please forward this email to others w/in your respective students orgs.

Now, the first thing I thought when I read this e-mail was "What was the context in which Prof. Kaplan made these statements?" Frankly, I thought it was unacceptable for the e-mail to tell me that the comments were "racist and inappropriate" but not give me enough context to reach that conclusion myself. Then, I thought "And how reliable are these quotes, anyway?"

I immediately began trying to track down someone who was actually in the class. A little while later, a friend of mine told me that his friend, Nam Dao, was in the class and was not offended by the statements and that the e-mail misrepresented both the content and the context of Prof. Kaplan's statements. However, soon after, I read this article, which suggests that Mr. Dao was offended and that Mr. Dao believed that Prof. Kaplan endorsed the statements he allegedly made. Then the Badger Herald (the UW student newspaper) published this editorial which, while not particularly insightful, marked the first time I saw a rather peculiar error: the editorial claimed that Mr. Dao is Hmong, which he is not. The story then got a little more traction, until the AP eventually picked it up. Many of the stories repeated the Mr. Dao-is-Hmong error, and none gave any more than a cursory account of the events.

Meanwhile, the law school rumor mill was in full swing, but it, too, was woefully short of actual, substantive information. Mr. Dao, it turns out, was not offended by the comments, but did understand why some students were offended. There are also various stories floating around about what happened when the offended students met with Prof. Kaplan. Apparently, he said he was sorry that his comments had offended people, explained that that was not his intention, but stood by his comments. Some stories claim that Prof. Kaplan insisted on the truth of his statements based on "research" which he refused to identify and that he insisted that, if the students wanted to prove him wrong, they should provide him with appropriate citations to scholarship.

The whole ordeal reached a high point last Thursday. The offended students organized a forum, ostensibly on Hmong culture and the Hmong experience in America. The moderator, Prof. Stephanie Tai, repeatedly reminded the standing-room-only crowd that the forum was not intended as a discussion of what happened but, rather, that the purpose was to educate people about the Hmong. Prof. Tai went to great lengths to make it clear that the purpose of the forum was not to present a one-sided or mutli-sided account of the events that started this whole thing. Prof. Kaplan, who was originally supposed to be at the forum, did not attend, explaining, through a spokeperson, that he did not want for his presence to detract from the educational focus of the forum.

I attended the forum. Although there were presentations from a noted Hmong historian and a Hmong professor from UW-Milwaukee, the focus of the forum was, undeniably, the offended students and their experience. The offended students spoke in turn, recounting the way Prof. Kaplan's comments made them feel. Although they made several allusions to what actually happened, they did not discuss that in detail. Rather, they proceeded from the assumption that the comments were patently offensive. And that, for me, is where the problem is.

Undeniably, Prof. Kaplan's comments deeply affected the offended students. That should, of course, not be ignored. The students were completely within their rights to seek redress of their grievances, and I commend them for doing so. I also respect the students' desire to turn what was, for them, an incredibly negative event into something positive--a discussion of race relations at the UW Law School and Wisconsin generally. That kind of discussion is necessary in this school. However, I believe that that discussion is ultimately premature, given that neither the students nor Prof. Kaplan have made a real effort to explain what happened.

The problem starts with Ms. Moua's e-mail. At the forum, she admitted that the e-mail was highly emotional, and suggested that, had she been calmer, she would not have written that e-mail. She also suggested (at least in my opinion) that the quotes that the e-mail attributed to Prof. Kaplan were not completely accurate. But neither she nor any of the other students made any attempt to set the record straight, and one of the students said that the statements were offensive, regardless of what the statements actually were.

Nor have any of the offended students, to my knowledge, made a serious attempt to put the statements in context. Mr. Dao has explained that Prof. Kaplan made the statements during a discussion of legal formalism and the problem of integrating different cultures under one legal system. But the specific syntactical context of the statements remains unclear. Even assuming that the e-mail correctly quoted Prof. Kaplan, the statements lose all of their offensive character if they were immediately preceeded by, for example, the phrase "It is not the case that . . . ." While I doubt that any of the offended students would have mistaken a statement denying those stereotypes as a statement endorsing them, it is still possible that Prof. Kaplan, who has a reputation for being bat-shit crazy, was simply assuming a position for the sake of having his students disprove the position. Or for any number of valid pedagogical reasons. The fact is that we have no idea, and the parties involved have made no attempt to clarify, whether this is the case.

Prof. Kaplan, for his part, has largely remained silent, saying, at a faculty meeting, only that he did not make the statements that the e-mail attributed to him but that he understood why his statements were misunderstood. He has also said that he will provide a more detailed statement sometime this week.

Frankly, I find the current situation unacceptable. The offended students want to start a dialog, but they have failed to do so--even the question and answer portion of the forum was cancelled because the students had only reserved the room until 9pm; the obvious question is "who the hell wanted a class room that big at 9pm on a Thursday?" In order for a real dialog about free speech, the proper bounds of academic freedom, and race relations to happen, someone has to make it clear exactly what took place in that classroom. Someone has to be willing to answer the questions that have been on everyone's mind: Did Prof. Kaplan really say all that? Did he mean it? Did he really demand that the students disprove his claims? If he didn't say those things, what did he say? Why did he say it? If he had a valid educational reason for making the statements, what was it? To date, no one has answered those questions satisfactorily and, in fact, those questions have been almost completely avoided.

If it is the case that Prof. Kaplan made those statements and meant them to be insulting, then I would, without hesitation, support the efforts of the offended students to demand an apology from him. In such case, I would also support an effort to start a real, meaningful dialog about diversity, race, and the proper learning environment. But I refuse to condemn a respected and intelligent law professor on the say so of an inflamatory, incomplete, and conclusory e-mail; the large number of second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-hand reports floating around the school; or the demonstrably unreliable reporting of the media. Fortunately, it seems that the vast majority of my collegues feel the same way.

Update:
Prof. Kaplan has finally issued his response. You can see a PDF of the letter he wrote to Dean Davis here. It's well-written and seemingly honest. It's also pretty easy to see that Prof. Kaplan has been upset and angered by the recent events. The question now is whether this will close this story or merely make it larger. Time will tell.

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